Well, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, you have just let the proverbial cat out of the bag.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKvbPzsl5aQ
The outright lies and tricks are thick in that clip. Contraception is expensive for individuals (it’s actually between $108 and $600 per year) but won’t be for insurers somehow, who can’t charge for the billions of pills they will have to give out, and so forth. You have to be ignorant or brain dead to believe a word of that. Everyone with an iota of common sense knows that premiums will go up, or self-insuring religious institutions will either cut off their insurance plans, face steep fines possibly in the millions of dollars, or shut down altogether. Or, more likely, some combination of all of that. It’s going to be a mess.
But here’s the crux.
“The flip side of this is that religious institutions shouldn’t be imposing their values, necessarily, on their employees who don’t necessarily subscribe to those values.”
Employment is voluntary. Sure, most of us have to have jobs, but we have the freedom to not work at a religious institution whose values we find objectionable. There is no imposition of values going on in how religious institutions handle their insurance plans, or wasn’t until Sebelius’ edict came down. Religious institutions exist to demonstrate, promote and amplify their values and beliefs. It’s kind of the point, to a large extent, of the religious institutions that are being forced now by the government to pay for things that violate their consciences.
Government, in the American vision as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, is supposed to exist to guarantee our freedoms. Not mandate equality of outcomes or even access to a particular good or service. Certainly not to impose values on institution or citizens against their will or consciences, in violation of the plain text of the Constitution.
DWS has turned the American vision of the government-citizen relationship on its head. We’re not citizens anymore, in charge of a government of, by and for the people. We’re subjects to edicts from on high, imposed by unelected bureaucrats enacting legislation we were not allowed to examine before the Democrats passed it. They can do anything they want now, to us, the subjects of the regime. She’s also admitting that the pill war isn’t really about the pill, it’s about values — liberal values — and imposing them on the country without its consent or even input. And she’s admitting that she and her party are demolishing the wall separating church and state. It’s over. The first amendment is dead.
Having admitted this, what’s left to discuss? Pandora’s box has been opened, and the only thing left to do is defeat these latter-day leftist inquisitors and undo everything they have done.
The liberal Democrats’ foolishness on this remarkable. The chairman of the Democratic National Committee has paved the way in her remarks for the next Republican administration, which may come about sooner than any Democrat thinks, to swing the pendulum the other way and use the government to impose a totally different set of values on the very Democrats who are cool with it now when their man is in power. They’ll have no one to blame but themselves when that happens.
h/t Hot Air
Additional thought: America has enjoyed a mostly successful run at having stable pluralistic society because our social contract includes bright lines protecting the right to disagree with each other and with the government and remain within the law, mostly without penalty, but with a tradition and respect for civil disobedience when it’s necessary. The freedom to engage in unpopular speech and promulgate unpopular ideas are defended within the Constitution’s first amendment, and it’s hard to argue that we all haven’t benefited from this protection. The same Constitution that allows the Klan to march and shout also allows Dr. Martin Luther King to overcome the Klan with the power of his ideas. At one point, and thanks to massive support from Democrats on up to President Woodrow Wilson, the Klan’s ideas were more popular than King’s. It was a long time and too slow in coming, but the Constitution’s protections of the right to disagree paved the way for the Klan’s eventual and just defeat.
DWS and the Democrats have gutted one of the bulwarks in the social contract, with the mandate that goes against religious freedom of conscience. DWS’s suggestion above that religious institution should not do what they exist to do, but government should do what it was never intended to to, and Pelosi’s yesterday that churches themselves should be forced into contracts that violate their consciences, prove that they’re not content with what they have already done, and they will continue to push for more and more. Having shown no respect for the social contract, or for the American tradition of civil disagreement, there is no telling what they will command next if they are not stopped.
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