ROGERS — The “contraception” controversy - so labeled by media from NPR to Fox News - has little to do with contraception.
President Barack Obama’s Health and Human Services secretary decreed the Catholic Church is to provide insurance for contraception, sterilization and abortifacients for its employees, except those behind church walls.
Because the exercise of any meaningful religion extends beyond church walls into such ministries as Catholic hospitals, the Church objects that such payments violate its religiously informed conscience.
The only effect on the availability of contraception the HHS rule would have had is to make “free” that which was cheap. The Catholic Church does not even prevent Catholics from obtaining those services.
So the controversy should be more accurately labeled the “freedom of religion controversy.”
The Constitution protects “the free exercise” of religion, not merely “freedom of worship,” as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has lately been phrasing it. Worship can be performed entirely in one’s head. Not even totalitarian states can prevent worship.
The president’s decree would set the precedent that the government defi nes the content of religious practice based on the government’s agenda. Mr. Obama would use the extra-Constitutional fiction of “compellinggovernmental interest” to increase government control of our lives. The Founders thought the government’s compelling interest was to protect the freedom of citizens who lent it power for that purpose. They did not foresee Mr. Obama’s Imperial Presidency.
Apparently his copy of the Constitution reads, “The Administration, in its grace and wisdom, permits citizens to believe what they wish, but their practice of religious beliefs may serve only the Greater Good, be it Women’s Health, the Environment or Another Just Cause as His Excellency or His Designee determines.”
The ecumenical outrage that erupted in the House hearings, however, sent the president back to the real Constitution where he discovered that pesky “free exercise” clause.
So he seized the opportunity to appear reasonable with a “compromise.” He ordered the premium money laundered by requiring insurance companies to provide the items for free. Despite the wealth of evidence, I still don’t believe Mr. Obama is completely ignorant of economics: He knows heis still forcing Catholics to fund contraception through increased premiums.
The compromise also targets the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee to due process before the government can deprive one of life or property.
The president, by imperial decree, has ordered private companies to part with their property (premium revenue) without due process. That’s what the plain words of the Amendment forbid.
Clever constitutional lawyers might fi nd a precedent to obfuscate that meaning. Even Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v.
Sawyer, the case in which President Harry Truman’s wartime seizure of the steel companies was found unconstitutional, will be only a minor inconvenience to the progressive legal imagination.
This arrogation of power is consistent with other Obama actions: rewriting bankruptcy procedures to stiff GM bond holders and help the unions, making recess appointments when Congress is not in recess, changing the agreement with a failing Solyndra to protect his contributors not taxpayers and even depriving American citizens Samir Khan and Anwar al-Awlaki of their lives without due process. The fact we might agree with some of these outcomes should not excuse the imperial presidency.
The media then granted the president a political bonus by focusing on candidate Rick Santorum’s doctrinaire Catholicism- he believes contraception is wrong and, further, that its effects on society have been, on balance, negative.
Certainly politically incorrect beliefs. But since there can be no religious test for public oft ce, Santorum’s Catholicism is as irrelevant as John Kennedy’s Catholicism or Mitt Romney’s Mormonism or Obama’s “progressive” (his qualifi er) Christianity.
What matters are actions.
As a senator, Santorum voted in favor of federally funding contraceptives in some federal programs, while supporting a ban on federal funding of abortion. Santorum takes the scientific view: Abortion takes a human life, but contraception prevents life’s creation. His is a principled yet tolerant position. As a state senator, Mr. Obama voted for infanticide. He has spoken of unplanned pregnancy as something to be terminated, so one is not “punished” by parenthood.
I hope Mr. Obama’s latest imperial exercise can become the unplanned pregnancy of the election cycle. I hope it leads to the birth of viable and vigorous debates about freedom and its connection to our prosperity (jobs) and the pursuit of happiness, about the centrality or irrelevance of the Constitution and about whether we elect a chief executive or a fouryear emperor. Then come November, Mr. Obama may be punished for fathering those debates.
BUDDY ROGERS IS A ROGERS RESIDENT.
Opinion, Pages 5 on 02/27/2012