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Human
Events...
Obama’s
remaking of America
by Patrick
J. Buchanan
03/06/2012
Anyone who
believes America’s culture wars are behind her should have started out
Friday
reading The Washington Times.
The
headlines on the three top stories on page one read:
“California
judges asked to say if they are gay.”
“’Tebow
Bill’ for home-schoolers dies in Virginia Senate panel.”
“Opt-out on
birth control defeated in Senate.”
The
California judges story dealt with the lately passed Judicial
Appointments
Demographic Inclusion Act, which mandates a survey of all of the
state’s 1,600
judges -- to find out how many are homosexual.
Purpose of
the law: “Promote and increase the representation of lesbian, gay,
bisexual and
transgender people in the ... judicial branch.”
The
questionnaire sent to the judges asked each to identify themselves by
race,
ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation.
Forty
percent of the judges balked, refusing to reveal their sexual
orientation. One
percent said they were gay. One percent said they were lesbian. One
judge
identified himself as transgendered.
Welcome to
21st century America.
Under the
old American ideal, the lawyers who proved the most qualified by wisdom
and
experience were to be elevated to the bench.
The new
ideal is that California’s judiciary should mirror the diversity of the
state.
Whites, Asians, Hispanics, males, females, blacks, gays, straights and
bisexuals are to be represented on the bench in the proportion that
they are
found in the population.
Yet another
triumph of diversity over excellence.
Were an
Olympic team or symphony orchestra to be chosen on the basis of this
kind of
diversity, they would be a joke.
The “Tebow Bill,”
named for Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow, who played high school
football
while being home-schooled, was crafted to allow home-schooled Virginia
kids to
try out for the tennis, football, baseball and basketball teams at
their local
high schools.
The
Virginia House approved the measure 59-39.
But a
Senate panel sank the Tebow Bill on an 8-7 vote, denying 38,000
Virginia
home-schoolers their last chance to play high school sports. Every
Democrat on
the panel voted as the Virginia Education Association dictated.
But it is
the top story in the Times, about the 51-48 defeat of the Blunt
Amendment, that
best reveals the shifting correlation of forces in the religious and
cultural
wars sundering the country.
The
amendment of Sen. Roy Blunt would have assured Catholic institutions
and
Catholic employers of their freedom to opt out of providing health
insurance
coverage for contraception, abortifacients and sterilizations for
employees, if
they have religious objections.
The position
of the Catholic Church on this issue is neither new nor is it unknown.
It was
reaffirmed in 1968 in the famous encyclical “Humanae Vitae” of Pope
Paul VI.
Artificial birth control is unnatural and immoral. This is high among
the
beliefs that differentiate Catholic teaching from other Christian
faiths.
Nor is it
any secret. And any government that orders Catholic institutions and
employers,
against their religious beliefs, to provide contraceptives, “morning
after”
pills or sterilizations for employees has crossed the line between
church and
state to trample upon the First Amendment religious freedom it was
established
to protect.
Sandra
Fluke, a 30-year-old student at Georgetown Law School, has emerged as
the
heroine of the Democratic establishment, being phoned by President
Obama after
her excoriation by Rush Limbaugh.
And what is
Fluke’s demand? That Georgetown University pay for and provide birth
control
for herself and all coeds and law school students.
Consider if
you will the chutzpah on display here.
Fluke
attends one of the most prestigious law schools in America. She is
among a
cognitive elite whose future is secure. Why should she not pay for her
own
birth control, even if she has to borrow money? Why is providing her
birth
control someone else’s obligation?
This is not
an abandoned woman on welfare. Why should other students or the
university be
forced to foot the bill for Fluke’s exercise of her freedom to pursue
her
personal lifestyle? She has talked of $3,000 a year being the annual
cost of
birth control for a Georgetown student.
Georgetown
University and its law school presumably remain Jesuit institutions.
For Fluke
to demand contraceptives or birth control pills for herself and her
fellow
students is to demand that Georgetown enable and subsidize behavior the
church
and the Jesuit community teach to be immoral.
Fluke has
an extraordinary sense of entitlement.
Undeniably
this episode, where the Democratic Party, traditional political home of
America’s
Catholics, is now demanding that Catholic institutions and employers be
forced
to subsidize what their church teaches to be immoral conduct, tells us
much
about the sea change that has taken place and is taking place across
America.
The America
of Barack Obama that is emerging appears to be a country where civil
disobedience may yet become a duty of traditional Christians and devout
Catholics.
The
historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr. once called anti-Catholicism “the
deepest-held
bias in the history of the American people.”
In Obama’s
Washington, it is becoming so again.
Read this
and other columns at Human Events
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