Continuing with my "Article Heritage" series begun last fall, installments of which appear every few months or so, I here present a second article from my early days as a writer. This one, originally written and published in 2007 and entitled "The Two-Party System: A Catastrophic Failure," became my most popular article published that year. It was accepted for publication on five different websites (some "conservative," some "liberal") and generated dozens of reader comments, most of which were positive, a few of which were negative. Furthermore, it was reprinted in its entirety without my permission on a website called "Nigeria Village Square" by a certain Dr. Gary K. Busch, who in addition inadvertently neglected to credit me as the author. When I contacted him to complain about this, he apologized for failing to properly credit me and put my name at the top of the webpage where he ran the article. He added that my article was well written and informative, and that he had re-published it to give it additional exposure. That mollified me somewhat, so I did not insist he remove it from the website. However, this experience did highlight my predicament as a starving writer (which I still am today), since I never received a penny for this article (ditto for most of my other articles).
This article expresses my honest opinions regarding the American two-party political system. In it, I contend that this system has inflicted and is continuing to inflict great harm on our nation by dividing the American people over fundamental moral issues on which our nation is built and on which we should be in agreement; by hampering clear and objective discourse on national issues through the excitement of emotional partisan fervor; and by corrupting politicians of both parties to support big business interests that have nothing to do with the common good of our nation. I point out that our nation's Founders objected with good reason to the establishment of a partisan political system, and argue that the two-party system must be abolished for the good of our country. Reading this article today, I find it still pertinent to our country's current situation, and even (if I may say so) a bit prophetic. Below is the article as originally written, albeit slightly revised to incorporate the emergence of the Tea Party and polished a bit to bring the style more in line with my current authorship standards. Your civil and constructive comments are most welcome.
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The Two-Party System: A Catastrophic Failure
by Justin Soutar May 23, 2007
For a number of years now, respected pundits have lauded the American two-party political system as an excellent balance between the dictatorship of a one-party system and the instability of a multiparty system. Yet the two-party system has done and continues to do our country great harm. The Republican and Democratic parties have divided the American people over fundamental moral values; they have failed to rectify longstanding national problems; and their existence chiefly benefits special interest groups, politicians, and mega-corporate executives. Most unfortunately of all, however, the two-party setup does not represent the people of the United States.
Many people believe that political parties are essential in a democracy such as the United States. These individuals claim that since a democracy encourages dissent and disagreement, it is only natural that such differences of opinion will find expression in organized factions. But this strain of thought clashes with the judgment of our nation’s founders. In his Observations on History, Benjamin Franklin wrote that parties engender confusion. In The Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay warned against the evils to the general public that a “spirit of faction” would cause. And George Washington refused allegiance to any political party during his eight-year service as first president of the United States.
Despite this initial rejection of partisanship, opposing factions emerged at the end of the 1700s representing two different opinions about the role of the federal government. The emergence of these factions marked the beginning of a two-party system that would dominate American politics for the next two hundred-plus years. The Federalists urged a strong central administration that would dominate the states and ensure national unity, while the Republicans believed that the individual states should have more power than the central government. In fact, the form of government officially established by the Constitution was a federal republic, so these parties were emphasizing the importance of either national or state power. Alexander Hamilton became the leader of the Federalist camp, whereas Thomas Jefferson sided with the Republicans—although neither prominent national founder held the rigidly partisan or doctrinaire outlook typical of many American politicians today. Moreover, the chief disagreement of these early parties was over the distribution of power within the United States government. Members of both camps initially saw eye to eye on most moral, economic, social, and foreign policy matters such as slavery, domestic trade, traditional family values, and isolationism.
During the 1800s, the parties evolved and grew further apart, especially over the issue of slavery. Federalists changed their name to Republicans and opposed slavery and the secession of the South, while the heretofore Republicans became Democratic-Republicans and declared support for both slavery and secession. At this stage, one party was championing a grave injustice which most Americans instinctively understood was evil. The Democratic-Republicans received backing primarily from wealthy Southern landowners, who insisted on keeping Negro slaves for cheap labor. After Republican president Abraham Lincoln waged the Civil War, declared emancipation, and brought the South back into the Union, the Democratic Party remained the faction of Southern landlords’ continued rebellion against the North and repression of Black political rights. However, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Democrats also gained membership from blue-collar workers in Northern cities as the Industrial Revolution created a new underclass. Meanwhile, Republicans attracted backing from the new class of wealthy Northern capitalists and from supporters of African-American civil rights nationwide.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, the importance of economic and foreign policy issues increased. The Republican Party came to stand for Northern farmers, retention of the gold standard, fiscally disciplined government, and isolationism, while the Democratic Party represented Southern landowners and Northern industrial laborers, a flexible money supply, growth of the federal government, and foreign engagement. During the Cold War, the two parties achieved a significant level of bipartisanship, agreeing on the necessity of confronting Communism and promoting freedom abroad. Another major change occurred in the 1960s, when Democratic president Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. From then onward the Democratic Party took up the “liberal” causes of civil rights and urban workers, leading the “conservative” faction of farmers, limited government and big business—the Republican Party—to dominate the South.
Another element was added to the American political landscape with the social upheavals of the 1960s and the Supreme Court’s decision of Roe v. Wade which legalized abortion in 1973. When a number of Democrats who had favored the abandonment of traditional social and moral values came to realize the bitter failure of those upheavals, they converted into social “conservatives” and found a new home in the Republican Party. President Ronald Reagan emerged as the standard-bearer of these new Republicans, who established their party on the firm foundation of God’s Law and strove to restore our nation’s identity as a Christian country.
The end of the Cold War signaled the arrival of two more simultaneous factional changes. One was President Bill Clinton and the “New Democrats”, who championed unrestricted globalization and free market economics alongside social spending. The other change had been planted during the Reagan administration, hibernated under the Clinton administration, and blossomed fully after the events of September 11, 2001: the ascendancy of neoconservatives within the Republican Party. Led by President Bush, these individuals likewise championed unrestricted globalization and free market economics, but they also demanded an aggressive military response to “Islamic” terrorism with vast increases in military spending and in the size of the federal government, as well as cuts in social spending and foreign economic aid.
Towards the end of the Bush administration, public disapproval of neoconservative excesses and corruption fueled the rise of the Tea Party movement within Republican ranks. This no-holds-barred populist movement, led by Ron Paul and Sarah Palin, earnestly strove to return America to the Judeo-Christian religious and moral principles that made her great. Its platform, solidly grounded in those principles, included strict Constitutional government in line with the intent of the Framers; reversal of Roe v. Wade; drastic reduction in federal government size and spending; elimination of federal budget deficits and reduction of the overall national debt; abolition of the Federal Reserve and income taxes; and opposition to costly foreign wars in the Middle East and elsewhere. With its staunch Christian, pro-life and family values combined with an ethos of limited government, low taxes, fiscal responsibility, and a balanced budget, the Tea Party movement was essentially a reincarnation of the Reagan Republican Party of the 1980s, albeit adapted to the particular challenges facing a new generation of Americans. Tea Party Republicanism gained widespread support and respect from Republican and Democratic Americans alike due to the consistency of its political philosophy, the soundness of its clearly articulated positions, and above all the character and integrity of its leaders. In 2010, a growing wave of public discontent and anger with the recently elected Obama administration and corrupt Washington politicians in both parties swept more than a hundred Tea Party candidates to power in state governorships as well as in the U.S. House and Senate. However, despite strong public support, the Tea Party movement lost its bids for the presidency in both 2008 and 2012 because it allowed the corrupt Republican establishment to dictate the choice of its presidential nominee.
We can learn some important lessons from this condensed review of American partisan history. One reason for the pendulum dynamic of swinging back and forth between the parties is that the country has different needs at different times. After Democratic-Republican President James Buchanan (1857-1861), the American people swung to Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln in 1860 because of his firm stand against slavery and his leadership abilities during a critical time in the nation’s history. In 1932, after four years of Republican President Herbert Hoover, American voters swung to Democratic candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt, opting for increased government spending and control of the economy to mitigate the effects of the Great Depression. In 1980, the voters swung from Democratic President Jimmy Carter to Republican candidate Ronald Reagan in reaction to economic stagnation and other domestic and foreign problems. In 1992, following twelve years of Republican presidential rule, economic recession influenced voters to swing to Democratic contender Bill Clinton. And in 2008, after eight years of Republican President George W. Bush, American voters swung to Democratic President Barack Obama to address the financial crisis as well as health care and immigration reform issues that the Bush administration had not adequately dealt with.
But though our country has different needs at different times, the two major political parties are not the proper instruments to satisfy these needs. According to George Washington, the constant alternation of two parties in the federal government would be a “frightful despotism.” The main reason for this pendulum dynamic, especially in the past few decades, is that neither party is adequately solving the key problems America faces.
Two factors explain this failure. First, each party stands for some of the values and policies America needs. For example, the Republican Party traditionally stands for the right to life of each human person from conception to natural death; a free market economy; limited government; low taxes; a balanced budget; a strong national defense; secure borders; and strict interpretation of the Constitution. The Democratic Party traditionally stands for the rights of the poor, disabled, and elderly to health care and financial assistance; the rights of ethnic and religious minorities to an equal place in our society; abolition of the death penalty and reform of our prison system; fair wages and decent working conditions for employees; common-sense regulation of the economy for the sake of the common good; protection of the environment; the development of clean renewable energy resources; increased economic aid to impoverished countries; and multilateral nuclear disarmament. However, the U.S. really needs both sets of values and policies. We need pro-life laws and prison reform, lower taxes and renewable energy, a free market economy with common-sense regulations—not one or the other.
The second factor explaining the failure of the two-party system is corruption. When a new president is elected, people anticipate that he will get things done. When he fails to meet even reasonable expectations and his administration becomes plagued by scandal (as has happened all too often in recent decades), people turn with hope to the other party, which generally does not improve matters much. This is because most members of both parties have been corrupted by special interests. Our last three presidents have been mega-corporate moguls whose ownership of major industries presented flagrant conflicts of interest. In addition, wealthy and vocal lobby groups have bullied our senators, representatives and president into enacting policies that benefit a few large companies at the expense of the average American citizen.
For example, President Bill Clinton was elected in 1992 on a platform that featured tax cuts, economic growth for everyone, and an ambitious social welfare program. Although the economy did grow, Clinton broke other promises by instituting the largest tax raise in American history, keeping social spending to a minimum, and permitting corporations such as Wal-Mart, Microsoft, and McDonalds to reap the lion’s share of gains. Then in 2000 President George W. Bush was elected on a platform that featured the right to life, tax cuts, free-market economics, secure borders, and fiscal discipline. Although Bush has generally held to his pro-life pledge and did sign into law some token tax cuts, in September of 2006 he declared support for the Plan B contraceptive pills for minors. Furthermore, President Bush has allowed big businesses such as Wal-Mart, Microsoft, McDonalds, Halliburton, Boeing, Verizon Wireless, and News Corporation to choke the “free” market; has pandered to illegal aliens; and ran up the largest federal budget deficits and national debt in American history. Both presidents ended up serving the interests of mega-corporations first and foremost.
The two-party political system does not accurately represent opposing viewpoints of the role of the federal government as it did in the young United States. Though it was a bad idea to begin with, since the latter part of the last century the system has become decrepit with corruption and has fallen sadly out of touch with the average American. Most of the Republican and Democratic candidates allege certain principles and make attractive promises during their campaigns, but upon entering office compromise overtakes principle like a weed and promises are thrown to the wind. Unfortunately, the current corrupt political climate is hostile to honest, traditionally-minded candidates with unwavering principles from Middle America such as Rand Paul, Sarah Palin and Ted Cruz. In general, only those individuals who habitually cater to—or are susceptible to manipulation by—hawkish pressure groups have a chance at federal public office.
Despite the manifest failure of the modern Republican and Democratic parties to deliver, however, most American voters across the map of the United States continue to choose congressional and presidential candidates along major party lines because no viable alternatives are in sight. They feel it is useless to vote for a third party or independent candidate because such a candidate has no real chance of making it into office. These dedicated factional adherents are stuck in the rut of the two-party system. Economics has long vied with fundamental moral convictions as a major factor determining political affiliation. In the US today, richer individuals (who generally dominate rural areas) tend to vote Republican, while poorer individuals (who generally dominate cities) tend to vote Democratic. These choices are based largely on the economic policies and moral positions that the parties stand for and on the hope that new candidates will do a better job than their predecessors. Some Republican and Democratic senators and representatives actually keep their campaign promises and work hard to protect innocent unborn children or help financially struggling Americans, or both, and it is those few exceptions that keep alive what little hope is left in the reigning system.
On the other hand, contented middle-class individuals (who generally dominate suburbs and small towns and comprise a significant minority of the American people) tend to hold a more independent, traditionally-minded outlook and are more likely to spread their votes around based on fundamental moral convictions as well as their common-sense perception of local and national needs. These are the “swing voters” to which enterprising candidates of both parties direct so much of their campaigning energy.
The degree of distinction between the two parties is a matter of controversy. To figure this out, it is helpful to distinguish between theory and practice. In theory, the Republican and Democratic factions are ideological opposites, with Republicans focusing on traditional values and responsibility while Democrats are grounded in progressive values and opportunity. But in practice, thanks to the endemic corruption of the system, there is little difference between parties. Republicans turn out to be not really Republican, and Democrats turn out to be not really Democrats: both sets of politicians operate together in a hazy and confused middle ground defined by special interest groups. This has been clearly demonstrated on a number of occasions, such as the overwhelming Congressional approval for war in Iraq in 2002, the Republicans’ passage of a bill that would have provided federal funds for embryonic stem-cell research involving abortions in 2006, and the refusal of Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to consider impeaching President Bush. All of these decisions were driven by mega-corporations, which stood to profit immensely from them. Even though President Bush vetoed the embryonic stem-cell act, soon afterward he accepted limited access to contraceptive pills for minors in order to mollify the big business executives.
Some might point to these occasions of crossing party lines as examples of bipartisanship. However, selling one’s fundamental principles to money-hungry American firms does not make for true bipartisanship. Real bipartisanship involves consistent agreement on fundamental, non-negotiable moral values such as the right to life and frequent compromise on the wide range of negotiable issues such as national security, economic policy, environmental protection, domestic poverty relief, and foreign aid. But instead of the way things should be, the pressure of the unrestricted free-market ideology has inverted values. Republicans and Democrats treat the negotiable issues as the most crucial of all and generally are absolutely unbending on them, whereas the fundamental moral values elicit disgraceful compromises and persistent disagreement. After all, big business tycoons do not like to have their enormous profits curtailed by the Ten Commandments, and they demand a totally unregulated market in order to reap those profits.
The two-party setup in the United States has severely divided our nation. Having names and labels for different political persuasions can be helpful, but they have too often led to pigeonholing and name-calling which hampers a free exchange of ideas. “Republican” and “Democrat”, “conservative” and “liberal”, “right” and “left” have degenerated into terms used to ostracize and vilify the opposition and to stifle discussion of topics deemed politically incorrect. A private citizen or political candidate who opposes US involvement in foreign wars should not be dubbed a “radical leftist” any more than a private citizen or political candidate who advocates illegalizing abortion should be denounced as a “right-winger”.
Moreover, the true meanings of the terms “conservative” and “liberal” have been obscured. In modern parlance, a “conservative” is someone who defends fundamental moral values and wishes to preserve traditional national ideals, and a “liberal” is someone who disputes fundamental moral values and wishes to radically change our country around. But these meanings are inadequate. The words originally referred to political approaches, not to a person’s moral values or lack thereof. “Conservative” basically means someone who applauds the status quo, while “liberal” means someone who wishes to effect change. Neither conservatism not liberalism is good or evil per se; it depends on what specific policy you wish to maintain or to alter. Continuing a bad policy such as torture of terrorist suspects is just as detrimental to our national well-being as changing a good policy such as the ban on federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research involving abortion would be. Beneficial policies need to be maintained and harmful policies need to be changed. Thus in the original sense of the words, few if any human beings could be described as completely conservative or completely liberal.
Political factions tend to be driven by ideologies that, in their members’ pursuit of particular goals, obscure rather than clarify the truth. Indeed, truth itself has been politicized. Inconvenient truths (such as the inability of embryonic stem-cells to cure diseases) are derided as falsehood, while falsehoods that make a few people rich (such as the impossibility of conducting a dialogue with terrorists) are glorified as absolute truth. Nowhere are these destructive elements of partisan politics more evident than in the meteoric rise of the neoconservative ideology following the terrorist attacks of September 11. This intolerant, extremist, and totalitarian belief system seems to have become a religion for many people, yet it is a deception that worships the false gods of national security and an unfettered free market. It was cunningly crafted by a handful of rich American tycoons to justify an aggressive foreign policy that enables them to engage in the age-old practice of war profiteering, to expand their globalized business operations across the world, and to exploit more and more human beings without hindrance. In contravention of history, it insists that terrorism is an act of war rather than a criminal tactic employed to draw a government’s attention to real grievances, and that only all-out armed force can “defeat” terrorism. Its view of the terrorist threat is based on mistaken assumptions, numerous fallacies, and blanket denials of many important facts that contradict their view.
Although it masquerades as patriotic, the neoconservative ideology and its loyal adherents have done tremendous harm to the American political landscape. Neoconservatives have viciously attacked their opponents, twisted moral values, and used false guilt to silence opposition. They are utilizing the ancient strategy of divide and conquer to destroy American public debate and ultimately to dominate the world. Their ability to find common ground with Americans of other opinions on negotiable issues is nil. In the pursuit of greed and power, they are willing to exacerbate partisan divisions among the American people and make them forget their nonpartisan heritage.
According to our nation’s founders, it would be better to have no political parties at all. Individuals should form their opinion on each individual negotiable matter through a careful review of all the relevant facts and without pressure from a corporate-controlled media, comfortable politicians, wealthy pundits, celebrities, or mega-corporate leaders. If that were to happen, if Americans were to discard ideologies and agree on the fundamental moral values, they would find much common ground on the negotiable issues. Instead of constant bickering and division, we would begin to experience true reconciliation and unity.
With each Congressional partisan victory and each new presidential administration, the newly elected have vowed to make a fresh start precisely because the previous faction led America to a dead end. The Democratic Party is now taking advantage of the myriad failures of the Bush administration and of Congressional Republicans to shore up their image as the faction that America desperately needs, the party that will rescue Americans from the clutches of right-wing insanity and deliver than a brighter future in 2009. For Americans weary of Republican mistakes and desirous of substantial changes in many political areas, the carrot held out by Democratic candidates looks tempting. It would be easy to accept this carrot and elect Democrats to Congress and the presidency alike. But if Americans choose this easy route next year, they will find that it leads to a dead end. A Democratic triumph next year will simply turn out to be a repetition of recent political history. How long will Americans dance to the tune of this dishonest and corrupt two-party scheme? Choosing the easy route will not get us anywhere. Instead, we should make known loudly and clearly our intense desire for candidates whose integrity is unsullied by a web of political connections and whose records are unsullied by corruption (such as “Average Joe” Schriner, Mick Huckabee or Sam Brownback for president), and then write the name of one of those candidates on the ballot in state primary elections and again in the November 2008 election. Otherwise, Americans eight years from now will again be whining about the dishonesty, corruption and ineffectiveness of Washington, D.C.
The “frightful dictatorship” and corrupt farce that is our two-party system should be dismantled. Parties give us temptations to attack opponents, become demagogues, and garner followers, distracting us from seeking the true good of the country. If we nevertheless wish to belong to a particular group of Americans with a clear identity, let us unite with all Americans of good will. Instead of saying, “I am a Republican” or “I am a Democrat”, let us rediscover the heritage bequeathed to us by our wise and farsighted national founders and try to grasp what it really means to say, “I am an American.” The United States was established by our founders as a nation that is too great to be defined by just two colors. Interestingly, the American flag contains some red and some blue, but the color most evenly spread throughout the flag is white. White can be thought of as a mixture of all political shades, and thus as a symbol of unity. Unity on the basis of the fundamental, universal moral truths enshrined in the hearts of all Americans and willingness to compromise on negotiable issues is what America needs now more than ever.
Copyright © 2007 by Justin D. Soutar. All rights reserved.
Showing posts with label taxes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label taxes. Show all posts
Thursday, February 13, 2014
Friday, April 19, 2013
What's Wrong with the HHS Mandate?
by Justin Soutar
(Originally published on Intellectual Conservative 4/17/13 at http://intellectualconservative.com/index.php/what-s-wrong-with-the )
On January 20, 2012, under the direction of President Barack Obama, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced an unprecedented new law: As of August 1, 2012, all forms of health insurance coverage provided by businesses to their employees and by not-for-profit organizations to their clients would have to include artificial contraceptives, sterilizations and abortion-inducing drugs. This official announcement aroused an immediate and fierce storm of protest throughout the United States. Catholic bishops, Protestant ministers, Jewish rabbis, hospital owners, charity CEOs, heads of colleges and universities, big and small business owners, state and federal government leaders, and ordinary American citizens all declared in no uncertain terms that they could not possibly comply with such a directive. The reason? It would force them to act in violation of their religious beliefs and moral convictions—and they were not about to blithely discard those sacrosanct tenets.
In response to this massive wave of protest, a few weeks later on February 10, 2012 the HHS announced a “compromise” to its sweeping mandate, in which two “exemptions” were handed to religious believers. First, “houses of worship” (i.e. churches, synagogues, mosques, etc.) would be exempted from the new law. Second, religious institutions that only hire and serve members of their own faith would not be compelled to furnish certain health care items if furnishing such items violated the principles of their religion. However, this “compromise” did little to abate the storm of protest against the new federal contraceptive, sterilization and abortifacient law. The Catholic bishops objected that it failed to adequately address the serious religious liberty issues raised by the HHS mandate. How so? Well, the second exemption to that mandate is extremely narrow and very few religious organizations qualify for it. Whether schools or hospitals or charities, most religious institutions in America are not exclusivist, hiring and serving only members of their own faith. Rather, most are—as they should be—part of the broader society, and as such they hire staff on the basis of merit and serve people on the basis of need, without discriminating on the basis of religious affiliation. So this HHS “compromise” still left an overwhelming majority of religious institutions legally compelled to act against their beliefs.
A few months later, the U.S. Supreme Court completed its review of the encyclopedic Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, which authorized the Obama administration to issue the healthcare mandate in the first place. On June 28, 2012, the Court ruled that the entire Act is constitutional and that the HHS mandate is simply a legitimate exercise of Congressional power to lay and collect taxes. In his written majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts argued that the mandate is not really coercive in violation of the First Amendment because religious entities and business leaders that object to it can choose between obeying the law or paying the tax fines imposed for noncompliance with it. According to Chief Justice Roberts, these fines are not so crippling that they force compliance with the mandate; therefore, the healthcare law leaves religious institutions and business owners still free to act in accord with their beliefs.
This landmark decision was quickly followed by another national wave of public outcry. What was wrong with the ObamaCare ruling? Critics pointed out that, contrary to Roberts’s claim, the tax penalties for noncompliance with the HHS mandate are indeed severely crippling; a religious organization or business that refuses to obey the law will be subjected to fines as high as 15 percent of its annual income or $100 per employee per day. Thus, for a typical institution—be it religious or secular, for-profit or not-for-profit—with dozens or hundreds of employees that refuses to offer contraception, sterilization and abortifacient drugs in its healthcare plan, the tax fines will amount to hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars per year. Fines of these magnitudes will force many religious institutions and businesses across America to shut down. This is precisely why the National Federation of Independent Business took the Obama administration to the U.S. Supreme Court over the PPACA and the mandate—because they are coercive: Businesses are either forced to obey the law or forced to pay unsustainable fines. Furthermore, fines by their very nature are meant to ensure compliance with a law and to deter and punish noncompliance with it. The notion that the healthcare mandate is not coercive is total nonsense. By allowing ObamaCare to stand unchallenged, the Supreme Court left the First Amendment rights of religious institutions and business owners still exposed to the full onslaught of the HHS mandate.
Facing a barrage of more than forty lawsuits in federal courts across the nation—eleven of which had already been decided in favor of the plaintiffs at this writing—the Department of Health and Human Services held out its most recent olive branch to the American public on February 1, 2013, proposing certain “accommodations” to make its controversial healthcare mandate more palatable to the stubbornly religious masses. Although initially the public wasn’t sure what to make of these complex new “accomodations,” Catholic bishops and lawyers were soon sounding the alarm that the newly proposed HHS regulations do little if anything to allay their deep concerns about the mandate’s violation of religious freedom. In an op-ed entitled “Making Sense of Another Ambiguous ‘Compromise,’” Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia warned that the healthcare mandate “remains unnecessary, coercive and gravely flawed.” On EWTN’s news program The World Over Live with Raymond Arroyo, attorney Kyle Duncan of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty flatly dismissed the new “accommodations” as “window-dressing.” And Cardinal Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S. bishops’ conference, in an official statement on behalf of all the bishops, declared, “Throughout the past year, we have been assured by the Administration that we will not have to refer, pay for, or negotiate for the mandated coverage. We remain eager for the Administration to fulfill that pledge.”
So what is lacking in this latest “compromise” from HHS? According to Cardinal Dolan, three issues remain unresolved: 1) The federal definition of a religious ministry remains extremely narrow. 2) Nearly all religious institutions are still compelled to fund and facilitate "services" such as contraceptives, sterilization, and abortifacients. 3) No protection is afforded to the conscience rights of for-profit business owners.
We’ve already discussed how the mandate affects religious institutions. But what about religious owners of secular for-profit businesses as well as of nonreligious charitable organizations who object that the HHS mandate violates their personal religious beliefs? No legal exemption from the mandate is afforded them. Lawyers for the Obama administration maintain that secular businesses must comply with it regardless of their owners’ personal religious objections to handing out artificial contraceptives, sterilizations and abortifacients in their healthcare plans. In other words, under the Obama regime it is a crime for a religious person who runs a secular business or not-for-profit organization to do so in line with his or her religious convictions if such convictions prohibit the distribution of abortion pills, contraceptive drugs and/or sterilization procedures. Forcing individual believers to violate their faith is as much an attack on the First Amendment as forcing entire religious institutions to do so.
And what about the conscience rights of that small but significant group of non-religious owners of secular businesses and charitable organizations who object to providing abortifacients on moral rather than religious grounds? Why should they be exempted from the HHS mandate? After all, according to the Obama administration, this healthcare law is driven by “a compelling public interest”: for their own good, the American people must have unrestricted access to abortifacient drugs, birth control pills and sterilization procedures. The answer is that the moral right to refuse to provide abortion-inducing drugs is found in the moral law, also known as the natural law—a set of universal principles of right and wrong which come from God and which are inscribed in the human conscience. This moral law guided the thinking and actions of our nation’s great founders and, together with faith in God according to the Judeo-Christian tradition, served as the framework for our country’s two principal founding documents: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.
The Declaration of Independence states: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to ensure these Rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” This solemn statement is becoming all the more remarkable as our nation becomes more secularized, rejecting the firm foundations of religion and morality on which it was built. In this text, our nation’s founders acknowledged as self-evident truths that God created all human beings equal in dignity and endowed them with certain “unalienable” rights, i.e., rights that cannot be taken away, and that the role of government is to protect these rights. The founders knew that the moral law requires respect for the right to life of every innocent human being and forbids murder. They also knew that the Fifth Commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” is merely a direct external confirmation by God of a law that he had already written in the human heart. Moreover, in acknowledging “Liberty” as an unalienable human right, the founders understood liberty as 1) the freedom to act in accordance with the moral law, and 2) the freedom to practice one’s own religion without government interference. The former aspect—what we refer to today as “freedom of conscience”—was taken for granted by the founders; we refer to the latter aspect as “freedom of religion.”
In our Constitution’s Bill of Rights, the First Amendment states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Having come to this land from Europe, where some theocratic monarchs forced the state religion on their subjects and outlawed the public practice of other religions, our nation’s founders clearly understood that freedom of religion is a fundamental human right that requires legal protection from the opposing threats of single-religion dictatorship and religious persecution. Thus they wisely crafted a law that on the one hand forbids religious compulsion by the government, and on the other hand guarantees the freedom to practice one’s own religion without interference from the government.
The Fifth Amendment to our Constitution protects our unalienable rights to both life and liberty from arbitrary revocation by the government. It states: “No person shall be…deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” This passage, along with most of the Fifth Amendment, was written to protect the rights of criminal suspects. When our nation’s Founders authored this text, they meant that no one could be executed or deprived of his liberty or land without first being publicly tried and convicted of a crime. Unfortunately, some two hundred years later in the infamous Roe v. Wade decision, the U.S. Supreme Court led by Chief Justice Warren Burger deliberately ignored the intent of the Constitution’s authors and, through some incomprehensible twist of logic, arbitrarily reinterpreted the Fifth Amendment due process clause regarding the confinement and execution of criminals to justify legalizing the murder of innocent unborn persons. As a result of this infamous decision, over the last forty years nearly 56 million innocent unborn Americans have been deprived of their unalienable right to life, and with it all their other rights as well. A woman’s supposed “right” to an abortion on demand has no authentic legal basis in the Constitution.
The most fundamental of all human rights—the right to life—as well as the rights to moral and religious liberty are explicitly acknowledged in our nation’s founding documents. By compelling individuals and institutions to help women kill their innocent unborn children regardless of moral objection to an intrinsically evil practice, the HHS mandate violates our sacred rights to life and liberty enshrined in the Declaration and the Constitution. Abortion violates the unalienable rights to life and liberty of the innocent unborn human being in its mother’s womb; therefore, it is both murder and tyranny and constitutes a violation of the Declaration and the Fifth Amendment. The HHS mandate violates not only the unalienable rights to life and liberty of the innocent preborn, but also the unalienable right to liberty of the American people, i.e., their freedom to act in accord with the moral law and with their religious beliefs; therefore, it is both murder and tyranny and constitutes a violation of the Declaration, the First Amendment and the Fifth Amendment.
Abortion is clearly gravely immoral, so the case for refusing to cooperate in it is pretty clear-cut. But would a secular nonprofit or business owner have the right to object to providing artificial contraceptives on strictly moral grounds? The answer is yes, and here’s one good reason: Studies prove that many birth control pills act as de facto abortifacients—instead of preventing the conception of a child altogether, they merely prevent a newly conceived child from implanting in its mother’s uterus, resulting in its abortion. Thus a secular nonprofit or business owner may rightly refuse to provide artificial contraceptives to employees on the ground that this would make him or her complicit in the grave moral evil of abortion.
But even if artificial contraceptives did not behave like abortion-inducing drugs, there would still be another argument for a secular nonprofit or business owner to justify withholding them from his or her employees: The use of artificial contraception by married couples is gravely immoral. Non-Catholics may object that this is exclusively a doctrine of the Catholic Church, not a tenet of the universal moral law. However, it is worth remembering that prior to 1920, every single Christian denomination in the United States taught that the use of artificial contraception by married couples was a gravely immoral practice. In doing so, they rightly stood alongside the Catholic Church in upholding a key truth of the unchanging law of God. The fact that most Christian churches in America no longer teach this, and the fact that most Americans who object to the use of artificial contraception within marriage are now Catholic, does not change the truth of the moral law. It merely demonstrates that only the Catholic Church has continued to faithfully proclaim the truth of the immorality of artificial birth control for use by married couples. If something is immoral it is immoral for everyone of all times, regardless of their religious faith (or lack thereof) and regardless of whether certain churches teach the truth of it or not.
The mission of civil government is to protect the God-given rights of its citizens and to promote the common good of society. Religion and morality are powerful allies in achieving both of these objectives. They are what George Washington referred to as “indispensable supports” of our nation’s liberty, the essential foundations of human society. Atop this foundation of religion and morality, the traditional family is the essential basic unit of human society, the place where new human life is welcomed and nourished and where religious and moral values as well as civic duties are inculcated in the next generation of American citizens. Government has a solemn duty to respect religion, morality and the family and to avoid making any policies that would threaten their wellbeing. A government that dares to attack religion, morality, or the family is attacking the very foundations of human society. The Obama administration has dared to attack all three of these foundations of our republic by issuing a law that violates religious freedom, promotes immorality, and discourages families from welcoming new human life into their midst.
Our nation’s founders prophetically warned that the United States would not long endure without the twin pillars of religion and morality, that is, faith in God and adherence to his moral law. If the people of a nation don’t believe that human rights—especially the rights to life and liberty—come from God, then those rights will be perceived as coming from the state and the state will claim the authority to define their limits and to give or take away those rights as it sees fit. And if people don’t believe that it is morally wrong to deprive an innocent person of his or her right to life or liberty, then human life and liberty will not be respected.
Unfortunately, religion and morality mean nothing to the Obama administration. Its healthcare mandate and other radical policies are grounded in the dangerous philosophy of radical secularism, which is the antithesis of everything our nation’s founders believed and did. The central idea of this philosophy is that human society and politics are better off without God and without the constraints of an unchanging moral law. Unlike today’s radical secularists, those few of our nation’s founders who were nonreligious men were not at all hostile to religion. Benjamin Franklin did not refuse to sign the Declaration of Independence because it mentioned or referred to God in several places. On the contrary, the nonreligious founders warmly supported and encouraged the public exercise of religion, recognizing its key importance to the welfare of the nation. With its outright rejection of religion and moral absolutes, radical secularism is a recipe for national disaster, grimly exemplified in totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Maoist China.
Despite the claims of the Obama administration, the HHS mandate has nothing to do with looking after the health of the American public, and it makes no sense whatsoever when viewed from that standpoint. For one thing, with this law the federal government is unnecessarily forcing health insurers to include coverage of an over-the-counter drug that is already inexpensive and widely available. Those who do not object to the use of artificial contraceptives within marriage as immoral can easily purchase them at the nearest drugstore for the price of a small bag of dog food. For another thing, giving women drugs to kill their unborn children is not caring for the health of either mothers or preborn infants, and giving people artificial contraceptives (many of which are de facto abortifacients) and surgical sterilization procedures so that they can’t have children is not health care either. None of these so-called “preventive services for women” are necessary or even beneficial to the health and well-being of American women; on the contrary, they are unnecessary and harmful to both. The negative effects of abortion on the physical, mental and emotional health and well-being of women are now well documented: cancer, pregnancy complications, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety, depression, guilt feelings, and suicide. Furthermore, artificial contraceptives have been shown to be harmful to the natural environment; their chemical waste byproducts pollute our nation’s water and soil and end up contaminating our food supply, which also degrades our health. Seen objectively, the HHS order is an irrational and self-destructive national policy of population control: By helping American women to not bear children, it places the future of our entire nation at risk. Leaving aside for the moment all considerations of morality, religious liberty, and constitutionality, these facts alone would render the “healthcare” mandate a grossly irresponsible, foolhardy and unethical decree of the federal government.
So if the HHS mandate is not about health care, what it is about? The answer is: money. The mandate is driven by powerful corporate interests—specifically the abortion, pharmaceutical, and insurance industries—which stand to profit immensely from legally mandated consumption of their products. Unfortunately, these wealthy and influential corporate giants are better represented in Washington, D.C. than the American people themselves are. They have bribed the Obama administration to give them exactly what they want—and they will do whatever it takes to ensure that the “healthcare” law remains firmly in place, no matter how destructive it is to our country.
To summarize: what is wrong with the HHS mandate?
1. It is unpopular. The HHS mandate is being imposed on our nation by Washington bureaucrats in the face of massive and sustained opposition from the American people. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, which gives the Obama administration the authority to issue the HHS mandate, was rammed through Congress and signed into law by President Obama despite the vociferous and well-founded objections of a large majority of his constituents that it failed to adequately protect their moral conscience rights and religious freedoms. Polls taken from 2009 up to today have consistently registered two-thirds of Americans as strongly opposed to ObamaCare, which makes it the most controversial and unpopular reform legislation in American history.
2. It is unjust. Never before in U.S. history has the federal government enacted a law that forces people to violate their moral consciences and religious precepts. Such compulsion is unjust because it infringes on the basic human rights to act in accord with the moral law and with one’s religious faith.
3. It is unconstitutional. The HHS mandate violates our First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion as well as the Fifth Amendment rights of unborn and born Americans not to be deprived of life or liberty, respectively, without due process of law.
4. It is immoral. It is one thing and bad enough for a government to legalize a gravely immoral act such as abortion. However, it is another thing and far worse for a government to legally compel its subjects to violate the moral law. No government has the right to order certain people to help other people do gravely immoral things such as murder their preborn children or render themselves infertile. Yet this is exactly what the federal government under the Obama administration is doing with the HHS mandate: forcing American citizens to participate in the gravely immoral acts of abortion, contraception, and sterilization.
5. It is an attack on religion, morality, and the family—the three basic pillars of human society and national life.
6. It is grounded in the dangerous philosophy of radical secularism, the idea that God and the moral law must be expelled from public life.
7. It is unnecessary. Abortion is not health care, and artificial contraceptives are already inexpensive and widely available for those who do not object to their use.
8. It is destructive to the public health. Abortion is harmful to the health of women, and artificial contraceptives generate toxic waste.
9. It is irresponsible. Preventing women en masse from having children is a recipe for national suicide.
10. It is driven by corporate greed. At bottom, the HHS mandate is nothing other than pork barrel for the abortion, pharmaceutical, and insurance industries.
Since announcing this high-handed and unprecedented “healthcare” directive over a year ago, the Obama administration has utterly failed to grant American religious institutions and business owners the basic freedom to act in accordance with their moral convictions and religious beliefs. The two HHS “compromises” presented thus far, with their narrow “exemptions” and dubious “accommodations,” are mere facades, totally devoid of genuine protections for the religious liberties and conscience rights of the American people. They’re carefully calculated political gestures designed to give the appearance of compromise and intended to weaken public resistance to a law that is immoral, unjust, and unconstitutional—a law that President Obama and his tyrannical accomplices have foisted on our nation without our consent, a law that they have no intention of rescinding or of substantially altering to comply with the First and Fifth Amendments.
The HHS mandate has been and continues to be loudly decried as an attack on religious liberty and the First Amendment, which it certainly is. But even more fundamentally, it is an attack on the moral law and on our right to act in accordance with that law. Perhaps, in our response as Catholic American citizens to the Obama administration’s radical anti-life policy, too much emphasis is being placed on the religious liberty and legal aspects of the issue and not enough on the moral and human rights aspects. The core of the issue is that the mandate forces American employers to purchase and distribute to their employees things that are gravely immoral for use either by pregnant women or by married couples. As Catholics, we need to articulate a more coherent defense of the moral law and of our right to act in accordance with it—defending principles that we hold in common with other religious believers as well as with many atheists and agnostics—in order to combat the insidious propaganda of the Obama administration more effectively.
The HHS mandate is an immoral and unjust law; therefore, we the people of the United States have not only the right but the moral duty to refuse to obey it—and to work for its full reversal. It’s not enough to merely demand further exemptions from the mandate; this approach is inherently flawed because it implies tacit acceptance of an unacceptable law. For the reasons given in this article, the so-called “healthcare” mandate in principle is intrinsically, profoundly and irredeemably flawed, and because of that it must be completely overturned. We must not allow ourselves to become discouraged by the obstacles we face in achieving this necessary goal. We must not give in to a subtle defeatist mentality and cowardly surrender to the mandate as though it were somehow irreversible. Such a dangerous and evil law cannot stand for long without wreaking tremendous havoc on our nation. We the people of the United States must keep up the pressure on the Obama administration to revoke this terrible law—and if it refuses to do so, we must use our heads when we next go to vote and select responsible leaders who will protect and defend our God-given unalienable rights to life and liberty, so that we will once again be “one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
Copyright © 2013 Justin D. Soutar. All rights reserved.
(Originally published on Intellectual Conservative 4/17/13 at http://intellectualconservative.com/index.php/what-s-wrong-with-the )
On January 20, 2012, under the direction of President Barack Obama, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced an unprecedented new law: As of August 1, 2012, all forms of health insurance coverage provided by businesses to their employees and by not-for-profit organizations to their clients would have to include artificial contraceptives, sterilizations and abortion-inducing drugs. This official announcement aroused an immediate and fierce storm of protest throughout the United States. Catholic bishops, Protestant ministers, Jewish rabbis, hospital owners, charity CEOs, heads of colleges and universities, big and small business owners, state and federal government leaders, and ordinary American citizens all declared in no uncertain terms that they could not possibly comply with such a directive. The reason? It would force them to act in violation of their religious beliefs and moral convictions—and they were not about to blithely discard those sacrosanct tenets.
In response to this massive wave of protest, a few weeks later on February 10, 2012 the HHS announced a “compromise” to its sweeping mandate, in which two “exemptions” were handed to religious believers. First, “houses of worship” (i.e. churches, synagogues, mosques, etc.) would be exempted from the new law. Second, religious institutions that only hire and serve members of their own faith would not be compelled to furnish certain health care items if furnishing such items violated the principles of their religion. However, this “compromise” did little to abate the storm of protest against the new federal contraceptive, sterilization and abortifacient law. The Catholic bishops objected that it failed to adequately address the serious religious liberty issues raised by the HHS mandate. How so? Well, the second exemption to that mandate is extremely narrow and very few religious organizations qualify for it. Whether schools or hospitals or charities, most religious institutions in America are not exclusivist, hiring and serving only members of their own faith. Rather, most are—as they should be—part of the broader society, and as such they hire staff on the basis of merit and serve people on the basis of need, without discriminating on the basis of religious affiliation. So this HHS “compromise” still left an overwhelming majority of religious institutions legally compelled to act against their beliefs.
A few months later, the U.S. Supreme Court completed its review of the encyclopedic Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, which authorized the Obama administration to issue the healthcare mandate in the first place. On June 28, 2012, the Court ruled that the entire Act is constitutional and that the HHS mandate is simply a legitimate exercise of Congressional power to lay and collect taxes. In his written majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts argued that the mandate is not really coercive in violation of the First Amendment because religious entities and business leaders that object to it can choose between obeying the law or paying the tax fines imposed for noncompliance with it. According to Chief Justice Roberts, these fines are not so crippling that they force compliance with the mandate; therefore, the healthcare law leaves religious institutions and business owners still free to act in accord with their beliefs.
This landmark decision was quickly followed by another national wave of public outcry. What was wrong with the ObamaCare ruling? Critics pointed out that, contrary to Roberts’s claim, the tax penalties for noncompliance with the HHS mandate are indeed severely crippling; a religious organization or business that refuses to obey the law will be subjected to fines as high as 15 percent of its annual income or $100 per employee per day. Thus, for a typical institution—be it religious or secular, for-profit or not-for-profit—with dozens or hundreds of employees that refuses to offer contraception, sterilization and abortifacient drugs in its healthcare plan, the tax fines will amount to hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars per year. Fines of these magnitudes will force many religious institutions and businesses across America to shut down. This is precisely why the National Federation of Independent Business took the Obama administration to the U.S. Supreme Court over the PPACA and the mandate—because they are coercive: Businesses are either forced to obey the law or forced to pay unsustainable fines. Furthermore, fines by their very nature are meant to ensure compliance with a law and to deter and punish noncompliance with it. The notion that the healthcare mandate is not coercive is total nonsense. By allowing ObamaCare to stand unchallenged, the Supreme Court left the First Amendment rights of religious institutions and business owners still exposed to the full onslaught of the HHS mandate.
Facing a barrage of more than forty lawsuits in federal courts across the nation—eleven of which had already been decided in favor of the plaintiffs at this writing—the Department of Health and Human Services held out its most recent olive branch to the American public on February 1, 2013, proposing certain “accommodations” to make its controversial healthcare mandate more palatable to the stubbornly religious masses. Although initially the public wasn’t sure what to make of these complex new “accomodations,” Catholic bishops and lawyers were soon sounding the alarm that the newly proposed HHS regulations do little if anything to allay their deep concerns about the mandate’s violation of religious freedom. In an op-ed entitled “Making Sense of Another Ambiguous ‘Compromise,’” Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia warned that the healthcare mandate “remains unnecessary, coercive and gravely flawed.” On EWTN’s news program The World Over Live with Raymond Arroyo, attorney Kyle Duncan of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty flatly dismissed the new “accommodations” as “window-dressing.” And Cardinal Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S. bishops’ conference, in an official statement on behalf of all the bishops, declared, “Throughout the past year, we have been assured by the Administration that we will not have to refer, pay for, or negotiate for the mandated coverage. We remain eager for the Administration to fulfill that pledge.”
So what is lacking in this latest “compromise” from HHS? According to Cardinal Dolan, three issues remain unresolved: 1) The federal definition of a religious ministry remains extremely narrow. 2) Nearly all religious institutions are still compelled to fund and facilitate "services" such as contraceptives, sterilization, and abortifacients. 3) No protection is afforded to the conscience rights of for-profit business owners.
We’ve already discussed how the mandate affects religious institutions. But what about religious owners of secular for-profit businesses as well as of nonreligious charitable organizations who object that the HHS mandate violates their personal religious beliefs? No legal exemption from the mandate is afforded them. Lawyers for the Obama administration maintain that secular businesses must comply with it regardless of their owners’ personal religious objections to handing out artificial contraceptives, sterilizations and abortifacients in their healthcare plans. In other words, under the Obama regime it is a crime for a religious person who runs a secular business or not-for-profit organization to do so in line with his or her religious convictions if such convictions prohibit the distribution of abortion pills, contraceptive drugs and/or sterilization procedures. Forcing individual believers to violate their faith is as much an attack on the First Amendment as forcing entire religious institutions to do so.
And what about the conscience rights of that small but significant group of non-religious owners of secular businesses and charitable organizations who object to providing abortifacients on moral rather than religious grounds? Why should they be exempted from the HHS mandate? After all, according to the Obama administration, this healthcare law is driven by “a compelling public interest”: for their own good, the American people must have unrestricted access to abortifacient drugs, birth control pills and sterilization procedures. The answer is that the moral right to refuse to provide abortion-inducing drugs is found in the moral law, also known as the natural law—a set of universal principles of right and wrong which come from God and which are inscribed in the human conscience. This moral law guided the thinking and actions of our nation’s great founders and, together with faith in God according to the Judeo-Christian tradition, served as the framework for our country’s two principal founding documents: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.
The Declaration of Independence states: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to ensure these Rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” This solemn statement is becoming all the more remarkable as our nation becomes more secularized, rejecting the firm foundations of religion and morality on which it was built. In this text, our nation’s founders acknowledged as self-evident truths that God created all human beings equal in dignity and endowed them with certain “unalienable” rights, i.e., rights that cannot be taken away, and that the role of government is to protect these rights. The founders knew that the moral law requires respect for the right to life of every innocent human being and forbids murder. They also knew that the Fifth Commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” is merely a direct external confirmation by God of a law that he had already written in the human heart. Moreover, in acknowledging “Liberty” as an unalienable human right, the founders understood liberty as 1) the freedom to act in accordance with the moral law, and 2) the freedom to practice one’s own religion without government interference. The former aspect—what we refer to today as “freedom of conscience”—was taken for granted by the founders; we refer to the latter aspect as “freedom of religion.”
In our Constitution’s Bill of Rights, the First Amendment states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Having come to this land from Europe, where some theocratic monarchs forced the state religion on their subjects and outlawed the public practice of other religions, our nation’s founders clearly understood that freedom of religion is a fundamental human right that requires legal protection from the opposing threats of single-religion dictatorship and religious persecution. Thus they wisely crafted a law that on the one hand forbids religious compulsion by the government, and on the other hand guarantees the freedom to practice one’s own religion without interference from the government.
The Fifth Amendment to our Constitution protects our unalienable rights to both life and liberty from arbitrary revocation by the government. It states: “No person shall be…deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” This passage, along with most of the Fifth Amendment, was written to protect the rights of criminal suspects. When our nation’s Founders authored this text, they meant that no one could be executed or deprived of his liberty or land without first being publicly tried and convicted of a crime. Unfortunately, some two hundred years later in the infamous Roe v. Wade decision, the U.S. Supreme Court led by Chief Justice Warren Burger deliberately ignored the intent of the Constitution’s authors and, through some incomprehensible twist of logic, arbitrarily reinterpreted the Fifth Amendment due process clause regarding the confinement and execution of criminals to justify legalizing the murder of innocent unborn persons. As a result of this infamous decision, over the last forty years nearly 56 million innocent unborn Americans have been deprived of their unalienable right to life, and with it all their other rights as well. A woman’s supposed “right” to an abortion on demand has no authentic legal basis in the Constitution.
The most fundamental of all human rights—the right to life—as well as the rights to moral and religious liberty are explicitly acknowledged in our nation’s founding documents. By compelling individuals and institutions to help women kill their innocent unborn children regardless of moral objection to an intrinsically evil practice, the HHS mandate violates our sacred rights to life and liberty enshrined in the Declaration and the Constitution. Abortion violates the unalienable rights to life and liberty of the innocent unborn human being in its mother’s womb; therefore, it is both murder and tyranny and constitutes a violation of the Declaration and the Fifth Amendment. The HHS mandate violates not only the unalienable rights to life and liberty of the innocent preborn, but also the unalienable right to liberty of the American people, i.e., their freedom to act in accord with the moral law and with their religious beliefs; therefore, it is both murder and tyranny and constitutes a violation of the Declaration, the First Amendment and the Fifth Amendment.
Abortion is clearly gravely immoral, so the case for refusing to cooperate in it is pretty clear-cut. But would a secular nonprofit or business owner have the right to object to providing artificial contraceptives on strictly moral grounds? The answer is yes, and here’s one good reason: Studies prove that many birth control pills act as de facto abortifacients—instead of preventing the conception of a child altogether, they merely prevent a newly conceived child from implanting in its mother’s uterus, resulting in its abortion. Thus a secular nonprofit or business owner may rightly refuse to provide artificial contraceptives to employees on the ground that this would make him or her complicit in the grave moral evil of abortion.
But even if artificial contraceptives did not behave like abortion-inducing drugs, there would still be another argument for a secular nonprofit or business owner to justify withholding them from his or her employees: The use of artificial contraception by married couples is gravely immoral. Non-Catholics may object that this is exclusively a doctrine of the Catholic Church, not a tenet of the universal moral law. However, it is worth remembering that prior to 1920, every single Christian denomination in the United States taught that the use of artificial contraception by married couples was a gravely immoral practice. In doing so, they rightly stood alongside the Catholic Church in upholding a key truth of the unchanging law of God. The fact that most Christian churches in America no longer teach this, and the fact that most Americans who object to the use of artificial contraception within marriage are now Catholic, does not change the truth of the moral law. It merely demonstrates that only the Catholic Church has continued to faithfully proclaim the truth of the immorality of artificial birth control for use by married couples. If something is immoral it is immoral for everyone of all times, regardless of their religious faith (or lack thereof) and regardless of whether certain churches teach the truth of it or not.
The mission of civil government is to protect the God-given rights of its citizens and to promote the common good of society. Religion and morality are powerful allies in achieving both of these objectives. They are what George Washington referred to as “indispensable supports” of our nation’s liberty, the essential foundations of human society. Atop this foundation of religion and morality, the traditional family is the essential basic unit of human society, the place where new human life is welcomed and nourished and where religious and moral values as well as civic duties are inculcated in the next generation of American citizens. Government has a solemn duty to respect religion, morality and the family and to avoid making any policies that would threaten their wellbeing. A government that dares to attack religion, morality, or the family is attacking the very foundations of human society. The Obama administration has dared to attack all three of these foundations of our republic by issuing a law that violates religious freedom, promotes immorality, and discourages families from welcoming new human life into their midst.
Our nation’s founders prophetically warned that the United States would not long endure without the twin pillars of religion and morality, that is, faith in God and adherence to his moral law. If the people of a nation don’t believe that human rights—especially the rights to life and liberty—come from God, then those rights will be perceived as coming from the state and the state will claim the authority to define their limits and to give or take away those rights as it sees fit. And if people don’t believe that it is morally wrong to deprive an innocent person of his or her right to life or liberty, then human life and liberty will not be respected.
Unfortunately, religion and morality mean nothing to the Obama administration. Its healthcare mandate and other radical policies are grounded in the dangerous philosophy of radical secularism, which is the antithesis of everything our nation’s founders believed and did. The central idea of this philosophy is that human society and politics are better off without God and without the constraints of an unchanging moral law. Unlike today’s radical secularists, those few of our nation’s founders who were nonreligious men were not at all hostile to religion. Benjamin Franklin did not refuse to sign the Declaration of Independence because it mentioned or referred to God in several places. On the contrary, the nonreligious founders warmly supported and encouraged the public exercise of religion, recognizing its key importance to the welfare of the nation. With its outright rejection of religion and moral absolutes, radical secularism is a recipe for national disaster, grimly exemplified in totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Maoist China.
Despite the claims of the Obama administration, the HHS mandate has nothing to do with looking after the health of the American public, and it makes no sense whatsoever when viewed from that standpoint. For one thing, with this law the federal government is unnecessarily forcing health insurers to include coverage of an over-the-counter drug that is already inexpensive and widely available. Those who do not object to the use of artificial contraceptives within marriage as immoral can easily purchase them at the nearest drugstore for the price of a small bag of dog food. For another thing, giving women drugs to kill their unborn children is not caring for the health of either mothers or preborn infants, and giving people artificial contraceptives (many of which are de facto abortifacients) and surgical sterilization procedures so that they can’t have children is not health care either. None of these so-called “preventive services for women” are necessary or even beneficial to the health and well-being of American women; on the contrary, they are unnecessary and harmful to both. The negative effects of abortion on the physical, mental and emotional health and well-being of women are now well documented: cancer, pregnancy complications, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety, depression, guilt feelings, and suicide. Furthermore, artificial contraceptives have been shown to be harmful to the natural environment; their chemical waste byproducts pollute our nation’s water and soil and end up contaminating our food supply, which also degrades our health. Seen objectively, the HHS order is an irrational and self-destructive national policy of population control: By helping American women to not bear children, it places the future of our entire nation at risk. Leaving aside for the moment all considerations of morality, religious liberty, and constitutionality, these facts alone would render the “healthcare” mandate a grossly irresponsible, foolhardy and unethical decree of the federal government.
So if the HHS mandate is not about health care, what it is about? The answer is: money. The mandate is driven by powerful corporate interests—specifically the abortion, pharmaceutical, and insurance industries—which stand to profit immensely from legally mandated consumption of their products. Unfortunately, these wealthy and influential corporate giants are better represented in Washington, D.C. than the American people themselves are. They have bribed the Obama administration to give them exactly what they want—and they will do whatever it takes to ensure that the “healthcare” law remains firmly in place, no matter how destructive it is to our country.
To summarize: what is wrong with the HHS mandate?
1. It is unpopular. The HHS mandate is being imposed on our nation by Washington bureaucrats in the face of massive and sustained opposition from the American people. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, which gives the Obama administration the authority to issue the HHS mandate, was rammed through Congress and signed into law by President Obama despite the vociferous and well-founded objections of a large majority of his constituents that it failed to adequately protect their moral conscience rights and religious freedoms. Polls taken from 2009 up to today have consistently registered two-thirds of Americans as strongly opposed to ObamaCare, which makes it the most controversial and unpopular reform legislation in American history.
2. It is unjust. Never before in U.S. history has the federal government enacted a law that forces people to violate their moral consciences and religious precepts. Such compulsion is unjust because it infringes on the basic human rights to act in accord with the moral law and with one’s religious faith.
3. It is unconstitutional. The HHS mandate violates our First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion as well as the Fifth Amendment rights of unborn and born Americans not to be deprived of life or liberty, respectively, without due process of law.
4. It is immoral. It is one thing and bad enough for a government to legalize a gravely immoral act such as abortion. However, it is another thing and far worse for a government to legally compel its subjects to violate the moral law. No government has the right to order certain people to help other people do gravely immoral things such as murder their preborn children or render themselves infertile. Yet this is exactly what the federal government under the Obama administration is doing with the HHS mandate: forcing American citizens to participate in the gravely immoral acts of abortion, contraception, and sterilization.
5. It is an attack on religion, morality, and the family—the three basic pillars of human society and national life.
6. It is grounded in the dangerous philosophy of radical secularism, the idea that God and the moral law must be expelled from public life.
7. It is unnecessary. Abortion is not health care, and artificial contraceptives are already inexpensive and widely available for those who do not object to their use.
8. It is destructive to the public health. Abortion is harmful to the health of women, and artificial contraceptives generate toxic waste.
9. It is irresponsible. Preventing women en masse from having children is a recipe for national suicide.
10. It is driven by corporate greed. At bottom, the HHS mandate is nothing other than pork barrel for the abortion, pharmaceutical, and insurance industries.
Since announcing this high-handed and unprecedented “healthcare” directive over a year ago, the Obama administration has utterly failed to grant American religious institutions and business owners the basic freedom to act in accordance with their moral convictions and religious beliefs. The two HHS “compromises” presented thus far, with their narrow “exemptions” and dubious “accommodations,” are mere facades, totally devoid of genuine protections for the religious liberties and conscience rights of the American people. They’re carefully calculated political gestures designed to give the appearance of compromise and intended to weaken public resistance to a law that is immoral, unjust, and unconstitutional—a law that President Obama and his tyrannical accomplices have foisted on our nation without our consent, a law that they have no intention of rescinding or of substantially altering to comply with the First and Fifth Amendments.
The HHS mandate has been and continues to be loudly decried as an attack on religious liberty and the First Amendment, which it certainly is. But even more fundamentally, it is an attack on the moral law and on our right to act in accordance with that law. Perhaps, in our response as Catholic American citizens to the Obama administration’s radical anti-life policy, too much emphasis is being placed on the religious liberty and legal aspects of the issue and not enough on the moral and human rights aspects. The core of the issue is that the mandate forces American employers to purchase and distribute to their employees things that are gravely immoral for use either by pregnant women or by married couples. As Catholics, we need to articulate a more coherent defense of the moral law and of our right to act in accordance with it—defending principles that we hold in common with other religious believers as well as with many atheists and agnostics—in order to combat the insidious propaganda of the Obama administration more effectively.
The HHS mandate is an immoral and unjust law; therefore, we the people of the United States have not only the right but the moral duty to refuse to obey it—and to work for its full reversal. It’s not enough to merely demand further exemptions from the mandate; this approach is inherently flawed because it implies tacit acceptance of an unacceptable law. For the reasons given in this article, the so-called “healthcare” mandate in principle is intrinsically, profoundly and irredeemably flawed, and because of that it must be completely overturned. We must not allow ourselves to become discouraged by the obstacles we face in achieving this necessary goal. We must not give in to a subtle defeatist mentality and cowardly surrender to the mandate as though it were somehow irreversible. Such a dangerous and evil law cannot stand for long without wreaking tremendous havoc on our nation. We the people of the United States must keep up the pressure on the Obama administration to revoke this terrible law—and if it refuses to do so, we must use our heads when we next go to vote and select responsible leaders who will protect and defend our God-given unalienable rights to life and liberty, so that we will once again be “one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
Copyright © 2013 Justin D. Soutar. All rights reserved.
Monday, December 10, 2012
Election 2012: What Happened?
by Justin Soutar
December 10, 2012
Like many other Americans, I was taken by surprise and deeply disappointed when Barack Obama was re-elected President of the United States. For several months prior to the election, I had been seriously expecting Republican challenger Mitt Romney to unseat President Obama. I envisioned the latter as the Jimmy Carter of 2012, a sitting duck just waiting to be blown out of the water by the Ronald Reagan of 2012. And I wasn’t the only one: other, more seasoned political observers than I such as noted libertarian Wayne Allyn Root were also predicting a landslide Romney victory, and for the same reasons I was. We noted that Barack Obama has presided over the worst economic recession since the Great Depression, and history shows that no incumbent president wins re-election amidst an economic crisis (take Herbert Hoover, for example). Furthermore, President Obama has utterly failed to deliver on his 2008 campaign promise to help the average struggling American in these difficult economic times. Rather, under his administration the middle class has continued shrinking; unemployment rates have been double to triple what they were during the Bush administration; the gap between rich and poor has grown to unseemly proportions; and the number of Americans in poverty has climbed from 12 to 14 percent.
Meanwhile, President Obama’s rampant fiscal irresponsibility, with massive spending contributing to an out-of-control national debt, has contributed further to his negative image in the minds of many Americans. In 2010 he and his Democratic cohorts in the U.S. House and Senate forced on our country the infamous $1.2 trillion health care reform law known as Obamacare, the most expensive and controversial reform legislation in American history, which sent President Obama’s approval ratings plunging into the 40s and resulted in a spectacular Tea Party victory in the 2010 midterm elections in which Republicans regained control of the House of Representatives, increased their strength in the Senate, and swept governorships across the nation.
The Tea Party movement succeeded in focusing public attention on President Obama as the most radically pro-abortion president in American history at a time when a majority of Americans identified themselves as pro-life; it also raised the suspicions that Obamacare would mandate “abortion coverage” and fail to sufficiently protect the conscience rights of health care workers, employers and insurance carriers who refused to be involved in abortion or contraception. In January of 2012, our worst fears were realized with the advent of the HHS mandate, which forces all businesses and charitable organizations that serve the general public to cover or dole out immoral “preventive services for women” in violation of the First Amendment. At the time, I felt that this flagrant attack on the religious liberties and conscience rights of the American people would seal Obama’s fate as a one-term president and carry the Tea Party to a Republican landslide in November of 2012. Judging by its remarkable performance in 2010 and the outrageous behavior of the Obama administration since then, I reasonably expected the Republican Party to take full control of Washington in this election. That didn’t happen. Why not?
A combination of related factors are to blame for the results of this election. The most significant (and unfortunate) factor is that the Catholic vote went the wrong way: by a margin of 50 to 48 percent—the same margin as the general electorate—Catholic voters chose four more years of President Obama in open violation of clear and consistent teaching from their own bishops against voting for a pro-abortion candidate. It would appear that half of Catholic voters don’t even listen to their Church leaders or practice their faith in the voting booth when it comes to the extremely serious matter of the murder of millions upon millions of the innocent unborn. Shame on those so-called “Catholics” who voted for Obama. They will have a lot to answer for come Judgment Day. The bishops have been very clear that the right to life of the innocent unborn human being is the most fundamental voting issue at stake in our country today and that voting for a pro-abortion candidate is a gravely immoral act that makes one complicit in the evil of abortion. For the second presidential election in a row, the better part of the Catholic electorate has ignored the voice of its religious leaders and deliberately chosen to collaborate with Barack Obama’s radically pro-abortion agenda.
What’s even more unfathomable is that Catholics voted to re-elect an administration that has declared open war on their Church and the Constitution by passing a law that forces Catholic institutions to provide contraception, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs in violation of Catholic moral teaching and the First Amendment. As with the issue of abortion, our Catholic bishops have spoken out clearly, forcefully and consistently on the issue of religious liberty, but it appears that many Catholics have been listening more to the propaganda dished out by the Obama administration than to the message of their own Church hierarchy. A poll taken in mid-2012 showed that a majority of Catholics—mainly those who don’t fulfill their obligation to attend Sunday Mass each week—were actually oblivious to the clash between the Obama administration and the Catholic Church over the HHS mandate, and had heard little or nothing about the bishops’ nationwide religious liberty campaign. Even if these non-churchgoing Catholics knew about this particular issue, polls suggest that they probably would not be too concerned about it because for years these same Catholics have been using artificial contraception in violation of Church teaching. A profound crisis of faith has infected the American Catholic Church, and it is now showing up in the direction our nation is moving. As the great Catholic preacher Father John Corapi used to remind us, immorality is un-American and a threat to national security. The only thing worse than immorality is when a Catholic supports or participates in it. Catholics must stop betraying their religion and indulging in such scandalous behavior. They need to get their act together and start forming their consciences properly and start voting their faith in unison—not only for the salvation of their own souls, but for the wellbeing of their Church and the good of their country. Catholics who don’t want to vote pro-life or stop using artificial contraception should either repent and change their ways or leave the Church and quit pretending to be Catholic.
On a related note, I think it was smart of the devil to take Father Corapi out of action well ahead of this presidential election. His defection to the Evil One has been a tremendous loss for the Church in America and for our country in general. As a popular and effective Catholic preacher who reached millions through the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN), he would have been at his best during the 2012 presidential campaign season, loudly decrying the HHS contraceptive and abortifacient mandate and the direct attack on the Catholic Church which it represents, and rallying the Catholic faithful to defend the rights to life and religious liberty on which their nation was founded. He would have considerably amplified the voice of the bishops on the fundamental issues of abortion and religious liberty and made more Catholics fully aware of the choice they were facing in this election. Had he remained faithful to God and to his calling, I think the election result would have been quite different.
I can also point an accusing finger at myself in one respect. As a Catholic author, I could have—and should have—written more about abortion, religious liberty, and President Obama’s radically secularist agenda in order to help shape public opinion in the months prior to the election. I was busy working on a book and other projects, but I should have made more time to write about these current issues of such momentous importance to our Church and our nation.
Moving on to another factor that influenced the election, it seems that Americans in general actually like President Obama and are not as dissatisfied with his performance as we imagined, judging by fairly steady approval ratings of around 50 percent over the last four years. Despite his radically secularist agenda and grossly irresponsible behavior, President Obama manages to convey a respectable image of a president who is doing his best in spite of everything. With the mainstream media firmly on his side, the propaganda power and communication skills of the Obama administration have proven effective. People believe what President Obama tells them on TV, whether it is true or not, because they like him personally. As the old saying goes, “If you tell a lie long enough, people will believe it.” So when Obama and Biden kept lying that the HHS mandate does not force religious institutions to violate their moral convictions or that Obamacare does not really raise taxes by a trillion dollars, people started to believe those lies because they liked and trusted their elected officials who were telling them.
Another factor in this election that we just hinted at was the incumbent advantage. When people like and trust their familiar elected officials, they tend to re-elect them, which is what they did last month. When a new and unfamiliar candidate breaks onto the scene, be it Bob Dole in 1996 or John Kerry in 2004 or Mitt Romney in 2012, people are a bit suspicious. They know that they like and trust their current president, but they’re not sure about this challenger guy who claims he can do a better job. Why elect a new president when you’re happy with the one you have now? Furthermore, Barack Obama significantly augmented his incumbent advantage by spending a record-breaking one billion dollars on advertising for his reelection campaign. Romney spent nearly as much on advertising but Obama had the incumbent advantage.
Another factor in the election outcome was that the economy is not as bad as we sometimes make it out to be. We need to keep things in perspective. Even with the serious economic issues noted above as well as underemployment and the precipitous drop in median household income over the last four years, the average American in 2012 is still much wealthier than the average American during the 1930s, and 8 to 12 percent unemployment pales in comparison to the 30 percent unemployment that America suffered during the Great Depression. Nine out of ten Americans currently have a job; furthermore, most Americans eat three meals a day, have plenty of clothes to wear, live in heated and air conditioned homes with running hot water and electricity, and have a washer and dryer, a dishwasher, a TV (with Obama on it), a stereo, a computer, an Internet connection, a cell phone, and a car or two in the garage. Life is pretty good for most of us, and when we’re comfortable, we don’t want change. As Thomas Jefferson famously wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable.” Most Americans apparently feel that the current economic crisis is not insufferable, so they have opted to maintain the status quo. The American middle class is “doing fine,” says President Obama on the TV tube, and many people seem to agree.
Part of what did in Mitt Romney was his campaign strategy of focusing mainly on the economy. This was the same strategy employed by John McCain in 2008 and it didn’t work for him either. Romney’s plan to foster job creation and economic growth through free enterprise and opportunity instead of big-government bailouts, taxation and redistribution certainly did resonate with and appeal to many people. However, Romney failed to take into account the relatively contented nature of the American middle class or the fact that the economy was not a serious enough issue in enough people’s minds to sufficiently motivate them to replace President Obama. I think Romney should have focused primarily on the great moral issues of our time such as abortion, religious liberty, traditional marriage, and the radical secularist takeover of our country. His stances on these fundamental issues were clearly distinguished from those of Obama, but as a presidential candidate he should have articulated them more clearly and communicated them more effectively. Taking a strong stance on these moral issues and speaking out strongly about them makes good sense even from the strictly political point of view. Most Americans are pro-life, religious, Christian, and see marriage exclusively as the union of a man and a woman. Focusing on the right to life of the unborn helped sweep the Tea Party to victory in 2010. Despite raising much less money than Romney, Rick Santorum did well in the Republican presidential primary contest because he passionately defended the rights of the unborn while Romney was passionately defending his business career.
Americans know instinctively that abortion is morally wrong. It has been a uniformly negative experience for all those involved in it. It has hurt the lives of tens of millions of women, many of whom are now fervent pro-life advocates. The pro-life movement in America is now very strong and continues to grow stronger. Abortion rates are down to what they were in the 1970s and continue to decline while voters continue to enact additional state restrictions on abortion. Romney should have taken advantage of all these facts and tapped into the enormous reserve of political capital hidden in the pro-life movement and built his campaign on that, even more than President George W. Bush did. He should have spoken passionately about the horror and magnitude of the abortion holocaust, in which more than 55 million innocent Americans have been legally slaughtered over the past forty years since Roe v. Wade. He should have reminded Americans incessantly of Barack Obama’s criminal record on abortion as an Illinois state senator, as a U.S. senator and as president, and drawn attention to the unholy alliance between Planned Parenthood and the Obama administration. He should have reminded people of the draconian Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA) that President Obama promised to sign upon taking office in 2009; FOCA would have done away with all state restrictions on abortion and compelled all physicians to perform abortions (among other things), and it was only defeated by a massive outcry from the American people. He could have also fostered discussion on the broader negative impact of abortion on American society and the economy, from single-parent families and low marriage rates among young people to economic stagnation, and how things might be different if those 55 million Americans murdered in their mother’s wombs were alive today. And he should have billed himself unapologetically as the pro-life candidate for president who would work aggressively to end the scourge of legalized abortion in America forever. To his credit, Romney did pledge to defund Planned Parenthood and declared his support for overturning Roe v. Wade—two things President Bush never ventured. But had Romney given the right to life of the innocent human being in the womb the center of attention it deserves as the most important issue facing America today, I think he would have won the election.
But perhaps this was not to be expected of Mitt Romney, a wealthy businessman and politician from Massachusetts with a somewhat weak record on the crucial moral and social issues. Here we come to another reason why President Obama was re-elected: his challenger was a somewhat liberal candidate from the American political establishment who failed to present a credible conservative alternative to Barack Obama. People didn’t trust Romney and weren’t quite sure about him because of his mixed record. Had the Republicans nominated a strong candidate like Rick Santorum with impeccable conservative credentials, he would have soundly defeated Barack Obama—no question about it.
Romney was not a genuine Tea Party candidate, although we wishfully tried to make him so and although he tried to be so for us. He might have partially defunded Planned Parenthood, repealed the HHS mandate, got the economy going again, and done a few other good things for our country. However, he would not have significantly changed the dynamics of the deeply entrenched and deeply corrupt Washington political establishment, comprised of movers and shakers from Planned Parenthood and homosexual rights activists to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and insurance industries to the big multinational corporations that run Wall Street.
That establishment—allied with the mainstream media—is what promoted Romney’s candidacy and defeated the attempts of genuine conservative candidates like Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum to win the Republican presidential nomination. Such candidates, although more favored by the American people, would have upset the D.C. status quo too much. Romney bagged the Republican nomination, not because he was the most qualified candidate for president, but because he spent the most money on advertising and because he was the least threatening candidate to the Washington establishment. Romney tried to solve his conservative problem while remaining friendly with the establishment by picking a true conservative running mate. But that strategy of compromise didn’t work for him, just as it didn’t work for John McCain. Romney was Obama’s saving grace—the opposition candidate whose nomination would help assure his own re-election. Deep down this past summer, I suspected that the establishment wanted Romney nominated, and that his nomination would probably lead to a close presidential contest in which Obama would just squeak by. But I refused to listen to my hunch because I was strongly biased against Obama and willfully blind to the realities of the American political landscape as suggested by the polling data.
Ultimately, the reality of the 2012 election came down to three things: communication, compromise, and corruption. President Obama won re-election because he is a great communicator and because he’s in bed with corrupt special interests in Washington. Romney lost the election because he failed to communicate himself as well as Obama did, but he won the Republican nomination over his conservative rivals because the corrupt establishment helped him to do so. And the Tea Party movement compromised its core values and became complicit in the very corruption it decries by abandoning true conservative presidential contenders and surrendering to Romney as the only alternative to Obama.
Communication problems and Washington corruption also conspired to prevent the Tea Party from taking over the federal government in this election. The party allowed the economy to distract it from vigorously defending the right to life, traditional marriage and our nation’s fundamental Christian identity and from effectively communicating to the American people the outrage of the Obama administration’s assault on religious liberty and the First Amendment represented by the HHS mandate.
Our nation’s Founding Fathers, especially George Washington, warned that a national political party system would become a tool of corrupt special interests. Unfortunately, that is exactly what has happened. We now have corrupt private interests ruling our country through the Senate and the White House for their own private benefit instead of honest public servants who govern responsibly for the sake of the common good. The Tea Party movement came into existence precisely as a result of this situation, but it must become much stronger and more courageous if it is to achieve its goal of restoring honest and responsible government to both houses of Congress and the White House.
The corrupt Washington establishment will certainly continue doing all in its power to keep the Tea Party from gaining full control of the federal government because this would spell its own death sentence. However, the 2010 elections demonstrated that this corruption is not an insuperable obstacle to a robust popular movement whose leaders communicate effectively on the moral issues affecting our country. The Tea Party can still achieve its goal—but its future depends on whether or not it learns from the mistakes it made in 2012. If it hopes to bounce back from this defeat to victory in future elections, the Tea Party must do the following:
1. It must give pride of place to the all-important moral issues by which our nation stands or falls—especially abortion, religious liberty, marriage, and radical secularism—and it must articulate and communicate its positions on them clearly, consistently, passionately, and effectively.
2. It must remain committed to its goals of ending legalized abortion, repealing the HHS mandate and all of Obamacare, protecting traditional marriage and the nuclear family, restoring our nation’s fundamental Christian identity, and returning honest and responsible leadership to the legislative and executive branches of the federal government.
3. It must remain committed to the traditional Republican ethos of limited government, low taxes, a balanced budget, a strong national defense, and promoting a favorable climate for small businesses.
4. It must remain seriously committed to the long-term goals of abolishing the Federal Reserve, the IRS and income taxes, and restoring the value of our currency through a return to the gold standard on which our nation thrived for more than 150 years.
5. It must return to the “city on a hill” concept of the Pilgrims and Founding Fathers, i.e., to spreading freedom and democracy by the power of our example at home rather than by the force of arms abroad. In line with this principle, it must reject costly foreign wars of national liberation (e.g. Afghanistan) and aggressive “preemptive” wars to eliminate nonexistent WMD programs (e.g. Iraq and Iran)—both of which are driven by corrupt special interests—and commit to bringing all of our troops home and keeping them home to defend our coastlines and borders.
6. It must remain faithful to the above stated core principles—above all to the moral ones in items 1 and 2—and firmly resist the temptation to compromise any of them for short-term political gain. This means it must not back establishment candidates or proposals that are at odds with any of its core principles. This also means that it must clearly distinguish itself from the corrupt Republican/Democratic political establishment currently in control of Washington.
This election has certainly taught us some painful lessons: Moral issues go in first place. Communication is critical. Corruption controls Washington. Compromise is the short road to ruin. And wishful thinking is no substitute for reality. We’d do well to keep these lessons in mind when the next election seasons roll around in 2014 and 2016.
Copyright © 2012 Justin D. Soutar. All rights reserved.
December 10, 2012
Like many other Americans, I was taken by surprise and deeply disappointed when Barack Obama was re-elected President of the United States. For several months prior to the election, I had been seriously expecting Republican challenger Mitt Romney to unseat President Obama. I envisioned the latter as the Jimmy Carter of 2012, a sitting duck just waiting to be blown out of the water by the Ronald Reagan of 2012. And I wasn’t the only one: other, more seasoned political observers than I such as noted libertarian Wayne Allyn Root were also predicting a landslide Romney victory, and for the same reasons I was. We noted that Barack Obama has presided over the worst economic recession since the Great Depression, and history shows that no incumbent president wins re-election amidst an economic crisis (take Herbert Hoover, for example). Furthermore, President Obama has utterly failed to deliver on his 2008 campaign promise to help the average struggling American in these difficult economic times. Rather, under his administration the middle class has continued shrinking; unemployment rates have been double to triple what they were during the Bush administration; the gap between rich and poor has grown to unseemly proportions; and the number of Americans in poverty has climbed from 12 to 14 percent.
Meanwhile, President Obama’s rampant fiscal irresponsibility, with massive spending contributing to an out-of-control national debt, has contributed further to his negative image in the minds of many Americans. In 2010 he and his Democratic cohorts in the U.S. House and Senate forced on our country the infamous $1.2 trillion health care reform law known as Obamacare, the most expensive and controversial reform legislation in American history, which sent President Obama’s approval ratings plunging into the 40s and resulted in a spectacular Tea Party victory in the 2010 midterm elections in which Republicans regained control of the House of Representatives, increased their strength in the Senate, and swept governorships across the nation.
The Tea Party movement succeeded in focusing public attention on President Obama as the most radically pro-abortion president in American history at a time when a majority of Americans identified themselves as pro-life; it also raised the suspicions that Obamacare would mandate “abortion coverage” and fail to sufficiently protect the conscience rights of health care workers, employers and insurance carriers who refused to be involved in abortion or contraception. In January of 2012, our worst fears were realized with the advent of the HHS mandate, which forces all businesses and charitable organizations that serve the general public to cover or dole out immoral “preventive services for women” in violation of the First Amendment. At the time, I felt that this flagrant attack on the religious liberties and conscience rights of the American people would seal Obama’s fate as a one-term president and carry the Tea Party to a Republican landslide in November of 2012. Judging by its remarkable performance in 2010 and the outrageous behavior of the Obama administration since then, I reasonably expected the Republican Party to take full control of Washington in this election. That didn’t happen. Why not?
A combination of related factors are to blame for the results of this election. The most significant (and unfortunate) factor is that the Catholic vote went the wrong way: by a margin of 50 to 48 percent—the same margin as the general electorate—Catholic voters chose four more years of President Obama in open violation of clear and consistent teaching from their own bishops against voting for a pro-abortion candidate. It would appear that half of Catholic voters don’t even listen to their Church leaders or practice their faith in the voting booth when it comes to the extremely serious matter of the murder of millions upon millions of the innocent unborn. Shame on those so-called “Catholics” who voted for Obama. They will have a lot to answer for come Judgment Day. The bishops have been very clear that the right to life of the innocent unborn human being is the most fundamental voting issue at stake in our country today and that voting for a pro-abortion candidate is a gravely immoral act that makes one complicit in the evil of abortion. For the second presidential election in a row, the better part of the Catholic electorate has ignored the voice of its religious leaders and deliberately chosen to collaborate with Barack Obama’s radically pro-abortion agenda.
What’s even more unfathomable is that Catholics voted to re-elect an administration that has declared open war on their Church and the Constitution by passing a law that forces Catholic institutions to provide contraception, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs in violation of Catholic moral teaching and the First Amendment. As with the issue of abortion, our Catholic bishops have spoken out clearly, forcefully and consistently on the issue of religious liberty, but it appears that many Catholics have been listening more to the propaganda dished out by the Obama administration than to the message of their own Church hierarchy. A poll taken in mid-2012 showed that a majority of Catholics—mainly those who don’t fulfill their obligation to attend Sunday Mass each week—were actually oblivious to the clash between the Obama administration and the Catholic Church over the HHS mandate, and had heard little or nothing about the bishops’ nationwide religious liberty campaign. Even if these non-churchgoing Catholics knew about this particular issue, polls suggest that they probably would not be too concerned about it because for years these same Catholics have been using artificial contraception in violation of Church teaching. A profound crisis of faith has infected the American Catholic Church, and it is now showing up in the direction our nation is moving. As the great Catholic preacher Father John Corapi used to remind us, immorality is un-American and a threat to national security. The only thing worse than immorality is when a Catholic supports or participates in it. Catholics must stop betraying their religion and indulging in such scandalous behavior. They need to get their act together and start forming their consciences properly and start voting their faith in unison—not only for the salvation of their own souls, but for the wellbeing of their Church and the good of their country. Catholics who don’t want to vote pro-life or stop using artificial contraception should either repent and change their ways or leave the Church and quit pretending to be Catholic.
On a related note, I think it was smart of the devil to take Father Corapi out of action well ahead of this presidential election. His defection to the Evil One has been a tremendous loss for the Church in America and for our country in general. As a popular and effective Catholic preacher who reached millions through the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN), he would have been at his best during the 2012 presidential campaign season, loudly decrying the HHS contraceptive and abortifacient mandate and the direct attack on the Catholic Church which it represents, and rallying the Catholic faithful to defend the rights to life and religious liberty on which their nation was founded. He would have considerably amplified the voice of the bishops on the fundamental issues of abortion and religious liberty and made more Catholics fully aware of the choice they were facing in this election. Had he remained faithful to God and to his calling, I think the election result would have been quite different.
I can also point an accusing finger at myself in one respect. As a Catholic author, I could have—and should have—written more about abortion, religious liberty, and President Obama’s radically secularist agenda in order to help shape public opinion in the months prior to the election. I was busy working on a book and other projects, but I should have made more time to write about these current issues of such momentous importance to our Church and our nation.
Moving on to another factor that influenced the election, it seems that Americans in general actually like President Obama and are not as dissatisfied with his performance as we imagined, judging by fairly steady approval ratings of around 50 percent over the last four years. Despite his radically secularist agenda and grossly irresponsible behavior, President Obama manages to convey a respectable image of a president who is doing his best in spite of everything. With the mainstream media firmly on his side, the propaganda power and communication skills of the Obama administration have proven effective. People believe what President Obama tells them on TV, whether it is true or not, because they like him personally. As the old saying goes, “If you tell a lie long enough, people will believe it.” So when Obama and Biden kept lying that the HHS mandate does not force religious institutions to violate their moral convictions or that Obamacare does not really raise taxes by a trillion dollars, people started to believe those lies because they liked and trusted their elected officials who were telling them.
Another factor in this election that we just hinted at was the incumbent advantage. When people like and trust their familiar elected officials, they tend to re-elect them, which is what they did last month. When a new and unfamiliar candidate breaks onto the scene, be it Bob Dole in 1996 or John Kerry in 2004 or Mitt Romney in 2012, people are a bit suspicious. They know that they like and trust their current president, but they’re not sure about this challenger guy who claims he can do a better job. Why elect a new president when you’re happy with the one you have now? Furthermore, Barack Obama significantly augmented his incumbent advantage by spending a record-breaking one billion dollars on advertising for his reelection campaign. Romney spent nearly as much on advertising but Obama had the incumbent advantage.
Another factor in the election outcome was that the economy is not as bad as we sometimes make it out to be. We need to keep things in perspective. Even with the serious economic issues noted above as well as underemployment and the precipitous drop in median household income over the last four years, the average American in 2012 is still much wealthier than the average American during the 1930s, and 8 to 12 percent unemployment pales in comparison to the 30 percent unemployment that America suffered during the Great Depression. Nine out of ten Americans currently have a job; furthermore, most Americans eat three meals a day, have plenty of clothes to wear, live in heated and air conditioned homes with running hot water and electricity, and have a washer and dryer, a dishwasher, a TV (with Obama on it), a stereo, a computer, an Internet connection, a cell phone, and a car or two in the garage. Life is pretty good for most of us, and when we’re comfortable, we don’t want change. As Thomas Jefferson famously wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable.” Most Americans apparently feel that the current economic crisis is not insufferable, so they have opted to maintain the status quo. The American middle class is “doing fine,” says President Obama on the TV tube, and many people seem to agree.
Part of what did in Mitt Romney was his campaign strategy of focusing mainly on the economy. This was the same strategy employed by John McCain in 2008 and it didn’t work for him either. Romney’s plan to foster job creation and economic growth through free enterprise and opportunity instead of big-government bailouts, taxation and redistribution certainly did resonate with and appeal to many people. However, Romney failed to take into account the relatively contented nature of the American middle class or the fact that the economy was not a serious enough issue in enough people’s minds to sufficiently motivate them to replace President Obama. I think Romney should have focused primarily on the great moral issues of our time such as abortion, religious liberty, traditional marriage, and the radical secularist takeover of our country. His stances on these fundamental issues were clearly distinguished from those of Obama, but as a presidential candidate he should have articulated them more clearly and communicated them more effectively. Taking a strong stance on these moral issues and speaking out strongly about them makes good sense even from the strictly political point of view. Most Americans are pro-life, religious, Christian, and see marriage exclusively as the union of a man and a woman. Focusing on the right to life of the unborn helped sweep the Tea Party to victory in 2010. Despite raising much less money than Romney, Rick Santorum did well in the Republican presidential primary contest because he passionately defended the rights of the unborn while Romney was passionately defending his business career.
Americans know instinctively that abortion is morally wrong. It has been a uniformly negative experience for all those involved in it. It has hurt the lives of tens of millions of women, many of whom are now fervent pro-life advocates. The pro-life movement in America is now very strong and continues to grow stronger. Abortion rates are down to what they were in the 1970s and continue to decline while voters continue to enact additional state restrictions on abortion. Romney should have taken advantage of all these facts and tapped into the enormous reserve of political capital hidden in the pro-life movement and built his campaign on that, even more than President George W. Bush did. He should have spoken passionately about the horror and magnitude of the abortion holocaust, in which more than 55 million innocent Americans have been legally slaughtered over the past forty years since Roe v. Wade. He should have reminded Americans incessantly of Barack Obama’s criminal record on abortion as an Illinois state senator, as a U.S. senator and as president, and drawn attention to the unholy alliance between Planned Parenthood and the Obama administration. He should have reminded people of the draconian Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA) that President Obama promised to sign upon taking office in 2009; FOCA would have done away with all state restrictions on abortion and compelled all physicians to perform abortions (among other things), and it was only defeated by a massive outcry from the American people. He could have also fostered discussion on the broader negative impact of abortion on American society and the economy, from single-parent families and low marriage rates among young people to economic stagnation, and how things might be different if those 55 million Americans murdered in their mother’s wombs were alive today. And he should have billed himself unapologetically as the pro-life candidate for president who would work aggressively to end the scourge of legalized abortion in America forever. To his credit, Romney did pledge to defund Planned Parenthood and declared his support for overturning Roe v. Wade—two things President Bush never ventured. But had Romney given the right to life of the innocent human being in the womb the center of attention it deserves as the most important issue facing America today, I think he would have won the election.
But perhaps this was not to be expected of Mitt Romney, a wealthy businessman and politician from Massachusetts with a somewhat weak record on the crucial moral and social issues. Here we come to another reason why President Obama was re-elected: his challenger was a somewhat liberal candidate from the American political establishment who failed to present a credible conservative alternative to Barack Obama. People didn’t trust Romney and weren’t quite sure about him because of his mixed record. Had the Republicans nominated a strong candidate like Rick Santorum with impeccable conservative credentials, he would have soundly defeated Barack Obama—no question about it.
Romney was not a genuine Tea Party candidate, although we wishfully tried to make him so and although he tried to be so for us. He might have partially defunded Planned Parenthood, repealed the HHS mandate, got the economy going again, and done a few other good things for our country. However, he would not have significantly changed the dynamics of the deeply entrenched and deeply corrupt Washington political establishment, comprised of movers and shakers from Planned Parenthood and homosexual rights activists to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and insurance industries to the big multinational corporations that run Wall Street.
That establishment—allied with the mainstream media—is what promoted Romney’s candidacy and defeated the attempts of genuine conservative candidates like Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum to win the Republican presidential nomination. Such candidates, although more favored by the American people, would have upset the D.C. status quo too much. Romney bagged the Republican nomination, not because he was the most qualified candidate for president, but because he spent the most money on advertising and because he was the least threatening candidate to the Washington establishment. Romney tried to solve his conservative problem while remaining friendly with the establishment by picking a true conservative running mate. But that strategy of compromise didn’t work for him, just as it didn’t work for John McCain. Romney was Obama’s saving grace—the opposition candidate whose nomination would help assure his own re-election. Deep down this past summer, I suspected that the establishment wanted Romney nominated, and that his nomination would probably lead to a close presidential contest in which Obama would just squeak by. But I refused to listen to my hunch because I was strongly biased against Obama and willfully blind to the realities of the American political landscape as suggested by the polling data.
Ultimately, the reality of the 2012 election came down to three things: communication, compromise, and corruption. President Obama won re-election because he is a great communicator and because he’s in bed with corrupt special interests in Washington. Romney lost the election because he failed to communicate himself as well as Obama did, but he won the Republican nomination over his conservative rivals because the corrupt establishment helped him to do so. And the Tea Party movement compromised its core values and became complicit in the very corruption it decries by abandoning true conservative presidential contenders and surrendering to Romney as the only alternative to Obama.
Communication problems and Washington corruption also conspired to prevent the Tea Party from taking over the federal government in this election. The party allowed the economy to distract it from vigorously defending the right to life, traditional marriage and our nation’s fundamental Christian identity and from effectively communicating to the American people the outrage of the Obama administration’s assault on religious liberty and the First Amendment represented by the HHS mandate.
Our nation’s Founding Fathers, especially George Washington, warned that a national political party system would become a tool of corrupt special interests. Unfortunately, that is exactly what has happened. We now have corrupt private interests ruling our country through the Senate and the White House for their own private benefit instead of honest public servants who govern responsibly for the sake of the common good. The Tea Party movement came into existence precisely as a result of this situation, but it must become much stronger and more courageous if it is to achieve its goal of restoring honest and responsible government to both houses of Congress and the White House.
The corrupt Washington establishment will certainly continue doing all in its power to keep the Tea Party from gaining full control of the federal government because this would spell its own death sentence. However, the 2010 elections demonstrated that this corruption is not an insuperable obstacle to a robust popular movement whose leaders communicate effectively on the moral issues affecting our country. The Tea Party can still achieve its goal—but its future depends on whether or not it learns from the mistakes it made in 2012. If it hopes to bounce back from this defeat to victory in future elections, the Tea Party must do the following:
1. It must give pride of place to the all-important moral issues by which our nation stands or falls—especially abortion, religious liberty, marriage, and radical secularism—and it must articulate and communicate its positions on them clearly, consistently, passionately, and effectively.
2. It must remain committed to its goals of ending legalized abortion, repealing the HHS mandate and all of Obamacare, protecting traditional marriage and the nuclear family, restoring our nation’s fundamental Christian identity, and returning honest and responsible leadership to the legislative and executive branches of the federal government.
3. It must remain committed to the traditional Republican ethos of limited government, low taxes, a balanced budget, a strong national defense, and promoting a favorable climate for small businesses.
4. It must remain seriously committed to the long-term goals of abolishing the Federal Reserve, the IRS and income taxes, and restoring the value of our currency through a return to the gold standard on which our nation thrived for more than 150 years.
5. It must return to the “city on a hill” concept of the Pilgrims and Founding Fathers, i.e., to spreading freedom and democracy by the power of our example at home rather than by the force of arms abroad. In line with this principle, it must reject costly foreign wars of national liberation (e.g. Afghanistan) and aggressive “preemptive” wars to eliminate nonexistent WMD programs (e.g. Iraq and Iran)—both of which are driven by corrupt special interests—and commit to bringing all of our troops home and keeping them home to defend our coastlines and borders.
6. It must remain faithful to the above stated core principles—above all to the moral ones in items 1 and 2—and firmly resist the temptation to compromise any of them for short-term political gain. This means it must not back establishment candidates or proposals that are at odds with any of its core principles. This also means that it must clearly distinguish itself from the corrupt Republican/Democratic political establishment currently in control of Washington.
This election has certainly taught us some painful lessons: Moral issues go in first place. Communication is critical. Corruption controls Washington. Compromise is the short road to ruin. And wishful thinking is no substitute for reality. We’d do well to keep these lessons in mind when the next election seasons roll around in 2014 and 2016.
Copyright © 2012 Justin D. Soutar. All rights reserved.
Monday, December 3, 2012
Supreme Betrayal: What the ObamaCare Ruling Means for America
by Justin Soutar
December 3, 2012
On June 28, 2012, in a 5-4 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Obamacare in its entirety. In doing so, the Court allowed an unjust and unconstitutional law to stand, joined the Obama administration in attacking our religious liberties and rights of conscience, and betrayed the American people.
This wasn’t the first time our Supreme Court made a bad decision. In Dred Scott v. Sanford, the Court ruled that slaves were not persons with rights but rather property with no rights. In Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court upheld unjust state segregation laws. More recently, in Roe v. Wade, the Court ruled that women have a “right” to kill their unborn children, resulting in a staggering 55 million innocent Americans being legally deprived of their First Amendment rights to life and liberty over the past forty years.
In each of these three cases, the Supreme Court used a certain rationale based on the Constitution to justify its faulty decision. When we read the written majority opinions in which these rulings were handed down, we’re impressed by their formal tone and struck by how dispassionate, logical, wise, and constitutionally sound they seem to be. Yet however well written and fair to read, these apparently brilliant opinions are all infected with the destructive germ of an erroneous conclusion resulting from one or more incorrect premises.
It’s the same story with National Federation of Independent Business et al v. Sebelius et al. The massive Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA)—passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama in 2010—contains provisions that clearly violate our Constitutionally guaranteed rights to religious freedom as individuals, as religious institutions, and as businesses. In these provisions, the Act authorizes the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to require employers to include contraception, sterilization and abortifacients in health insurance plans for their employees, even if they object to providing such coverage—and even if their employees object to receiving it—on moral or religious grounds. Furthermore, the Act imposes heavy fines on those individuals and entities who refuse to comply with the HHS mandate. This unprecedented mandate is in clear conflict with the First Amendment to our Constitution, which guarantees freedom of religion and prohibits Congress from making any law that would interfere with the free exercise of religion. Recognizing this, the National Federation of Independent Business along with twenty-six state governments and a host of private religious and educational institutions rightly filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration in the U.S. Supreme Court challenging the constitutionality of the HHS mandate. In this case, the minimum duty of the High Court was perfectly clear: to strike down those provisions of the PPACA authorizing the HHS mandate.
Yet after reviewing the Act, the Supreme Court somehow decided that everything within it, including the coercive mandate, is, in fact, “constitutional.” How did it come to this outlandish conclusion? Several erroneous premises were involved. The Commerce Clause of our Constitution, which gives Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce as well as to lay and collect taxes, served as the principal basis of the Court’s flawed ruling. In a nutshell, Chief Justice Roberts argued that the entire PPACA falls within Congressional authority to regulate commerce, and that the fines it imposes on those who refuse to comply with the HHS mandate are a legitimate exercise of Congressional taxing power. As for the mandate itself, the Court made the eye-popping discovery that it does not really violate the First Amendment because it is not really “coercive”: employees and health providers who object to it have a choice between acting against their consciences and paying the fines. The latter two premises are closely related, so we will discuss them together below.
Let’s take the Court’s first premise first: that the whole Affordable Care Act is a legitimate example of Congressional authority to regulate interstate commerce. A casual browse through the Act is sufficient to expose the phoniness of this argument. Its ten Titles, hundreds of sections, 900 pages, and $1,200,000,000,000 (1.2 trillion dollar) price tag speak of much more than just a few new regulations for the American healthcare industry. The PPACA represents nothing less than a wholesale takeover and transformation of our healthcare system by the federal government. The Act creates 159 new federal offices, essentially doubling the size of the Washington bureaucracy. It combines federal and state governments, health insurance carriers, pharmaceutical industries, healthcare providers and facilities, private charitable organizations, and individual American citizens into a single, seamless, all-encompassing national healthcare system funded by our tax dollars. Through the Act, our government now defines what “acceptable” healthcare coverage is and levies substantial new tax fines on individuals, employers and insurance carriers who fail to purchase or provide “acceptable” health insurance as dictated by the Act (in addition to the aforementioned fines for violating the HHS mandate). To say that the PPACA falls entirely within legitimate Congressional authority to regulate commerce is pure sophistry and insulting to the intelligence of the American people.
However, the most serious error in the Court’s decision lies in the two related premises that the fines for noncompliance with the HHS mandate are a legitimate exercise of Congressional taxing power, and that the PPACA does not really force employees to violate their religious liberties or conscience rights because they can simply choose to pay the fines if they object to obeying the law. To say that an employer has a choice between obeying the law or paying huge fines is akin to saying that a driver has a choice between obeying the motor vehicle laws or paying traffic fines. The idea that the person in either situation is really free to choose between two equally legitimate options is ludicrous. A fine is not simply a viable alternative to observance of a law; it is meant to ensure compliance with the law and to deter and punish noncompliance. We are only really free to choose to do what is right. If a law is just, the only right choice is to obey it. Under the new healthcare law, however, employers who refuse to furnish their employees with contraceptives, sterilizations and abortifacients for moral or religious reasons—as millions of employers all across America have been doing for decades—will suddenly find themselves forced to either a) obey the law and violate their consciences, b) break the law and pay steep fines, or c) go out of business. Those are not free choices; they are choices forced by the new law, which is an unjust law. Sorry Supreme Court, but this is blatant coercion in violation of the First Amendment. No one should be punished under U.S. law for refusing to violate their religious beliefs and moral convictions.
The PPACA is a huge windfall for the declining abortion industry, drug companies, the medical establishment, and the insurance sector. By ruling in favor of ObamaCare, the Supreme Court caved in to pressure from the Obama administration and from the handful of powerful corporate interests backing it, unjustly sacrificing our God-given, Constitutionally protected religious liberties and conscience rights on the altar of those private interests. The High Court abandoned its solemn duty to interpret the law in light of the Constitution and failed to exercise its proper oversight role with respect to the other two branches of government. Furthermore, the Court showed contempt and disregard for the will of the American people by upholding a piece of legislation that a large majority of citizens have consistently opposed from its inception. The infamous ruling clearly demonstrated that a few powerful corporate interests are now largely in control of our federal government and our court system. I can’t help but think of the following Scripture passage from the Book of Wisdom, chapter 6, verses 2 through 5:
Copyright © 2012 Justin D. Soutar. All rights reserved.
December 3, 2012
On June 28, 2012, in a 5-4 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Obamacare in its entirety. In doing so, the Court allowed an unjust and unconstitutional law to stand, joined the Obama administration in attacking our religious liberties and rights of conscience, and betrayed the American people.
This wasn’t the first time our Supreme Court made a bad decision. In Dred Scott v. Sanford, the Court ruled that slaves were not persons with rights but rather property with no rights. In Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court upheld unjust state segregation laws. More recently, in Roe v. Wade, the Court ruled that women have a “right” to kill their unborn children, resulting in a staggering 55 million innocent Americans being legally deprived of their First Amendment rights to life and liberty over the past forty years.
In each of these three cases, the Supreme Court used a certain rationale based on the Constitution to justify its faulty decision. When we read the written majority opinions in which these rulings were handed down, we’re impressed by their formal tone and struck by how dispassionate, logical, wise, and constitutionally sound they seem to be. Yet however well written and fair to read, these apparently brilliant opinions are all infected with the destructive germ of an erroneous conclusion resulting from one or more incorrect premises.
It’s the same story with National Federation of Independent Business et al v. Sebelius et al. The massive Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA)—passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama in 2010—contains provisions that clearly violate our Constitutionally guaranteed rights to religious freedom as individuals, as religious institutions, and as businesses. In these provisions, the Act authorizes the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to require employers to include contraception, sterilization and abortifacients in health insurance plans for their employees, even if they object to providing such coverage—and even if their employees object to receiving it—on moral or religious grounds. Furthermore, the Act imposes heavy fines on those individuals and entities who refuse to comply with the HHS mandate. This unprecedented mandate is in clear conflict with the First Amendment to our Constitution, which guarantees freedom of religion and prohibits Congress from making any law that would interfere with the free exercise of religion. Recognizing this, the National Federation of Independent Business along with twenty-six state governments and a host of private religious and educational institutions rightly filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration in the U.S. Supreme Court challenging the constitutionality of the HHS mandate. In this case, the minimum duty of the High Court was perfectly clear: to strike down those provisions of the PPACA authorizing the HHS mandate.
Yet after reviewing the Act, the Supreme Court somehow decided that everything within it, including the coercive mandate, is, in fact, “constitutional.” How did it come to this outlandish conclusion? Several erroneous premises were involved. The Commerce Clause of our Constitution, which gives Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce as well as to lay and collect taxes, served as the principal basis of the Court’s flawed ruling. In a nutshell, Chief Justice Roberts argued that the entire PPACA falls within Congressional authority to regulate commerce, and that the fines it imposes on those who refuse to comply with the HHS mandate are a legitimate exercise of Congressional taxing power. As for the mandate itself, the Court made the eye-popping discovery that it does not really violate the First Amendment because it is not really “coercive”: employees and health providers who object to it have a choice between acting against their consciences and paying the fines. The latter two premises are closely related, so we will discuss them together below.
Let’s take the Court’s first premise first: that the whole Affordable Care Act is a legitimate example of Congressional authority to regulate interstate commerce. A casual browse through the Act is sufficient to expose the phoniness of this argument. Its ten Titles, hundreds of sections, 900 pages, and $1,200,000,000,000 (1.2 trillion dollar) price tag speak of much more than just a few new regulations for the American healthcare industry. The PPACA represents nothing less than a wholesale takeover and transformation of our healthcare system by the federal government. The Act creates 159 new federal offices, essentially doubling the size of the Washington bureaucracy. It combines federal and state governments, health insurance carriers, pharmaceutical industries, healthcare providers and facilities, private charitable organizations, and individual American citizens into a single, seamless, all-encompassing national healthcare system funded by our tax dollars. Through the Act, our government now defines what “acceptable” healthcare coverage is and levies substantial new tax fines on individuals, employers and insurance carriers who fail to purchase or provide “acceptable” health insurance as dictated by the Act (in addition to the aforementioned fines for violating the HHS mandate). To say that the PPACA falls entirely within legitimate Congressional authority to regulate commerce is pure sophistry and insulting to the intelligence of the American people.
However, the most serious error in the Court’s decision lies in the two related premises that the fines for noncompliance with the HHS mandate are a legitimate exercise of Congressional taxing power, and that the PPACA does not really force employees to violate their religious liberties or conscience rights because they can simply choose to pay the fines if they object to obeying the law. To say that an employer has a choice between obeying the law or paying huge fines is akin to saying that a driver has a choice between obeying the motor vehicle laws or paying traffic fines. The idea that the person in either situation is really free to choose between two equally legitimate options is ludicrous. A fine is not simply a viable alternative to observance of a law; it is meant to ensure compliance with the law and to deter and punish noncompliance. We are only really free to choose to do what is right. If a law is just, the only right choice is to obey it. Under the new healthcare law, however, employers who refuse to furnish their employees with contraceptives, sterilizations and abortifacients for moral or religious reasons—as millions of employers all across America have been doing for decades—will suddenly find themselves forced to either a) obey the law and violate their consciences, b) break the law and pay steep fines, or c) go out of business. Those are not free choices; they are choices forced by the new law, which is an unjust law. Sorry Supreme Court, but this is blatant coercion in violation of the First Amendment. No one should be punished under U.S. law for refusing to violate their religious beliefs and moral convictions.
The PPACA is a huge windfall for the declining abortion industry, drug companies, the medical establishment, and the insurance sector. By ruling in favor of ObamaCare, the Supreme Court caved in to pressure from the Obama administration and from the handful of powerful corporate interests backing it, unjustly sacrificing our God-given, Constitutionally protected religious liberties and conscience rights on the altar of those private interests. The High Court abandoned its solemn duty to interpret the law in light of the Constitution and failed to exercise its proper oversight role with respect to the other two branches of government. Furthermore, the Court showed contempt and disregard for the will of the American people by upholding a piece of legislation that a large majority of citizens have consistently opposed from its inception. The infamous ruling clearly demonstrated that a few powerful corporate interests are now largely in control of our federal government and our court system. I can’t help but think of the following Scripture passage from the Book of Wisdom, chapter 6, verses 2 through 5:
Hear therefore, ye kings, and understand: learn, ye that are judges of the ends of the earth.
Give ear, you that rule the people, and that please yourselves in multitudes of nations:
For power is given you by the Lord, and strength by the Most High, who will examine your works, and search out your thoughts:
Because being ministers of his kingdom, you have not judged rightly, nor kept the law of justice, nor walked according to the will of God.
Copyright © 2012 Justin D. Soutar. All rights reserved.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Americans Unhappy with Dems on Economy
With midterm Congress- ional elections just over three months away, American dissatisfaction with the triple-blue Democratic administration they elected to Washington in 2008 persists and continues to grow. On Tuesday, July 27, Reuters-Ipsos released a survey showing significant disapproval of Democrats' efforts to revive the troubled economy. Americans rightly consider the economy an issue of major importance and believe that the administration of President Barack Obama has not adequately addressed it. According to the survey, 67 percent of respondents said that President Obama hasn't done enough to create jobs.
The reason why this administration has not adequately addressed our nation's economic woes is that President Obama and many of the Democrats in Congress are the pawns of special interests. They only pretend to care about the American people. That's why they spent $868 billion dollars to bail out the big banks instead of punishing them for irresponsible lending. That's why we have a war in Afghanistan still going on nine years later. That's why we have a vast new government bureaucracy including abortion "coverage" to help take care of our health, and new taxes for those who don't want to be a part of it. That's also why we don't have real tax cuts for working families and small businesses and major cuts in federal spending--measures that would help the American people to rebuild the economy on a solid foundation. The corruption runs deep. It is also why Americans are unhappy with the Dems on almost every issue, not just the economy.
As Democrats in D.C. continue losing support and momentum, Republicans are gaining it. The Reuters-Ipsos poll indicated that 46 percent of Americans plan to vote Republican this November, compared to 44 percent who intend to vote Democratic. Furthermore, nearly three-fourths of Republicans (72 percent) said they are certain to vote in November, compared to less than half of Democrats.
Republican candidates for U.S. House and Senate seats appear increasingly likely to score major victories this fall. May those who win election go on to win the trust, respect and approval of their constituents through faithful public service for many years to come.
Monday, January 25, 2010
More Trouble for President Obama
One week after the devastating geological earthquake in Haiti, a political earthquake shook the United States. On Tuesday, January 19, in a special election, Massachusetts voters elected Republican Senator Scott Brown to replace the late Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy. Nicknamed the "Lion of the Senate," Senator Kennedy had served continuously from 1972 until his death in 2009. Moreover, Kennedy had been preceded by a Democratic senator for several years prior to his own record-long reign.
The political significance of this event cannot be underestimated, for many reasons. This marks the first time in more than 40 years that Massachusetts has elected a Republican to the U.S. Senate. The Bay State is a reliably Democratic domain that, less than one and a half years ago, helped carry President Barack Obama to the White House with 68 percent of the vote. So why didn't the state's voters act predictably and follow tradition by choosing Democratic senatorial candidate Martha Coakley to succeed Kennedy?
The answer is that the people of Massachusetts didn't like what Mrs. Coakley stood for, and what she represented. She stood for forcing all health care professionals in the state, including Catholics, to perform and participate in abortions even if they object to doing so for conscience reasons. Such a draconian position--which is in flagrant violation of the laws of God and nature, and indeed of our Constitution and Bill of Rights--was unacceptable even by the liberal standards of the
Massachu- setts electorate. Mrs. Coakley also stood for President Obama's healthcare reform plan, which has no conscience protections for pro-life medical professionals and would tax individuals who do not have "acceptable" health care coverage as defined by the government. Among Massachusetts voters, even many Democrats could not tolerate such measures.
Finally, as a Democrat, Mrs. Coakley represented the currently reigning political party in Washington, D.C, which is rapidly becoming a symbol of incompetent, immoral and corrupt government. And this is where the broader implications of this astounding upset come into play. If Democrats in the Bay State have grown frustrated enough with their party's performance in the federal government to blow their top and elect a Republican, then we can be sure that American citizens in general are even more frustrated with their elected representatives. Thus, Mrs. Coakley's loss to Senator Brown, together with the recent election of Republican governors in New Jersey and Virginia, represent a clear vote of no confidence in the Obama administration.
It should be noted that Massachusetts' new Republican Senator Scott Brown is not actually pro-life. Nonetheless, his election is still to be celebrated, because he represents the lesser of two evils in a very important respect. Martha Coakley supports the Democratic healthcare legislation in the Senate, especially the abortion provisions; Senator Brown, despite his support of abortion, opposes the Democratic healthcare legislation. Thus his victory also represents an important strategic victory for the pro-life movement in the United States.
Another significant thing is that as a result of this special election, the Democratic Party no longer constitutes a supermajority of the United States Senate. With 60 senators, Democrats could invoke the cloture rule to end debate and force a vote on any measure they wished, including a healthcare reform bill, and could also easily pass it. Now, with only 59 seats and not a single Republican senator in favor of the pending healthcare bill, that bill may never come to a vote, much less be passed, by the Senate. The door has now been opened for Republican senators to continue the Senate healthcare debate and challenge their Democratic colleagues regarding the contents of the healthcare bills. This is very good news for the American people, who have registered their intense dissatisfaction with the prevailing Democratic health care bills in opinion polls and to their elected representatives in the preceding months.
There are many reasons for the landslide opposition of the American people to Democrat- ic healthcare reform. One is its gigantic $2.3 trillion price tag, which comes at a time when our national debt is already $13 trillion and most Americans are hurting financially due to the effects of a Great Recession. They do not trust the smooth promises of their Democratic politicians that the healthcare reform bills currently on the table will make health care more affordable and accessible for all Americans. They realize that, far from increasing the healthcare options available to them and bringing down healthcare costs, the new system will create a giant new government bureaucracy, funded by unprecedented income tax hikes, devoted to its subjects' healthcare a la Communist Russia, requiring the participation of all American citizens under penalty of yet more taxes. The image of Democrats as "tax-and spenders" has reared its ugly head to a whole new level at a time when average Americans are already crushed by their income tax burdens. If the economy is to recover, Americans must have money to spend, and they will not have such money if it is annually depleted by excessive taxes.
However, in addition to these financial and economic reasons, Americans have a potent moral reason for opposing Democratic healthcare reform: It would force doctors and nurses everywhere in the United States to perform and participate in abortions. This same week, hundreds of thousands of Americans peacefully demonstrated for protection of the right to life of the innocent unborn. In Washington, D.C., 300,000 American citizens, half of whom were under the age of 25, participated in the 37th Annual March for Life, which became the longest march in American history. Americans have made clear their opposition to the radically anti-life agenda of the Obama administration, which this administration has attempted to bury in the healthcare bills. This agenda was previously enshrined in FOCA, which President Obama had promised Planned Parenthood to sign upon becoming president. But FOCA failed, and now the administration's Plan B--abortion coverage through healthcare reform--is collapsing.
In the words of President Obama himself during a visit to Ohio on January 22, his "agenda seems to be running into a buzz-saw." We had much to rejoice about in this week of political shakeup for the Obama administration. However, amid the celebration of the moment we must be careful to remain vigilant. As Republican Representative Thaddeus McCotter of Michigan's 11th district cautiously observed on The World Over Live with Raymond Arroyo on January 22, "I'm not going to brag about having 41 seats when the other side has 59." We still have our work cut out for us in the pro-life movement. Therefore, we must continue to work to build a culture of life and especially offer prayers and sacrifices for full restoration of the legal guarantee of the right to life.
The political significance of this event cannot be underestimated, for many reasons. This marks the first time in more than 40 years that Massachusetts has elected a Republican to the U.S. Senate. The Bay State is a reliably Democratic domain that, less than one and a half years ago, helped carry President Barack Obama to the White House with 68 percent of the vote. So why didn't the state's voters act predictably and follow tradition by choosing Democratic senatorial candidate Martha Coakley to succeed Kennedy?
The answer is that the people of Massachusetts didn't like what Mrs. Coakley stood for, and what she represented. She stood for forcing all health care professionals in the state, including Catholics, to perform and participate in abortions even if they object to doing so for conscience reasons. Such a draconian position--which is in flagrant violation of the laws of God and nature, and indeed of our Constitution and Bill of Rights--was unacceptable even by the liberal standards of the
Massachu- setts electorate. Mrs. Coakley also stood for President Obama's healthcare reform plan, which has no conscience protections for pro-life medical professionals and would tax individuals who do not have "acceptable" health care coverage as defined by the government. Among Massachusetts voters, even many Democrats could not tolerate such measures.Finally, as a Democrat, Mrs. Coakley represented the currently reigning political party in Washington, D.C, which is rapidly becoming a symbol of incompetent, immoral and corrupt government. And this is where the broader implications of this astounding upset come into play. If Democrats in the Bay State have grown frustrated enough with their party's performance in the federal government to blow their top and elect a Republican, then we can be sure that American citizens in general are even more frustrated with their elected representatives. Thus, Mrs. Coakley's loss to Senator Brown, together with the recent election of Republican governors in New Jersey and Virginia, represent a clear vote of no confidence in the Obama administration.
It should be noted that Massachusetts' new Republican Senator Scott Brown is not actually pro-life. Nonetheless, his election is still to be celebrated, because he represents the lesser of two evils in a very important respect. Martha Coakley supports the Democratic healthcare legislation in the Senate, especially the abortion provisions; Senator Brown, despite his support of abortion, opposes the Democratic healthcare legislation. Thus his victory also represents an important strategic victory for the pro-life movement in the United States.
Another significant thing is that as a result of this special election, the Democratic Party no longer constitutes a supermajority of the United States Senate. With 60 senators, Democrats could invoke the cloture rule to end debate and force a vote on any measure they wished, including a healthcare reform bill, and could also easily pass it. Now, with only 59 seats and not a single Republican senator in favor of the pending healthcare bill, that bill may never come to a vote, much less be passed, by the Senate. The door has now been opened for Republican senators to continue the Senate healthcare debate and challenge their Democratic colleagues regarding the contents of the healthcare bills. This is very good news for the American people, who have registered their intense dissatisfaction with the prevailing Democratic health care bills in opinion polls and to their elected representatives in the preceding months.
There are many reasons for the landslide opposition of the American people to Democrat- ic healthcare reform. One is its gigantic $2.3 trillion price tag, which comes at a time when our national debt is already $13 trillion and most Americans are hurting financially due to the effects of a Great Recession. They do not trust the smooth promises of their Democratic politicians that the healthcare reform bills currently on the table will make health care more affordable and accessible for all Americans. They realize that, far from increasing the healthcare options available to them and bringing down healthcare costs, the new system will create a giant new government bureaucracy, funded by unprecedented income tax hikes, devoted to its subjects' healthcare a la Communist Russia, requiring the participation of all American citizens under penalty of yet more taxes. The image of Democrats as "tax-and spenders" has reared its ugly head to a whole new level at a time when average Americans are already crushed by their income tax burdens. If the economy is to recover, Americans must have money to spend, and they will not have such money if it is annually depleted by excessive taxes.However, in addition to these financial and economic reasons, Americans have a potent moral reason for opposing Democratic healthcare reform: It would force doctors and nurses everywhere in the United States to perform and participate in abortions. This same week, hundreds of thousands of Americans peacefully demonstrated for protection of the right to life of the innocent unborn. In Washington, D.C., 300,000 American citizens, half of whom were under the age of 25, participated in the 37th Annual March for Life, which became the longest march in American history. Americans have made clear their opposition to the radically anti-life agenda of the Obama administration, which this administration has attempted to bury in the healthcare bills. This agenda was previously enshrined in FOCA, which President Obama had promised Planned Parenthood to sign upon becoming president. But FOCA failed, and now the administration's Plan B--abortion coverage through healthcare reform--is collapsing.
In the words of President Obama himself during a visit to Ohio on January 22, his "agenda seems to be running into a buzz-saw." We had much to rejoice about in this week of political shakeup for the Obama administration. However, amid the celebration of the moment we must be careful to remain vigilant. As Republican Representative Thaddeus McCotter of Michigan's 11th district cautiously observed on The World Over Live with Raymond Arroyo on January 22, "I'm not going to brag about having 41 seats when the other side has 59." We still have our work cut out for us in the pro-life movement. Therefore, we must continue to work to build a culture of life and especially offer prayers and sacrifices for full restoration of the legal guarantee of the right to life.
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