Michael Novak has an article online at the National Review where he lists the four premises of the Obama Administration's recent violation of the separation of church and state. His approach of breaking it down into premises is important since its the premises that often get lost in the deceptive rhetoric of public dialogue. Here are the four premises as I have broken them down in bullet point fashion:
- Its not a contraception manadate; its a power grab.
- That abortifacients, contraception, sterilization, and arguably abortion by extension, are not private choices but women's health. Once they claim its women's health they then jump to a right to access and ultimately the right to have others pay for that access.
- That the President has the power to make laws regarding the self-understanding of churches.
- "The fourth hidden premise is that the president also has the power to trample on the free exercise of religion by individual laypersons of faith and devotion. If they do not work directly in a house of worship, the president says, these individuals are bound by this unconstitutional mandate, even if it violates their consciences."
The Obama administration has gone so far over the top with their actions as of late. We can hope that they won't hold up in court. Thet may be able to use the media to confuse the issue in the public but they can not play that same game in front of the Supreme Court.
To understand the game they are playing, let's consider what Novak says on the second premise when he comments "This definition is then expanded into an enforceable right to women’s health." This expansion is the movement from the existence of a women's health need (albeit only by phony definition) to an ought. Where does this obligation come from? Well, Obama created the obligation when he passed his health care law. Then they with some more playful defining of terms they claim that women are being singled out and refused treatment. Thus, they make this about women's rights. This game is getting very old and hopefully more and more transparent to the public.
Novak gets to the point with the following comments about premise three:
The Catholic Church has never understood itself merely as an inside-the-church institution. It regards itself as living in all its members and in their daily work, above all in the works of mercy sketched out by the Sermon on the Mount. The authenticity of worship and public liturgy is proved only when worshippers go out into the world and prove that they love their neighbors by meeting real needs. That is how any Christian knows whether or not he loves God, Whom he does not see — only when he loves his neighbor, whom he does see.<> HHS does not see religion that way. Neither does President Obama. The two of them have no scruple about a U.S. administration, for the first time in our history, trampling so heavily, blindly, and arrogantly upon the right of worshippers to define religion in their own way, not the government’s way. Never has an administration stomped so heavily beyond its constitutional powers into the vineyards of religious doctrine and its free exercise. <> This despised mandate is, then, a violation by one most powerful political institution, the state, against the integrity of those other major institutions that are outside the power of the state — the churches and synagogues and mosques. The Constitution in its First Amendment insists that “Congress shall make no law . . .” and it clearly does not mean that the president or his Department of Health and Human Services has the constitutional power to do so either.
Read the Article:
Obama's Deceptive Hidden Premises
Michael Novak, National Review Online, February 17, 2012.
