Hold the Mayo

February 12, 2012

Obama's War

I have been following the Obama administration's decision to force religious institutions to provide insurance coverage that violates their fundamental beliefs. The initial edict was that such institutions must pay to provide this coverage to their employees. Then they decreed a "compromise" that said religious institutions don't have to pay for the coverage to which they have a moral objection but that the insurance companies must include that coverage for free. It's not really much of a compromise. It's kind of like saying if you don't like 2+2=4 then we'll go with 2x2 instead.

One of the most troubling aspects of the whole issue is the focus of the debate and criticism on "Obama's War on Religion," or more specifically "Obama's War on Catholics." This belies a fundamental misunderstanding of the situation. This is not Obama's war on religion or Catholics, this is the religious/Catholic front in Obama's War on the Constitution.

In his own words:

"The Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent, as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, as least as it’s been interpreted, and Warren Court interpreted in the same way that, generally, the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties, says what the states can’t do to you, says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. And that hasn’t shifted."

Obama added, "one of the, I think, the tragedies of the civil rights movement, was because the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change, and in some ways, we still stuffer from that."

The President finds the Constitution that he swore to protect and defend a too restrictive collection of "negative liberties." Explaining quite succinctly the argument for Constitutionally limited government. he notes the Constitution says what the government can't do to you, and that is the point. It places "essential constraints" on the government. Constraints that Obama does not like.

If your goal was to eliminate the essential constraints of the Constitution so that the government was free to do whatever it wanted whenever it wanted, how would you do it?

A full frontal assault would generate a backlash that would make the Tea Party look like … a tea party. To borrow the President's budget metaphor you don't go after the Constitution with a chainsaw, you use a scalpel.

The wedge issue the administration has chosen is Sex. Positioned by the administration as access to preventive health measures. Birth control will prevent unwanted pregnancy and in the case of condoms prevent the spread of sexually transmitted disease. Who, aside from a few old-fashioned rigid religious believers, is against Safe Sex?

But safe sex is not the issue. And health is not the goal. The target is to draw a line through that clause of the First Amendment that reads, … or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Succeeding in that, destroys not just the First amendment, but blows a big hole in the essential constraints of the Constitution.

That is what the Obama administration is trying to accomplish.

That is what we must fight.

ABO 2012.

Posted by: Stephen Macklin at 09:16 AM | No Comments | Add Comment