H H S Ruling follow-up: Obama winks

  • A bit of follow-up on the HHS rul­ing that would have forced any orga­ni­za­tion tak­ing fed­eral funds to pro­vide any birth con­trol (includ­ing abor­tion drugs and pro­ce­dures) to any employee, regard­less of their own reli­gious con­vic­tions. On OCN’s The Sound­ing, I said:

    The rul­ing from HHS was deliv­ered with a pre­sump­tion of author­ity over the con­science of Chris­tians that is stag­ger­ing. There was no fan­fare, no call for national dis­cus­sion — the admin­is­tra­tion seemed to assume that no one would give them any grief for this out­ra­geous attempt to coerce those tak­ing fed­eral funds to go along with the world’s cul­ture regard­ing the “incon­ve­nience” of unwanted pregnancy.

    In the mean­time, the news on Fri­day is that the Obama admin­is­tra­tion blinked, or at least that’s the way that it is being reported. But I would sug­gest that it only winked. AP reported:

    Under fierce election-year fire, Pres­i­dent Barack Obama on Fri­day abruptly aban­doned his stand that reli­gious orga­ni­za­tions must pay for birth con­trol for work­ers, scram­bling to end a furor rag­ing from the Catholic Church to Con­gress to his re-election foes. He demanded that insur­ance com­pa­nies step in to pro­vide the cov­er­age instead.

    So he reduced all of the oppo­si­tion down to a prob­lem with foot­ing the bill and then “demanded” that the insur­ance com­pa­nies take that off our hands.

    This is so cyn­i­cal, I don’t even know what to say. The pres­i­dent doesn’t appear to have heard a word we’ve said. We didn’t say we were too cheap to pay for abor­tions; we said that we con­sider them an offense against God. And we said that liv­ing in a coun­try that guar­an­tees reli­gious free­dom is under­stood to mean that the gov­ern­ment can­not coerce us to vio­late our beliefs by with­hold­ing funds unless we do.

    Instead of at least acknowl­edg­ing the offense, Pres­i­dent Obama dou­bled down by mak­ing a lat­eral move into the pri­vate sec­tor and telling a busi­ness indus­try (which he also has no juris­dic­tion over) that THEY have to pay for this. This is ridicu­lous. I hope the insur­ance com­pa­nies tell him to pound sand … um, well … in a nice way. He is the pres­i­dent, after all.

    This is far from over, so we’ll see what hap­pens next. There’s prob­a­bly a strug­gle ahead, with many more of these sup­posed “com­pro­mises” sug­gested which aren’t really com­pro­mises at all. I hope we’ve got it in us to stay strong. I hope we don’t set­tle for halfway mea­sures that are still offen­sive, and I hope we don’t just get fatigued and cave.

    It’s obvi­ous that the pres­i­dent and a lot of oth­ers in the halls of power totally under­es­ti­mated the zeal of Chris­tians. I hope we con­tinue to sur­prise them.


    Related posts:

    1. “Yes, we can” what? Ruin the country?
    2. Wash­ing­ton Post: Where are we? What hap­pened? How’d this ‘Obama is my king’ tat­too get on my arm?
    3. Chris­tians tar­geted in Nigeria
    4. The elec­tion of ’08 in a week
    5. Path to 9/11 follow-up

    February 13th, 2012 | Grace | 1 Comment | Tags: , , , , , ,

One Response and Counting...

  • pho­tini 02.13.2012

    What I find amaz­ing is that no one is talk­ing about the Con­sti­tu­tion­al­ity of it all. Since when could the pres­i­dent order a com­pany to give some­thing away for free? Or to tell a reli­gious group to bow to what the he says?

    This was not a com­pro­mise as the media wants us to believe. It is a usurpa­tion of pow­ers that don’t exist!! (Does that make sense? Hope­fully, you under­stand what I mean.)

    And do you think that will REALLY hap­pen? The cost for all those “free” prod­ucts and ser­vices will be cov­ered by increased pre­mi­ums for every­one else.

Leave a Reply

* Name, Email, and Comment are Required