The Washington Post’s superb pundit, Charles Krauthammer—a secular Jew (I believe)—demolishes President Obama and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in a column decrying the anti constitutional Free Birth Control Rule promulgated under Obamacare as it affects Catholic institutions. (Here was my take.)
After discussing Obama’s speech at a prayer breakfast, which need not concern us here, Krauthammer gets down to the very serious and important to American freedom business at hand: From “The Gospel According to Obama:”
And thus, the word came forth from Sebelius decreeing the exact criteria required (a) to meet her definition of “religious” and thus (b) to qualify for a modicum of independence from newly enacted state control of American health care, under which the aforementioned Sebelius and her phalanx of experts determine everything — from who is to be covered, to which treatments are to be guaranteed free of charge.
Criterion 1: A “religious institution” must have “the inculcation of religious values as its purpose.” But that’s not the purpose of Catholic charities; it’s to give succor to the poor. That’s not the purpose of Catholic hospitals; it’s to give succor to the sick. Therefore, they don’t qualify as “religious” — and therefore can be required, among other things, to provide free morning-after abortifacients.
How I wish I had written that. But there’s more:
Criterion 2: Any exempt institution must be one that “primarily employs” and “primarily serves persons who share its religious tenets.” Catholic soup kitchens do not demand religious IDs from either the hungry they feed or the custodians they employ. Catholic charities and hospitals — even Catholic schools — do not turn away Hindu or Jew. Their vocation is universal, precisely the kind of universal love-thy-neighbor vocation that is the very definition of religiosity as celebrated by the Gospel of Obama. Yet according to the Gospel of Sebelius, these very same Catholic institutions are not religious at all — under the secularist assumption that religion is what happens on Sunday under some Gothic spire, while good works are “social services” properly rendered up unto Caesar.
Indeed. And for not having the “proper” views on certain cultural issues, they must be forced to submit—or leave their good works behind.
Like so many Leftists today, Obama isn’t interested in Constitutional liberty, but the raw exercise of government power. And Obamacare has become the vehicle.
