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Townhall...
Rationing our Rights
by Ken Blackwell
Feb 18, 2012
Note: This column was
co-authored by Bob Morrison.
They said it would never lead to rationing. But rationing is already
here. Under the latest assault by the Obama administration, they are
rationing our rights. Tens of millions of Catholics—and tens of
millions of the rest of us—are having our religious liberty crushed by
the latest health care mandate from HHS. The legislation that President
Obama signed with a flourish in 2010 was supported by not a single
Republican. The election of 2010 resulted in a massive electoral
“shellacking,” the president’s own word, that cost the Democrats their
majority in the House and serious losses in thousands of state
legislative contests. Ignoring all that, they advance.
The National Archives saluted the Fourth of July in 2010 with a
breathless announcement. Just four months after Vice President Joe
Biden hailed the signing of historic healthcare legislation as a “big
[expletive deleted] deal,” the folks at the Archives told us that they
had discovered a previously unnoticed correction in an early Thomas
Jefferson draft of the Declaration of Independence. Young Mr. Jefferson
had written the word “Subjects.” Then, he struck that word and penned
the word “Citizens.”
The National Archives informed us meaningfully that this was the first
time in American history that we were so called—Citizens. Will future
Archivists be able to pinpoint the signing of Obamacare as that moment
in time when we became Subjects once again?
What else can we be but Subjects if we have to go hat in hand to HHS
Sec. Kathleen Sebelius for a waiver from Obamacare? Thousands of
waivers have been granted. But not to the Catholic Bishops. Not to
Southern Baptists, Evangelicals, Orthodox Jews, or Missouri Synod
Lutherans. We don’t qualify for waivers. You have to be a big union or
a crony capitalist to qualify for waivers from this administration.
Do you recall: “If you like your current health care coverage, you can
keep it”? President Obama cooed soothingly. Eighty-five percent of us
did like the health care we had before Obamacare was thrust upon us.
Now, if we keep our current plans, they will be unrecognizable. It’s
like Henry Ford said: You can have any color Model T you want so long
as it’s black.
This HHS health care mandate is the gravest assault on religious
liberty in American history. We must legislate against it. We must sue
in federal court. We must line up behind the twenty-six states that are
already challenging Obamacare in federal court.
Those states—and literally hundreds of “friends of the court” who have
submitted briefs against this unconstitutional and unconscionable
bill—make the powerful point that when King George III and the British
Parliament laid a tax on tea, even they would not have presumed to make
us buy the tea.
With this latest Sebelius diktat, we are being forced to drink the tea.
The HHS mandate will force us to violate our consciences and provide
drugs that can cause abortions. To us, killing unborn children at any
stage is never health care. It is a grave sin.
So, we must strenuously oppose this HHS mandate. But we cannot ignore
the storm warnings. This mandate does not include RU-486, the lethal
drug that causes later abortions than those that can be caused by ella
and Plan B. These are included. Why does this administration exempt
RU-486 and all surgical abortions?
The logic of their position is this: abortion is a fundamental right;
abortion is a legitimate means of family planning; abortion should be
spread around the world by UNFPA and Planned Parenthood and funded by
American taxpayers.
But they have not included such later lethal drugs and such killing
procedures in their entering bid. Why not?
Abraham Lincoln spoke out most eloquently not just about the terrible
1857 Dred Scott ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court. He also showed where
it would lead. In his justly famous “House Divided” speech of 1858,
Lincoln said:
If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we
could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.”
He showed with relentless logic that the principle that underlay that
infamous court ruling was that slaves were property, that their owners
could take them into the territories, and Congress had no power to
prevent that. But if slaves are property and only property, then how
can an owner be prevented from taking his “property”—his slaves—into
the free states? Lincoln showed that we were just one court ruling away
from abolishing all the free states. Logically, we would become all
slave or all free. We could not “tend” toward both eventualities.
The Obama administration today tells us we must provide drugs that can
cause abortions.
Tomorrow, they will tell us we must provide the abortions. The logic is
inescapable.
Against what they do today, we must resist. Against they threaten to do
to us tomorrow, we must resist, as well. If they do these things in the
green wood, what will they do in the dry?
Read this and other columns at Townhall
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