On Friday morning, the Obama administration responded to the furor raised by the mandate that all Catholic related institutions will have to fund healthcare plans that cover contraception, sterilization, and plan-B abortion pills. This from the USA Today:
President Obama announced a plan today that attempts to accommodate certain religious employers opposed to a rule that would require them to provide access to birth control for women free of charge.
Obama announced that the rule would be tweaked so that in cases where non-profit religious organizations have objections, insurance companies would be required to reach out to employees and offer the coverage directly. . . .
"Under the rule, women will still have access to free preventive care that includes contraceptive service no matter where they work," Obama said. "That core principle remains. . . .
The change, loosely based on a regulation in effect in Hawaii, still leaves some unanswered questions. How will women be referred to insurers if they don't think of it themselves? Will the cost of contraceptives get added to premiums? And will other employers -- say, a strict Catholic who owns a restaurant -- be allowed the same exemption as hospitals, schools and charities? . . .
Contrary to the belief of apparently every leftie in the world, there really is no such thing as a free lunch. Just because contraception is free to women does not mean that it is free to the insurance companies. The insurers have to collect the money to pay for the free benefit from somewhere, and that somewhere is from all the people in the risk pool covered by the particular insurance policy. So in other words, what Obama is offering as a resolution of this issue is nothing more than pure smoke and mirrors - an accounting gimmick. If Catholic institutions have to purchase insurance and that insurance has to cover free contraception, steralization and Plan B abortion pills, than the Catholic Church will be funding it in reality, if not in the Obama directed accounting columns.
So why would Obama and the left possibly think that this smoke and mirrors will work to soothe the Catholic beast? Well, the left uses these kind of accounting tricks all of the time. Planned Parenthood is the premier example. Planned Parenthood receives tens of millions of our tax dollars annually with the proviso that none of those funds can be used to fund abortions. And yet, in 2009 alone, Planned Parenthood executed 332,278 abortions. How does the left get away with this? Through accounting of course. On paper, our tax dollars go to fund PP's overhead and all the other activities, while PP accounts show only other funds being used to fund the abortions. In reality, our tax funds are what allow PP to fund all of its activities, including abortion. It is intellectually dishonest to its core.
Update: It would seem that our nation's Catholic Bishops share the same reservations noted above and more with Obama's latest proposal.
As Charles Krauthammer notes in the above video, the Obama Administration is experiencing a tremendous backlash against its decision to mandate that Catholic institutions pay for health insurance covering contraception and Plan-B abortion, or in the alternative, pay fines or dissolve. Virtually the entire Catholic Church hierarchy is up in arms, as are not just liberal Catholics, but also countless people from other religions who see this as unconstitutional government overreach. And now, the far left is itself on the attack, making the most disingenuous and intellectually dishonest arguments imaginable in support of Obama's mandate.
The ACLU came out today arguing that Catholics institutions, by refusing to fund contraception and Plan-B abortion, are trying to "impose their will on their employees." The ACLU further argues that this mandate is not a violation of religious liberty, concluding that "religious liberty" does not give Catholic institutions the right to "impose those views on others, including ignoring civil rights laws or denying critical health care."
Let's address the first of theses arguments, that Catholics are "trying to impose their will on their employees." In the Thinker's Guide To Fallacies: The Art Of Mental Trickery & Manipulation, a great publication on critical thinking, this is listed as "Dirty Trick No. 1 - Accuse Your Opponent Of Doing What He Is Accusing You Of." That is precisely what the ACLU is doing here. The Catholic Church has since its inception two millennia ago stood for the sanctity of life and, as the issues arose, they have uniformly stood in opposition to contraception and abortion. The U.S. government has just decided now to force the Catholic Church to change its position, pay a fine or face dissolution. Yet the ACLU is trying to turn the argument on its head in order to put the Catholics on the defensive. The left uses this trick all of the time. Scurrilous bastards.
As to the ACLU's "religous liberty" argument, it is equally meritless. Religious liberty lies at the foundation of our nation. Indeed, it is what drove many of the first refugees to make the dangerous trip to American shores, in order that they could freely practice their religion. And the whole concept of "religious liberty" is found in the very first Amendment to our Constituion, it provides that "Congress shall make no law . . . prohibiting the free exercise" of religion. Given that sanctity of life is at the very core of the Catholic Church doctrine, and given that the new Obama policy would require either that the Catholic Church act against its core doctrine, pay a penalty, or cease its existence, that by definition impinges on the free exercise of religion. Furthermore, as Ed Morrisey points out:
The rights in the Constitution are not granted to American citizens because the government decided to offer them beneficently at their discretion. They exist in the document as a testament to our natural rights, part of our innate humanness, and are detailed in the Constitution as a bar to government’s overreach in trampling them.
The ACLU is not alone in their arguments today. The trio of far left politicians, Barbara Boxer, Patty Murray, and Jeanne Shaheen, have authored piece for the Wall Street Journal that is truly outrageous. They shamelessly assert that the Obamacare mandate furthers "religious liberty" based on a full scale redefinition of that term:
Those now attacking the new health-coverage requirement claim it is an assault on religious liberty, but the opposite is true. Religious freedom means that Catholic women who want to follow their church’s doctrine can do so, avoiding the use of contraception in any form. But the millions of American women who choose to use contraception should not be forced to follow religious doctrine, whether Catholic or non-Catholic.
Wow. That paragraph is nothing but non-sequiturs. First, these women are rewriting the Constitution, making it seem as if the Catholic Church itself has no rights. First Amendment protections flow not merely to individuals, but also to institutions. Indeed, if the Westboro Baptist Church has First Amendment Rights, then clearly so too does the Catholic Church.
Boxer asserts that the new mandate furthers "religious freedom." Yet to make this argument, Boxer redefines religious freedom to mean solely the right of an individual to ignore the doctrine of a religion. That is a unique and tenditious redefinition if there ever was one - which is another tried and true leftie trick of argument by fallacy.
And of course, no person in the U.S., including Catholic women, are being kept by the Catholic Church from accessing contraception or abortion as elective procedures. That has never been true and, indeed, it misstates the whole issue at hand. To claim that the Obama mandate furthers actual religious freedom is as about a shameless lie as I can imagine.
Boxer, further argues:
Catholic hospitals and charities are woven into the fabric of our broader society. They serve the public, receive government funds, and get special tax benefits. We have a long history of asking these institutions to play by the same rules as all our other public institutions.
As a threshold matter, the "rule" which Obama would impose differs fundamentally from all prior rules. None of the prior rules require Church affiliated institutions to act contrary to the core value of the Church. Further, I wait to see any case law - and I do mean any - showing that receipt of government funds and tax benefits constitutes a voluntary waiver of Constitutional rights. And lastly, Boxer ignores contrary "history" that some rules of general applicability, such as discrimination laws, cannot legally be applied in whole to religious institutions. Indeed, that was the subject of the recent Supreme Court Case, where the Court ruled unanimously for the Lutheran Church as regards the ministerial exception to employment laws.
And lastly, Boxer makes a series of pragmatic arguments that nationalizing the funding of contraception and plan-B is a panacea for American healthcare, that virtually all women use contraception at some point, and that, in the absence of funding some women working for Catholic institutions might not be able to afford the out of pocket costs. As Bookworm points out, Boxer is conflating arguments:
This is the big lie at the heart of the Obama administration's attack on traditional religious institutions. These harpies constantly conflate the availability of birth control with funding for birth control. They are not the same. Women in America can get birth control. The government can fund organizations -- indeed, it already does with the monies that go to Planned Parenthood -- that provide all these birth control options. Forcing religious organizations to pay for birth control, sterilization and abortifacients, however, both exceeds the government's power and contravenes the limitations the Bill of Rights imposes on government. This is not about whether women should have birth control; it's about with the government can force churches to pay for it.
I would add that I find Obama's decision to nationalize funding for contraception and abortion to border on the obscene. For one, this is yet another advance down the secular road, where the radical feminists want the act of sex to be wholly devoid of any moral, ethical or physical consequences. Moreover, it further the feminist left argument that abortions should be unconditionally available. This law essentially institutes radical feminist goals as the public policy of our country. Two, why should I or any other American have to fund elective costs that are rightfully at issue between consenting adults? Three, why are woman entitled to this special treatment and not men for specifically male issues? What about the dreaded EDS you hear about in ads every day for Viagra? Again the answer is because this is part of the radical secular agenda being pushed by the feminists.
So, in sum, there is good and bad in all of this. That portion of the Obamacare mandate requiring all Americans to fund the costs of birth control and abortions is likely to get through (though I wonder if individuals of deeply religious beliefs could not make the same argument as the Catholic Church, using the Courts rulings in the area conscientious objector status as a springboard for a colorable argument). The good news is that Obama has grossly overreached on this issue, as Krauthammer points out in the above video. I actually find it comforting that Obama and the far left are drawing a line in the sand on this issue. I hope they keep it up through November, because this issue is easily one that could cost Obama reelection and cost the left Congressional seats.
As Mark Levin asked on his show the other day, does Romney have a clue about capitalism? I would add, does he have a clue about the failure of the welfare state, the plight of those caught in generational poverty, or for that matter, the role of Democrats in insuring that nothing is done about it?
My gravest concern about Romney's electability is that the left is going to be able to successfully portray him as a combination Dr. Evil / Gordon Gecko / Robber barron in what is going to be a take no prisoners bout of class warfare. And if they do, Obama may well win. After all, if nothing else, Romney's campaign has taught us how saturation negative ads can indeed work to destroy one's opponent, irrespective of fairness or accuracy.
What Romney said in the quote above is beyond tin ear. It not only plays right into the left's class warfare meme, it just shows almost a complete failure to grasp the plight of America. The left will make a huge deal out of this. The right should also, as we are getting very close to making this man our nominee for President.
What a conservative candidate should have said:
President Obama's economy has driven millions of people into poverty and threatens to drive many more there unless we turn things around. History tells us with 100% certainty that the way to do that is through capitalism and wealth creation.
And yet, President Obama answer to all of this is to punish wealth creation out of "fairness." That language is also found in the history books. It is the language of class warfare, of socialism, and of economic ruin. Obama's appeal to "fairness" falsely appeals to our sense of justice. Inevitably, it will cripple our nation and make life that much harder for our declining middle class.
President Obama thinks he can tax and regulate us to prosperity. He thinks that he can do better than capitalism by pouring billions into creating new markets out of whole cloth with huge government mandates. President Obama's idea of capitalism is crony capitalism, where he, not the marketplace, picks the winners and losers. It is great if you are a crony of the President - but it hurts every other person in this country. No nation on earth has ever succeeded with the economic policies this President embraces.
But even beyond that, the welfare and entitlement society are driving our nation into bankruptcy. As to the welfare state, it has utterly failed the many poor in our society who are caught in generational cycles of poverty. It is a tragedy and a travesty that fifty years on from the start of the welfare state, 25% of the black population is still living below the poverty line. But we know how to stop that cycle. Education is the key. To paraphrase Juan Williams, the most important thing we can do for the perennial poor is to allow their children to receive precisely the same level of quality education that President Obama's children receive.
Sasha and Malia are receiving the very finest education available in a private school in Washinton D.C. Yet one of the first acts of President Obama was to end a program that gave the poor children of Washington, D.C. the opportunity to get that same education as his children. Instead, President Obama consigned the DC's poor to the worst public educational system in America. He did that because the Teacher's Unions - the economic foundation of the Democrat Party and the single biggest impediment to improving education in America - complained.
Unfortunately, if you vote for President Obama, if you are poor or, for that matter, for many in the middle class, your children will never get that opportunity that Sasha and Malia Obama have. There is no excuse for any child born of this country to be forced into a substandard education. Unfortunately, that cycle will never end under President Obama and the Democrats, because they value the dollars they get from the Teachers' unions more than they care about the generational poor in this country.
We really are at an absolutely critical point in our nation's history. Progressivism has built up in our machinery of state to levels that have worked fundamental change to our nation and that threaten to drag us down into bankruptcy and societal failure. Wholesale fundamental changes need to occur to clean out the machinery before it becomes irrevocably broken. Our educational system desperately needs to be overhauled. The out of control regulatory bureaucracies need to be systemically altered to restore democratic control. The EPA should never be able to regulate carbon without an affirmative vote of Congress. HHS should never be able to force Christians to fund acts that directly violate their religion's core beleifs without an affirmative vote of Congress. The FCC should never be able to unilaterally exercise control over the internet without an affirmative vote of Congress. The methods by which the left funnels hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to left wing organizations needs to end. Unions need to be brought to heel. No person in America should be forced to pay dues to a union simply so that they can get a job in a particular industry. The greens' keys to the courthouse, where decisions are made that should only be made by Congress, needs to end. The left's war on our military needs to end before we become so weakened that other nation's are willing to become adventurous. And then there are the entitlement programs that have us on the knife's edge of ruin.
I look at all of the above and ask myself, will Romney make any of those changes? Does he have a vision for America that addresses any of these fundamental issues? I don't think so. At best, I think that he will tinker around the margins for most of them. Villagers With Torches has a very good post up answering the question similarly. But each primary voter really needs to look at it and answer that question for themselves. Romney would be better for America than Obama, true, but is he, at this critical moment, the best choice that Republicans can make?
The Crusades were a series of nine major military expeditions launched by the Catholic Church to defend Christianity against Islamic aggression during the Medieval period. It has been over 700 years since a Pope felt Christendom so under threat that he launched a Crusade. Yet Obama may have just kicked off the 10th Crusade - this one to be fought on American soil against the advance of radical secularism at the ballot box on the first Tuesday in November.
In 2008, "Catholics, who accounted for about a quarter of the electorate, supported Obama, at 54% to 46% for McCain." Thus, Catholics form a very important part of the Obama coalition. Which makes it inexplicable that he has gone to war against the Catholics over the issue of whether Catholic religious institutions and related organization will have to "provide health insurance to their employees which includes subsidized contraception, sterilization and coverage for abortion-inducing drugs. Last week, HHS ruled that they must.
But go to war Obama has. And the Catholic Church is responding in kind. The day before the HHS issued its regulations, the Pope weighed in on the "radical secularists" war on religion in the U.S. Obama ignored that shot across the bow - and now, things have escalated. In virtually every Catholic Church in the U.S., letters from the Bishops have been read from the pulpit, all identical in their gist:
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ:
I write to you concerning an alarming and serious matter that negatively impacts the Church in the United States directly, and that strikes at the fundamental right to religious liberty for all citizens of any faith. The federal government, which claims to be “of, by, and for the people,” has just been dealt a heavy blow to almost a quarter of those people — the Catholic population — and to the millions more who are served by the Catholic faithful.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced last week that almost all employers, including Catholic employers, will be forced to offer their employees’ health coverage that includes sterilization, abortion-inducing drugs, and contraception. Almost all health insurers will be forced to include those “services” in the health policies they write. And almost all individuals will be forced to buy that coverage as a part of their policies.
In so ruling, the Obama Administration has cast aside the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, denying to Catholics our Nation’s first and most fundamental freedom, that of religious liberty. And as a result, unless the rule is overturned, we Catholics will be compelled to either violate our consciences, or to drop health coverage for our employees (and suffer the penalties for doing so). The Obama Administration’s sole concession was to give our institutions one year to comply.
We cannot—we will not—comply with this unjust law. People of faith cannot be made second class citizens. We are already joined by our brothers and sisters of all faiths and many others of good will in this important effort to regain our religious freedom. Our parents and grandparents did not come to these shores to help build America’s cities and towns, its infrastructure and institutions, its enterprise and culture, only to have their posterity stripped of their God given rights. In generations past, the Church has always been able to count on the faithful to stand up and protect her sacred rights and duties. I hope and trust she can count on this generation of Catholics to do the same. Our children and grandchildren deserve nothing less. . . .
And it is not only Catholics that Obama has to worry about. This is going to effect all Christian organizations - and virtually all have similar opposition to abortion, if not contraception and sterilization. Obama has given the finger to each and every person of the Christian faith.
Even knee jerk uber liberal E.J. Dionne - an Obama sycophant of the highest order - is coming down on the side of the Catholics on this one. In his most recent column, he points out that Obama has violated his promises to America's religious population made in the run up to the 2008 election, as well as violating the historical tradition of government respect for the conscience of the religious. This from Mr. Dionne:
One of Barack Obama’s great attractions as a presidential candidate was his sensitivity to the feelings and intellectual concerns of religious believers. That is why it is so remarkable that he utterly botched the admittedly difficult question of how contraceptive services should be treated under the new health care law.
His administration mishandled this decision not once but twice. In the process, Obama threw his progressive Catholic allies under the bus and strengthened the hand of those inside the Church who had originally sought to derail the health care law.
This might not be so surprising if Obama had presented himself as a conventional secular liberal. But he has always held himself to a more inclusive standard.
His deservedly celebrated 2006 speech on religion and American public life was a deeply sophisticated and carefully balanced effort to defend the rights of both believers and nonbelievers in a pluralistic republic.
Obama’s speech at Notre Dame’s graduation in 2009 was another tour de force. His visit to South Bend was highly controversial among right-wing Catholics. Yet his address temporarily silenced many of his critics because it showed an appreciation for the Catholic Church’s contributions to American life — particularly through its vast array of social-service and educational institutions — and an instinctive feeling for Catholic sensibilities. . . .
Speaking as a Catholic, I wish the Church would be more open on the contraception question. But speaking as an American liberal who believes that religious pluralism imposes certain obligations on government, I think the Church’s leaders had a right to ask for broader relief from a contraception mandate that would require it to act against its own teachings. The administration should have done more to balance the competing liberty interests here. . . .
“The tensions and the suspicions on each side of the religious divide will have to be squarely addressed,” Obama said back in 2006. “And each side will need to accept some ground rules for collaboration.” I wish the president had tried harder to find such rules here.
This decision fully illustrates the arrogance of the left, their disdain for Christianity, and their desire to push Christianity from the public square. It is both the most recent and, perhaps, the most significant attack in the U.S., in what has been a two hundred year war on Christianity. It is a war that started during the French Revolution, was given voice by socialism's greatest philosopher, Karl Marx, and has ever since been prosecuted by the secular left.
Professor Bainbridge, linked at the bottom of the page, points out that if the Catholic charities and social services only served Catholics, than these institutions would fall within the very narrow definition of religious organizations that HHS has carved out for exemption from the new healthcare rules. It is because of the very fact that the Catholic Church gives aid and charity to all regardless of their religion - and has done so since its inception two millennia ago - that HHS has chosen to subject the affiliated Church hospitals, schools and social organizations to this new mandate.
I find it hard to believe that Obama made this unforced error. Clearly he is pandering to his far left base. But in doing so, he is taking direct aim at religion. How historically ignorant do you have to be not to understand that you don't screw with peoples' religion.
True, its been almost a millenium since the Catholic Church launched a Crusade against such a fundamental attack on her religion. And it has been almost four centuries since the last of the Christian religious wars. But to think that Christian passions have so cooled that this will not drive the religious to vote their conscience in the 2012 election is, I think, a grand error.
Obama may be trying to fire up his base, but he has just done so at tremendous cost. If the election is close, this may prove the tipping point.
Update 2: Sen. Barbara Boxer has taken to the pages of the Huffington Post to engage in a truly Orwellian defense of a Obama's new policy. She claims that it actually advances religious freedom in America. Bookworm Room, in one of her finest efforts, has done a fisking of Boxer's column. It is a must read.
There is nothing in the Constitution . . . that authorizes the Federal government (and, by extension through the 14th Amendment, any state government) to mandate that a religious institution be complicit in an act it believes constitutes murder. More to the point, the Constitutional grant of religious freedom, by which the government agrees to stay out of managing a religious institutions affairs, either practical or doctrinal, should prohibit such conduct entirely. This is one more example, as if we needed it, of the Obama administration’s fundamental lawlessness.
Also much more on the statements issued throughout the U.S. in the comments to a post on Father Z's Blog.
Professor Bainbridge looks at the arguments of the left favoring the HHS decision and discusses how this is an attack on the charitable and social practices of the Catholic Church since its inception. It makes for a fascinating read.
There is no free lunch. If you want increased services, then there are inevitably increased costs, with the only question being whether the costs are passed on to the recipient or absorbed by the provider. Thus, is there anyone who can possibly think that Obamacare, with its many new mandates, would not increase health insurance costs?
Some of the new mandates coming into force in the next month include:
Lifetime dollar caps on coverage are abolished, and plans must allow parents to keep their children on the policy up to age 26. Many plans will also have to guarantee coverage for children regardless of a medical condition, and provide preventive care with no cost-sharing for the patient.
And with it come the new costs:
Aetna Inc., some BlueCross BlueShield plans and other smaller carriers have asked for premium increases of between 1% and 9% to pay for extra benefits required under the law, according to filings with state regulators.” And The Wall Street Journal was not alone. The Los Angeles Times and Dallas Morning News also reported rate hikes in their states, some as high as 16%. And this comes on top of news that Obamacare is forcing health care companies to stop offering coverage for kids and forcing colleges to stop offering coverage for students.
All that is basic economics. But now that the bill is starting to come due, the Obama administration is engaging in a blatant and outrageous abuse of power to stifle the speech of any health insurers who would blame premium increases on the Obamacare mandates, threatening any who do it with, in essence, with the death of their business. This from the AP:
President Barack Obama's top health official on Thursday warned the insurance industry that the administration won't tolerate blaming premium hikes on the new health overhaul law.
"There will be zero tolerance for this type of misinformation and unjustified rate increases," Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a letter to the insurance lobby.
"Simply stated, we will not stand idly by as insurers blame their premium hikes and increased profits on the requirement that they provide consumers with basic protections," Sebelius said. She warned that bad actors may be excluded from new health insurance markets that will open in 2014 under the law. They'd lose out on a big pool of customers, as many as 30 million people nationwide.
These new health insurance markets will be the primary vehicle for the purchase of health insurance in our brave new Obamacare world. Thus, exclusion from the government market will be a death sentence for many insurance companies.
It is difficult to think of an act more violative of First Amendment rights in our nation's history. For Sebelius to condition access to the government market based on whether the insurer speaks negatively about Obamacare is something we would expect to see in a dictatorship. And indeed, as the WSJ opines:
Zero tolerance for expressing an opinion, or offering an explanation to policyholders? They're more subtle than this in Caracas.
"Congress shall make no law," reads the First Amendment, "abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press."
Sebelius' approach is different: "zero tolerance" for dissent.
The threat to use government regulation to destroy or harm someone's business because they disagree with government officials is thuggery. Like the Obama administration's transfer of money from Chrysler bondholders to its political allies in the United Auto Workers, it is a form of gangster government.
"The rule of law, or the rule of men (women)?" economist Tyler Cowen asks on his marginalrevolution.com blog. As he notes, "Nowhere is it stated that these rate hikes are against the law (even if you think they should be), nor can this 'misinformation' be against the law."
This act of Sebelius is criminal. It is also an act that, were it perpetrated by a conservative, would be front page news for months. Yet from our MSM, only calm silence.
This also points to a larger issue involving Obamacare and, indeed, rule by 'progressives.' The Heritage Foundation sums up the larger issues at their blog, the Foundry:
Secretary Sebelius’ Hugo Chavezesque threats against the health insurance industry demonstrate why the fight to repeal Obamacare is also the fight for the soul of our country. Obamacare and the progressive movement represent a fundamental threat to our founding principles. For the left, “progress” means fundamentally transforming America through bureaucratic dictates that will engineer a “better” society by assuring equal outcomes. Through Obamacare, progressives would redistribute wealth through a distant, patronizing welfare state that regulates more and more of the economy, politics and society. The question Americans face is: Are we a country ruled by law or by bureaucrat?
If anything passed during the Obama years still stands after 2012, then the answer to that question is the latter, and our nation will continue its long, slow deterioration because of it.
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