Get ready for the full implementation of Obamacare. It ain't gonna be pretty.
In Mark Steyn’s brilliant opus on the decline of America and what it means to the average citizen and the world at large, After America, he wrote: “When California goes bankrupt, the Golden State’s woes will be nationalized and shared with the nation at large… It will be as if California and New York have burst their bodices like two corpulent gin-soaked trollops and rolled over the fruited plain to rub bellies at the Mississippi. If you’re underneath, it’s not going to be fun.”
Steyn’s point being that one of the great things about America, at least in its past, is that you could escape the policies of your locale and move to a place more conducive to your way of life. Steyn points out that “universal liberalism would rather deny you that choice,” which leads us to a seemingly unrelated story…
The Problem with Mandates
Unless you’ve been busy colonizing the moon, you’ve likely heard something about the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) mandate recently unearthed in Obamacare that all employers, including faith-based employers, must provide free birth control and abortifacients regardless of their moral objections.
The story has generally morphed into a battle between the Catholic Church and the Obama administration, but this angle misses the bigger and far more important issue. When Nancy Pelosi said we’d have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it, she wasn’t kidding. This mandate is just the tip of the iceberg of all the crap that will be coming down the pike. After all, the damn thing is like 10,000 pages long, filled with exemptions and goodies for the politically connected and all kinds of stuff that will make a routine doctor visit seem like a day at the DMV. In a word, it will be awesome.
While this particular HHS mandate is certainly a First Amendment religious liberty issue, it also distorts an already distorted medical market and more distortion is on the way. The federal government is exacerbating the problem of rising medical costs by forcing insurance companies and employers to cover just about everything. In a truly free market I would have a range of coverage from which to choose.
If I could, I would choose only catastrophic coverage and use a pay-as-you-go system for preventative and general illness doctor visits, but I can’t. Instead, due to mandates of this, that and the other, I have little choice in coverage. It’s either pick the expensive coverage, or the more-expensive coverage because I’m forced to pay through higher rates for someone else’s poor choices, the coverage of which has been mandated.
With birth control and abortifacients, putting aside the moral argument, why the hell am I paying for something that’s readily available and relatively cheap? And, if you can’t afford it, just march yourself down to Planned Parenthood, which I am also subsidizing against my will.
Herein lies the greater philosophical issue of positive versus negative rights. I’m foursquare behind the negative rights philosophy, which is the core of America’s founding. Positive rights, in which the government declares you have rights to things like free medical care, allow the government to dictate how you exercise those rights. And if that’s the case, how are such “rights” really rights?
True liberty is based on the concept that government’s role is to secure the ability to pursue your God-given (not man-given) rights. Negative rights, so called because they restrain government’s interference with the individual, ensure liberty. But progressives are not individualists, believing that the general populace needs to be both controlled and coddled, which flies in the face of America’s founding and its success as the greatest guarantor of individual liberty in the history of the world. Did America emerge as such because it was conceived as a welfare state?
Conservatives believe in the power of the individual to sink or swim based on their own merits and the choices – both good and bad – they make. So, if someone’s so hard up that they can’t buy birth control, is that my fault? Or, is it possible they’ve made poor personal decisions, both financially and morally, that led to them to seek free birth control and abortifacients?
With the HHS mandate, poor choices are rewarded while those of us trying to do the right thing are punished for those poor choices. And so it goes as my betters half a continent away dictate what’s best for me with one-size-fits-all “solutions” I’m forced to accept.
In a more Federalist system where locals rule and make decisions for their community I can get the hell out of Dodge if need be when the local government taxes and regulates me into oblivion. Increasingly, this is no longer the case, as the federal government involves itself ever more intimately in my personal life, taking on a role once reserved for the individual and his or her local government, the proverbial two corpulent gin-soaked trollops rolling over the fruited plain. If you’re underneath that, it’s not going to be fun, unless you have that kind of fetish, as progressives apparently do.
We begin this Bill of Rights Countdown with what is likely the most misunderstood Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the First Amendment, or Article I:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Pretty clear, huh? However, progressives often reinterpret the First Amendment to say:
Congress shall not allow any reference to or discussion of religion in the public square, and shall prohibit the free exercise thereof if the religion teaches something we disagree with; and abridge freedom of speech, and of the press, if we disagree with the speech and deem it to be “hate” speech; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances unless we agree with the petitioners.
In the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton argued against including a Bill of Rights in the Constitution. His argument was that enumerating such rights would allow the government to abridge rights it was never given the power to address in the first place:
I go further and affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and to the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed Constitution but would even be dangerous. They would contain various exceptions to powers which are 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 No. 84, from which I drew that excerpt, deserves to be quoted in full because it is a compelling argument against a Bill of Rights. It was also predictive of the convoluted ways and means by which future totalitarians would seek to abridge those rights and find powers and rights in favor of a centralized government over the people that were never intended to be granted.
Though compelling, I disagree with Hamilton. Totalitarians will always find ways to expand the scope of government interference in the lives of individuals. They don’t need a Bill of Rights to do so. A Bill of Rights gives us something specific to use in our fight against the totalitarian leanings of those who, in the name of “social justice” or some other concept of fairness, will abridge our freedoms in order to enforce an unattainable Utopian brotherhood of man.
Tasty at the ballpark, but downright disgusting when packaged as news.
There are various ways to describe the traditional media in America. By traditional, I mean the media that dominated American newsgathering and dissemination for most of its history, first with the metropolitan daily papers, then radio and finally weekly newsmagazines and the big three television networks: ABC, NBC and CBS.
To some degree, the first all-news cable network, CNN, was and is part of this traditional media mix. But it was the forerunner of the New Media, which has successfully fragmented the monopolistic hold traditional media had on reporting news.
The most common term used to describe traditional media is Mainstream. This misses the mark, however, because it is increasingly irrelevant and no longer in the mainstream of American life. Conservatives derisively refer to it as the Lamestream Media, the Dinosaur Media and the Drive-By Media, among others. Liberals, on the other hand, tend to hang onto Mainstream. I suppose it’s comforting to hearken back to a day when news was controlled by the elite few whose opinions were developed in the vacuum of academia, Manhattan, Chicago and Los Angeles.
Ronald Reagan famously said about progressives, a.k.a., liberals: “The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t so.” The most infamous recent example of this willful ignorance is the Left’s reaction to Arizona’s immigration law.
Apparently, no one in the Obama administration has bothered to read Arizona’s law, but they are so heavily invested in their ideology that what they want to believe about the law makes it magically turn into what they believe it is: a racist, fascist excuse for Arizona’s Gestapo-like police to harass and detain anyone with dark skin or an accent.
I know exactly how William Shatner felt in the Twilight Zone episode "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet". Does anyone else notice that the Obama administration is lying about Arizona's immigration law? Stewardess! There's a creature on the wing!
Every time I hear someone in the Obama administration denounce Arizona’s law – from Obama himself down to people whose job it is to actually know the law, like Eric Holder and Janet Napolitano – I feel like I’m living in an episode of the Twilight Zone. I’m almost as shocked and perplexed as William Shatner was when he saw a creature on the wing of the airplane he was flying on. Is this really happening and does anyone else notice it?
This is just the tip of the wing, however, as the belief in an alternative universe translates to every conceivable issue. Cyclical, historical climate change turns into Armageddon. Babies are no longer babies, but clumps of unorganized tissue that reveal themselves as babies only after they leave the womb. The only way to make airplanes safe from terrorists is not to look for terrorists. And so on and so forth.
My favorite is how progressives turn the First Amendment into something completely different than what it actually says. They believe it calls for the “separation of church and state,” though it says no such thing. It actually reads, in part, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…” That’s funny, the words “separation,” “church,” or “state” refuse to appear in the First Amendment. Maybe they’re hiding elsewhere in the Constitution? Or maybe not.
Despite the conspicuous absence of these words from the Constitution, progressives are constantly shouting down any religious references in the public square based on the Constitution’s supposed prohibition of religious speech through the “separation” clause. No such clause exists and the Amendment clearly states that Congress “shall make no law,” which means, for any progressives reading this, that Congress “shall make no law.” Do I need to repeat the phrase again so it’s clear? Apparently I do, but even if I do repeat it, progressives will still read, “separation of church and state.” It’s exasperating to say the least.
In the same way, progressives read the First Amendment’s free speech clauses as applying only to individuals and the causes they believe in. In other words, if you’re an organization representing the interests of a group of people, you’re not entitled to the same speech rights as an individual. Moreover, if you’re a group progressives distrust and malign, say an evil corporation or a conservative non-profit, you have even fewer rights to free speech, if any.
Progressives fervently believe that the First Amendment applies only to individuals when it’s in their best interests to believe this (see Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission), though the text itself says, rather clearly: “…or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” The key phrase here is “of the people”. Note that it does not read, “of the person,” nor does it say, “of the people we agree with who aren’t racist Nazi homophobes like we say they are because they don’t believe in the same foolish notions of creating an earthly Utopia like we do.”
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