Thursday, January 16, 2014

Obamacare's Threats to Religious Freedom

Reason reports:
The Little Sisters of the Poor are an order of Roman Catholic nuns who have taken vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. They operate nursing homes for those who cannot afford them and employ more than 50 persons. The sisters have objected to the requirement that they must pay for health insurance coverage that provides for birth control, as those payments directly violate Catholic teachings and beliefs.

In a pluralistic society, one would expect that the government would accommodate the sisters. In a free society in which everyone who works for the government takes an oath to uphold the Constitution, the feds have a legal obligation to accommodate them. In a political society in which many Catholics are Democrats who elected the Congress that gave us Obamacare, one would expect an accommodation. But we expect in vain, as the federal government has resisted the sisters mightily and asked the courts to turn down their pleas.

What is wrong with Obama that he would employ lawyers to do this? For starters, he does not believe in natural rights. He accepts the perverse view—known as positivism—that our rights come not from God, but from the government. This is not an academic argument, as, in the president's world, if the government is the source of freedom, then the government can restrict it. This is, of course, the opposite view from that of Judeo-Christian values, the Framers, the Constitution and American law; thus it violates the oath of office the president took.

But just as troubling as his attitude about the origin of personal freedoms is the president's attitude about the exercise of personal freedoms. Throughout his presidency, he has taken the position that he, and he alone, possesses the power to dispense with the obligations of federal laws when they are too burdensome and even to ignore them. He has bombed other countries without congressional approval, spied on all Americans without lawful warrants specifying any of them, enforced environmental regulations that Congress declined to enact, and declined to enforce or delayed the onset of sections of Obamacare that offend his friends. He has done this for political reasons when his colleagues and supporters have asked it of him.
Please read this Andrew Napolitano classic.