MARSHALL: Obamacare is on a collision course with our liberty generally and the first casualty
is religious freedom.
REPORTER: Under the President’s healthcare reform law, church-affiliated schools, hospitals,
and charities that provide insurance to their employees must cover the cost of contraceptives.
NEWS ANCHOR: The Catholic Church says it’s a violation of conscience.
NEWS ANCHOR: The White House says it’s not going to back down when it comes to that contraceptive
mandate.
REPORTER: Well a federal lawsuit has been filed …
NEWS ANCHOR: Lawmakers heard from religious leaders today about President Obama’s contraception
mandate.
RABBI SOLOVEICHIK: The Administration impedes religious liberty by unilaterally redefining
what it means to be religious.
MARSHALL: We’ve heard a lot in the news lately about the Obama anti-conscience mandate
and people are right to be alarmed about this.
It’s requiring religious employers to offer insurance coverage that will pay for abortion-inducing
drugs, contraception, sterilization, even if that conflicts with their religious belief.
ELLMERS: When the government can come in and tell a religious organization how they should
do business, then it becomes a violation of religious freedom.
LEVIN: Employers are in an impossible situation where the government is telling them that
they have to violate their own moral convictions or else basically get out of the business
they’re in.
And obviously that’s an unprecedented violation of religious liberty in American life.
DONOVAN: The opposition to this is not just coming from a handful of denominations or
a handful of institutions, it’s coming from across the religious spectrum.
People who don’t necessarily share the same views about the particular service and may
have no problem providing it.
LEVIN: They’re trying to turn this into an argument about whether you believe in contraception.
Look, I’m not Catholic and I’m not opposed to contraception.
I’m opposed to despotism.
And that’s basically what we’re seeing here.
What we’re seeing is the government telling religious institutions that they have to violate
their own convictions or else get out of the business of helping the poor, or educating
people, or of healing the sick.
And that’s ridiculous.
That’s totally unacceptable.
It leaves no room for institutions that are guided by moral purposes that in any way differ
from those of the people in power in the government.
This has nothing to do with contraception.
This is about whether we still have a free society.
MARSHALL: The Obama Administration announced this policy back in August.
There was a huge outcry as there should be against this religious liberty violation.
As a result, the Obama Administration issued what it called an “accommodation”.
This was no resolution at all to the religious liberty question at the heart of the matter.
And what’s more, it ended up just being talk because at the end of the day, the Obama
Administration filed the final regulation exactly as it had been written back in August.
There was no change at all.
ELLMERS: I was first struck by the president’s word that it is an accommodation.
In other words the benevolent President Barack Obama has now bestowed upon all of us that
he is going to change his mind a little bit.
MARSHALL: This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the problems with Obamacare
One of the reasons is it’s the first concrete detail, practically, that we’ve seen about
the essential benefits package — that is, what insurance will have to cover as a part
of Obamacare.
All kinds of opportunity for moral conflict for Americans!
We have handed the moral compass for some of our most personal healthcare decisions
to bureaucrats.
WEIGEL: People should have seen this coming.
Once you get the federal government defining the playing field in health care with the
degree of coercive action that was obvious under Obamacare.
I think it was implicit in letting Leviathan take over the drug store.
BLACKBURN: What this is the natural result of is happens when you have to pass the bill
to find out what’s in it.
ELLMERS: This is about government control.
This didn’t improve healthcare in any way, but as we’ve seen over the time that Obamacare
has been unveiled, it’s just been one situation after another.
You know, the government coming in and telling you what kind of healthcare you should have,
who should provide it, and rather than you be able to make these decisions with you and
your healthcare professional, your physician, now the government is going to come in and
make these decisions for you.
LEVIN: I think this is part and parcel of a larger pattern of the work of the Obama
Administration, not only in their work in civil society but also in the relationship
to the private economy where again and again the administration is trying to clear away
mediating institutions, mediating players between the government and the individual.
We are left only with the government and that leaves citizens with far fewer options and
far less freedom.
TURNER: Once you start to centralize power, these conflicts are absolutely inevitable.
Obamacare is wrong for America because it’s fundamentally opposed to the relationship
between the citizens and their government.
We are sovereign citizens.
Obamacare turns us into subjects.
WEIGEL: What is at stake here ultimately is whether civil society will survive.
Or whether voluntary institutions or voluntary will be allowed to function only if they imitate
the government.
LEVIN: What it basically does is it says it’s up to the government to define the ends of
society and then the question of means is just a question of efficiency.
So is it most efficient to have say a Catholic hospital promote the ends that are determined
by the government or is it most efficient to have the government do it?
But that of course is not what civil society is.
Civil society is a way for us to decide the ends we want to pursue.
And what the Obama Administration approach does is take away our ability to determine
the ends of our society in any way other than politics.
TURNER: So you’ve got one after another every time they try to fix this, they wind
up slamming into another part of the Constitution, and it shows that this law is fundamentally,
down to its DNA, unconstitutional.
BLACKBURN: The American People have been awakened to what this administration is doing, and
I think that they are ready for the fight.
It will be a worthy fight.