Cleveland Plain Dealer...
Obama dumps the Constitution for contraception
by Kevin O’Brien  
January 27, 2012 

Thousands of people spent Monday in Washington, D.C., protesting 39 years of legalized murder and commemorating more than 50 million American children lost to abortion. The protesters come every year, correctly refusing to drop the subject. 

But thanks to serial instances of President Barack Obama shredding the Constitution over the last couple of weeks, they had something new to talk about this year. 

An administration that has made it abundantly clear -- in ways that grow ever more brazen -- that it cares nothing for this nation’s founding principles or its foundational legal document announced last week that its re-election agenda requires an end to freedom of religion. 

That’s not overstating the case. That’s exactly the effect of the Obama administration’s ruling requiring employers -- including those affiliated with churches that have a moral or doctrinal objection to contraception -- to offer their workers insurance coverage that includes birth control at no out-of-pocket cost to the employee. 

Your church thinks contraception is wrong? Too bad. The institutions it has established will be required to buy contraception. 

But because Obama is a patient and gracious ruler, those institutions will get a whole extra year to shed their core beliefs before they have to comply with his edict. 

Human lives? Matters of faith? What God wants of us? 

Bah! Get real. There’s an election to win and a feminist- driven, abortion- worshiping left whose votes are essential. 

The only faith that matters here is the hard left’s belief in Obama’s willingness to use -- and, if necessary, abuse -- his power to advance its goals. 

Some of the things his imperial decree tells Americans really come as no great surprise. They are merely inevitable outgrowths of a brand of “health care reform” that is wrong for America in its concept and well on its way to being disastrous for America in its execution: 

• Private businesses no longer manage their own affairs -- not even their relationships with their own employees. 

• What were once private health insurance companies are now nothing more than government agencies. When it comes to products, coverage and cost, federal bureaucrats call the shots. 

• Private individuals -- barring the action of some court that still recognizes the Constitution as the supreme law of the land and the supreme limiter of government power over the individual -- are subservient to government, and government will determine what sort of medical care they will receive, if any. 

And churches? Institutions based on a belief in a power higher than government and on a moral code that aims at pleasing God rather than man? Institutions that, under the Constitution, are afforded a specific protection from government interference? 

They’re just anachronisms, like that very same Constitution. They stand in the way of progress. Worse, they have the temerity to resist what Obama -- a man who once said he would not want his daughters “punished with a baby” -- cynically defines as “efforts to ensure that our daughters have the same rights, freedoms, and opportunities as our sons to fulfill their dreams.” 

Over the last 39 years, since the Supreme Court went prospecting far outside the Constitution to find a right to abortion on demand, more than 50 million unborn American babies have been punished with death. Daughters and sons, they were brutally denied the right to live, to be free and to fulfill their dreams. 

The court, making it up as it went along, based that decision on ephemeral “emanations” and “penumbras.” 

Constitutionally, what Obama is doing is worse. He is defying the unambiguous words of the First Amendment, which denies the federal government power over religious expression.

Obama’s contraception requirement puts an abrupt end to the freedom of churches to operate their institutions according to the tenets of their faith. 

Americans, whether they favor or oppose abortion, cannot mutely accept the continued dismantling of the Constitution by a man whose oath was to preserve, protect and defend it. 

Read this and other columns at the Cleveland Plain Dealer