Why George Takei Is An Idiot

Clueless Democrats — sorry for the redundancy there — are passing this meme around on social media and saying how great and insightful it is.

It’s stupid.

Just because a guy who pushed buttons and encountered unconvincing aliens on a 1960s TV show says something, doesn’t make it true.

Hobby Lobby doesn’t have to be a church for its owners to have religious and private property rights. Corporations are made up of humans who form a legal entity for a purpose, in this case, to sell picture frames and nick-nacks. The owners of this particular corporation are a family. They have rights. They do not surrender those rights because they formed a business. Anyone who thinks that they did surrender those rights when they formed their family business is a moron.

The Greens — they own Hobby Lobby — were literally minding their own business when the Obama administration slammed them with a mandate forcing them to use their property to pay for something that violates their religious beliefs. The Greens acted on their beliefs and took the mandate to court. They won. That’s how it works in this country.

The scary part is that we were one Anthony Kennedy away from losing serious ground in both the private property and religious freedom spheres. Even scarier — people like George Takei spout off without having the first clue what they’re even talking about. And others just think he’s a genius.

The Obamacare mandate in question here is not a “neutrally crafted law.” It’s a regulation that the Department of Health and Human Services attached to a law that is itself of dubious legitimacy. The Obama administration could unwrite that regulation at any time. It could amend it. It has chosen not to, and chose to take the Greens all the way to the Supreme Court to defend it. The Obama administration are the aggressor in this fight. The Greens’ case is entirely defensive.

Obamacare’s dubious legitimacy is based on a couple of things. It’s a revenue bill, essentially. Or a tax, if you’re John Roberts. The House is supposed to kick off such bills, but in Obamacare’s case, the version that passed originated in the Senate. This is not a game, it’s how the Constitution works. The House and Senate had to engage in legislative chicanery to pass the thing. They passed it along hard party lines, over holidays and in the dead of night. The Democrats passed it against the will of the majority of the American people. Obamacare has never been popular. Had the abortifacient mandate been a part of the actual bill that passed, it might not have even passed. There remain enough Catholic Democrats in Congress who would have objected to it. As fragile as the passage process was, and as many kickbacks and buyoffs as it took to get it over the line, including that mandate in the actual bill might have killed the whole thing.

We are a nation that has enshrined respect for religious beliefs into our Constitution. That’s not some feel-good thing. It’s the bedrock of our system. The Supreme Court found that the Obamacare mandate puts an undue burden on religious people. They based that decision in part on the First Amendment, and in part on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Private property and religious freedom are rights hard won over hundreds of years. Takei and his ilk would roll those rights back. They must be stopped, and they deserve to be mocked.

The bottom line here is that George Takei is an idiot and has surrendered the right to be taken seriously. Anyone who passes the above meme around on social media in an approving way is even more of an idiot than he is.