Big Government Assaults Religious Liberty

    In a recent YourHub article, “Rick Santorum is no Ronald Reagan,” Jack Van Ens compares former US Senator and presidential candidate, Rick Santorum, to the late president and finds that Reagan was a likeable fellow always willing to compromise while Santorum is a scold who is too unwilling to compromise on his conservative and Catholic beliefs.  Having worked for Ronald Reagan, I can agree that he had a sunny disposition and was a very good natured and likeable leader; however, he also held very strong conservative positions and stuck to his core convictions.    Van Ens may not care for Santorum’s personality, and it would be difficult to find someone as positive and dynamic as Ronald Reagan, but Van Ens goes off the rails with his diatribe against Santorum especially when he accuses Santorum of being incoherent and extreme especially in the matter of birth control.   Van Ens becomes incoherent with his praise of President Obama’s contraception mandate compromise and when he misstates the facts about the Catholic Bishops objections to the compromise as an assault on religious liberty.

    Van Ens historical memory on religious liberty seems rather short.  In 1804, President Jefferson wrote a letter to the French Ursuline nuns in New Orleans in which he wrote that they would be free to govern themselves by their own rules.  He concluded that it would be done “without interference from the civil authorities.”  President Obama made a similar promise during a speech at the University of Notre Dame a few years ago.  He has thus far failed to emulate President Jefferson’s promise of religious liberty which is evident by Obama’s unconstitutional assault against the beliefs of the Catholic Church and hence Santorum.

    Adding to history is the fact that the same “religious or moral” protection was in Hillary Care, in a component sponsored by Senator Moynihan.  That bill declared that its mandates shall not “prevent any employer from contributing to the purchase of a standard benefits package which excludes coverage of abortion or other services, if the employer objects to such services on the basis of a religious belief or moral conviction.”  The same “religious or moral” protection language was in Democratic Senator Frank Church’s conscience statute, which Senator Ted Kennedy praised and voted for in the 1970′s, and which applies not only to abortion and sterilization but to “any health service.”  Although Hillary Care didn’t become law, the same “religious and moral” protection was signed into law by President Clinton limiting mandates in Medicare and Medicaid participating plans, and again in Medicare Choice, and again in regulation son federal employee insurance, and in multiple other examples.

    Van Ens faults Santorum for his unwillingness to “move to the middle” and insisting on “religious or moral” conscience protection substantively identical to the ones Senators Moynihan and Kennedy and President Clinton supported, but that Obamacare and its advocates arrogantly refuse to submit themselves to.   The other fatal flaw in Van Ens’ position is that even if he and other progressives accept these “compromise” terms as legitimate, other Catholics and Christians take a different moral view, and Van Ens and the Obama Administration have no right to tell Christians to shut up while the federal government violates their consciences just because they haven’t compromised their consciences to fit the state’s mandate.  This is a continuation of the marginalization of the influence of religious principles, whether Catholic or not, in the secular world of statism.  Big government statists want churches to get approval from an all –powerful state to practice their beliefs.

    America’s Roman Catholic bishops have joined other Christian and conservative voices in rejecting President Obama’s “compromise” on his mandate requiring all employers, including most religious institutions, to include free contraception to women in their health insurance coverage.  Religious leaders have pushed back and said that this compromise amounted to a “distinction without a difference,” since the religious employer would still pay for the insurance coverage and so would still be footing the bill for the contraception coverage it morally opposes.   Forcing private health plans nationwide, by the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen, to cover sterilization and contraception, including drugs that may cause abortion is the goal of the Obama Administration.  The bishops noted that all the other mandated “preventive services” under the HHS regulations address the prevention of disease, “and pregnancy is not a disease,” they emphasized.  Moreover, forcing plans to cover abortifacients violates existing federal conscience laws.

    Obama’s compromise proposal is an accounting gimmick and an unconstitutional mandate.  Obama and Van Ens don’t appear to understand that this isn’t about cost or women’s’ rights, - it’s about who controls the religious views of faith-based institutions.  Like a statist who believes that we all must serve the state and its rulers, Van Ens believes that Obama should have that control.  Our Constitution states otherwise.  Americans have the right to provide, purchase, or enroll in health coverage that is consistent with their religious beliefs and moral convictions.  That fundamental right is being trampled on by this mandate and its supposed compromise.  The issue here is whether the overbearing state can force people into paying for something that violates their moral precepts.   Our Constitution says that the state can’t coerce anyone into doing that. 

    Despite how the Obama administration and Van Ens try to spin the “accommodation,” under the mandate Christian institutions would still end up assisting with something they consider sinful.   As stated by the Catholic Bishops, “No amount of rationalization … can disguise the fact that indirect payment for these services would fall into the areas of either what the Church calls formal cooperation in evil or direct material cooperation in evil.”   The simple fact is that the Obama administration is compelling religious people and institutions who are employers to purchase a health insurance contract that provides abortion-inducing drugs, contraception, and sterilization.  Reagan would agree with the religious leaders and Santorum that this is a grave violation of religious freedom and cannot stand.

    As a strong conservative, Reagan would agree with the CATO Institute’s position that the natural compromise is simple: Birth control, abortion and other contentious practices are permitted. But those who object don't have to pay for them.   Reagan spoke out strongly against “socialized medicine” as he called it, and he would have said that the federal takeover of medicine prevents us from reaching these natural compromises and needlessly divides our society.    Santorum echoes Reagan when he asks why should the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) decree that any of us must pay for “insurance” that covers contraceptives.  

    As a constitutional conservative, Reagan would also tell us that this primarily is a First Amendment issue.  The Government should not be able to tell anyone how to practice their religion.   A new healthcare law can’t provide an exemption to the first Amendment.  Whether we are Catholic, Mormon, Jewish, Muslim or Evangelical, as an employer, we shouldn’t be forced to pay for plans that provide an option to obtain a procedure that we believe, based off of indisputable scientific fact — is infanticide.  It doesn’t matter whether you agree or not, it is our religious belief protected by the First Amendment.

    Being a true conservative, Reagan would go further and say that by focusing on an exemption for church-related institutions, we effectively admit that it is right for the rest of us to be subjected to this sort of mandate.   Reagan would have never compromise and accepted the terribly misnamed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act which we now learn will cost an additional $111 Billion.  Reagan would not have resigned himself to chipping away at the edges of this monstrosity.  He would have thrown it out, and fixed the terrible distortions in the health-insurance and health-care markets.  Reagan would agree with Santorum that churches should be exempt, and that we all should be exempt from socialized medicine.   In this regard, Rick Santorum is a Ronald Reagan.