President Obama has come out with his glorious “compromise” regarding his health care regulation that would force religious institutions to pay for contraceptive and abortifacient coverage for their employees.
And what solution has The Smartest Person In The World come up with? That the institutions won’t have to pay for the coverage, the insurance companies will.
My, my. It’s actually difficult to find words acceptable to public discourse for this proposal. How does one characterize it? Stupidity or deceit? I honestly don’t know which. But any high school economics student should be able to tell you that the insurance companies’ cost will be passed on to the institutions.
This is exactly the same reasoning that undergirded Health Secretary Sebelius’ absurd claim that abortion will be universally covered by the health care bill, but taxpayer funds won’t be used. Remember when they used to accuse President Reagan of voodoo economics? You know, the same economics that reversed a recession and gave us seven historic years of prosperity? And which the Clinton administration, after first condemning the Reagan years as a “decade of greed”, was wise enough to adopt and use to extend the prosperity for years more?
Well, welcome to the real voodoo economics, whereby liberals increase the power of the state at a cost to our own freedoms.
They promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption. For whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved. -2Pet 2:19
If it were just our prosperity and economic freedom at stake, that would be bad enough. But the Obama administration here has grossly incurred upon our freedom of conscience. If they can do this, they can do anything. If we let them do this, we will let them do anything.
Mike Huckabee has said that “we’re all Catholics now”. Well, no. One doesn’t have to be Roman Catholic to oppose the use of abortifacients. And one doesn’t have to even be Christian to understand the threat to all when government attempts to obliterate freedom of conscience.
Yesterday during a photo op, Obama was asked about this so-called compromise he was proposing. His response to this to-be-expected, entirely reasonable question was: “C’mon, guys…” The Emperor just doesn’t want to be bothered with such mundane matters. He’s already decided what’s best for us. Our role is to accept his beneficent decree with gladness.
I follow the headlines every day, under the rubric of “watch and pray”. And I’ve got to say that in my life I’ve never seen this country so dangerously lost. I’ve seen us badly divided before, such as over the Vietnamese War. But as bad as that was, the nation still pretty much had a common moral fabric that most were using to try to find the right way forward. Now, that fabric is almost gone. The moral dumbing-down of the population is almost accomplished.
This means that the church must assume it prophetic role. The old church-state hand-in-glove paradigm is almost totally gone, and it is time for the church to arise and speak adversarial truth to power. At the same time, we need to prepare for life on the outside. A study of the Confessing Church’s struggles under Nazism, or of Chinese Christians thriving under decades of severe persecution is in order. We have been in this situation before.
The Chinese church has shown us that though costly and difficult, life outside the halls of powers can be most rewarding spiritually. It really is time for us to dust off our copies of the Book of Acts and find out how the early church did it. If there is one thing Barack Obama has taught us, it is that government is no longer our friend. It is finally time for the church to be the church.
