The absence of free contraceptives, abortifacients, STD testing,
and sterilizations, among other Sebelius-decreed “essential”
services, constitutes a “war on women,” says President Obama. “It’s
a scary time to be a woman,” warbles a stooge in one of his
campaign ads.
Obama’s arrogance is bottomless. Even as he violates the freedom
of the religious — reducing them to the status of serfs in his
planned secularist and socialist state — he has the gall to cast
them as the victimizers.
Under this coercive secular state, Christian values are no
longer American values. Obama’s former chief of staff, Rahm
Emanuel, has made this view official by threatening to ban
Christian businesses like Chick-fil-A that appear out of step with
“Chicago values.”
If Obama wins a second term, Americans will be expected to
conform not only to Chicago-style politics but also to “Chicago
values.” Opponents of gay marriage will be treated as enemies of
the state. Obama’s military already tells chaplains and privates
who dissent from Obama’s agenda to “get out.”
As reported by the Washington Times in 2010, Lieutenant
General Thomas P. Bostick, the Army’s deputy chief of staff in
charge of personnel, showered withering contempt on traditionally
Christian members of the military: “Unfortunately, we have a
minority of service members who are still racists and bigoted and
you will never be able to get rid of all of them.… But these people
opposing this new policy [in favor of abolishing Don’t Ask, Don’t
Tell] will need to get with the program, and if they can’t, they
need to get out.”
Admiral Michael Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, echoed this line, telling a military chaplain who opposed
the abolition of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy in 2010, “If you
cannot get in line, resign your commission.”
Get out of the military, get out of major cities — this is the
voice of Obama’s commissars from San Francisco to Boston in his war
on the religious. He is building a secularist and socialist animal
farm in which no higher power exists than the will of the new
Napoleons.
Socialism and secularism overlap in Obama’s political
philosophy. He can see that religion is the natural rival of the
state, an obstacle that must be destroyed or coopted if he is to
succeed in his central planning. For the key to central planning is
coerced universal participation. No one can be allowed to leave the
animal farm. This is why, even though it makes little political
sense, he will not expand the religious exemption beyond purely
sectarian organizations. If he were to concede that the right to
religious freedom trumps his invented right to “reproductive
services,” his animal farm would stall and collapse.
Even Americans who don’t support organized religion should see
that it serves as an important buffer to the overweening state, and
that the extinction of freedom for those groups will one day
imperil their own. When government replaces God, its pitilessness
affects everyone.
On August 1, all employers, whether they realize it or not,
became cogs in Obama’s socialist and secularist machine. If they
refuse to subsidize the sex lives of their employees, Obama can now
bankrupt them through punitive fines. The fine is up to $100 per
employee, per day, according to an estimate by the Congressional
Research Service. The official position of Obama’s Justice
Department in defense of this fiat is that businessmen lose their
religious liberty the moment they decide to open their doors to the
public. Their money and their consciences belong to the
government.
The sheer idiocy of the HHS mandate was illustrated recently by
Senator Tom Harkin, who, in a comically desperate attempt to cast
the absence of free contraceptives and abortifacients as a form of
corporate oppression, said, “There are many women who take birth
control pills, for example, because they have terrible menstrual
cramps once a month, some of them almost incapacitated, can’t work.
I know of young women myself who, because of this, aren’t able to
work and be productive, and it’s prescribed by their doctor.”
Harkin, apparently, can’t rest until these women are back working
on Obama’s animal farm, having received, under the gaze of
government, all the suitable injections to guarantee their
productivity for years to come. Harkin’s paternalism is so
touching: What would women do without his monitoring of their
ailments?
It is high time Mitt Romney hit back hard against this nonsense.
Americans are losing real rights to Obama’s preposterously phony
new ones. The mendacity of the alleged “war on women” cannot be
overstated. If Romney continues to run a narrow race focused on
economic competency, he will lose. Man does not live on bread
alone. Romney needs to make the race a referendum on something
larger and more potent — the loss of God-given freedoms and
Obama’s sinister construction of the coercive socialist-secular
state.
