Obamacare & Wrath of The Faithful

By Steven Masone

This week the Supreme Court began to hear arguments on the constitutionality of the health care law known as Obamacare. 

The challenge before the court, is a challenge it has often not always lived up to. And that is to keep perspective that applying our constitution is not about straining at gnats and swallowing camels over the meaning of words in order to further personal agendas. No, it's about applying, using good faith, the principles that define this country and assuring that our government operates  consistently and with the spirit of those principles.

There is no excuse for abandoning common sense. And persuasive people can always use words to persuade less gifted people. 

Just remember the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857, when the Supreme Court decisively ruled 7-2 that slaves in America were property no different than household goods or livestock and could never be treated, under the U.S. Constitution, as citizens. The wrong arguments prevailed and it took a civil war to undo that evil. 

This in a country founded under the principle that it is self-evident "that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

Demonstrations are taking place nationwide to bring home to the American people, and  to the nine Supreme Court justices, that Obamacare passed in 2010 through procedural maneuvers and without a single Republican vote   violated our core principles of human liberty.

The major wave of protest is about the violation of religious liberty by applying the employer mandate to provide free contraceptives, sterilization and abortion pills as part of health insurance.

Seriously, how can anyone that cares about holding true to the principles of our Declaration of Independence envision an America in which government forces religious institutions to violate their religious convictions or pay a fine?

A nation in which Catholic organizations, or any religious organizations, are forced to finance the very behavior prohibited by their religion is a different American nation than originally founded and that the Constitution was written to preserve and protect.

No honest reasoning can conclude that among the rights with which we are endowed by our Creator is a right to use government to force third parties to pay for the contraceptives of others, especially if this violates a third party's religious convictions.

What decisions the nine justices come to will more than likely be a 5 to 4 split along the usual ideological and political lines. To those who cherish the U.S. Constitution,  being forced to violate religious beliefs should be a clear enough violation as the lower courts have ruled. On the left we see the unrest of those disgruntled of the Occupy Wall street movement exercising their irreligious anarchist philosophy.

We soon shall see how close we are to an era of civil protests and unrest from people of faith who can organize and mobilize with money and muscle other groups lack should the court deprive them of religious freedom as the Dred Scott decision took away the God given freedom and liberties of African Americans. Abolitionists were the religious zealots that won the day then, and this blatant encroachment by this administration may soon be it's undoing.