Attack on Catholic Church is an Attack on the Constitution

President Obama has decreed that the Catholic Church must provide birth control and abortifacients in the health care plans it offers to its employees

Here’s a statement from government suckerfish Planned Parenthood:

“This is good health policy and good economic policy,” said Dawn Laguens, vice president at Planned Parenthood. “It increases access to affordable birth control, but it is up to an individual employee to choose it or not. That’s very much the American way.” (El Lay Times – Contraceptive Mandate)

No.  It's not the American Way, as if a statist trained monkey raised and sustained on free taxpayer money would even begin to understand the concept. This is a terrible idea because it is a federal government telling private citizens what to do when it has no authority to do so.  A true free choice is one you make on your own and then pay for on your own without picking someone else’s pocket. That’s the American Way. The constitution was written to prevent such abuse.

Kevin Drum wrote that if you take government money you march to the government’s tune. It's a valid argument.  However, the violator here is not the Catholic Church; it is the US Government that is charged by We The People to be the guardian of our God-given rights. By ensnarling every last person in its tangled web, it has created a hopeless situation for anyone wanting to order their own lives and business free from the unblinking government gaze.

What gives the federal government the right to issue such dicta to churches? What gives it the right to command any organization or business in this way? What part of the constitution sanctions this?

The federal government is in bald-faced violation of the first amendment

You see, our rights are innumerable and bounded only by those outer limits where they interfere with the rights of others. Government’s rights are enumerated and limited; restricted by what that mandate from the people to their elected government, the US Constitution, says. This is what we need to be telling our politicians, our kids, and our family, friends, neighbors and coworkers who may have forgotten it. We also need to say it loud and proud when the smartass statist gargoyles in the press shove microphones in our faces at tea party rallies.

The US Constitution protects our God-given rights to life, liberty and property and it limits the actions the federal government may take against them. The very idea of mandating such everyday minutiae of our personal lives makes a mockery of our constitutional form of government.

Even Liberty's Defenders get it Wrong...

Oxymoronic ObamaCatholic Doug Kmiec proposes a speech Obama should give that admits the government was wrong. This phrase stuck out at me:

While the constitution doesn't mandate religious exemptions from general laws, I believe we should accommodate as many beliefs as possible and to the greatest extent possible without jeopardizing the purpose of the law. (Tim Reidy)

Firstly, we have no more general laws, as great jurists of England and the United states from centuries past would understand them. Our government no longer operates under the constitutional Rule of Law.  Rather, it now barrages us with stern commands and dictatorial edicts.

Religious Exemptions are a Warning Sign

Were our government’s lawmaking still in conformance with the constitution, there would be no requirement for “religious exemptions,” since the First Amendment bars government from prohibiting the free exercise of religion. The fact that our discussions of law and regulations are now so shot through with talk of exemptions is an indictment against our government and the craven batwinged legislators and bureaucrats who haunt its once-hallowed halls.

Federalist 84 eloquently expresses this concern, as Publius argues against a Bill of Rights. He saw the danger to all our rights that would be caused by enumerating certain of them. Hamilton proved to be quite prescient:

They would contain various exceptions to powers not granted; and, on this very account, would afford a colorable pretext to claim more than were granted. For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do?

Why, for instance, should it be said that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed?

I will not contend that such a provision would confer a regulating power; but it is evident that it would furnish, to men disposed to usurp, a plausible pretense for claiming that power. (Federalist 84)

Back when the constitution still mattered, honorable lawmakers would observe that this or that proposed legislation protrudes into the private lives of citizens, and thereby abandon the project.   Our post-constitutional government suffers no such scruples.  And the ignorant subjects stand up on their hind legs and applaud.