Solomon Obama Splits the Baby

Eager to achieve universal insurance coverage for health issues caused by illicit sexual behavior, and put an election-season gaffe caused by his disregard for others' consciences behind him, President Obama has proposed to liberate religious institutions from his Administration's demand that they cover sinful behavior.

His Solomonic compromise: make the insurance carriers rather than the religious institutions pay for it.  One still might wonder what business it is of the State to dictate to religious institutions what activity they may meaningfully regard (by not subsidizing it) as sinful, which is the real point of the dispute.

Everyone knows that feminists view contraception, abortion and sterilizations as women's rights and positive goods, not as sins.  Why can the power of the State be used to champion their beliefs and trample on contrary ones, however, when the opposite imposition is viewed as an impermissible breach of the Wall of Separation between Church and State?

Justice Holmes famously wrote in his Lochner dissent, “The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social Statics.”  I wonder what he would say about it's enactment of Simon de Beauvior's Second Sex?

Religious employers will still have to offer sin-care to employees, but somebody else will have to pay for it.  Evidently, the President and his allies think this brouhaha is about the money, not the moral and constitutional principles threatened by the ObamaCare directive.


True, it is repugnant for a person to be made to subsidize behavior he considers objectionable.  Leftists understand this when the behavior is related to national defense and other necessary and legitimate expenditures of public money that oblige the offense.  They're only blind to State overreach when the expenditures in question are about matters truly beyond the State's province, like who should pay for a woman's sex life, and involve expenditures of private money.

I'm not sure which unorthodox imposition thrills Leftists most: the State-mandated inversion of traditional morality--which upholds marriage and family, not sexual activity and baby prevention--or the State's determination of private expenditures.  Both are striking inversions of nature, offenses against justice, and blows against the liberty of many for the supposed rights of women, meaning feminists.

Note also the President's inflexible insistence on this one point: that somebody is going to pay for the woman's sexual activity, and it isn't going to be her.

She has Leftist rights; the responsibilities, even financial, are somebody else's "fair share."  It's important to the President that everyone pay for them so that nobody specifically notices the burden, and everyone's hands are covered in the blood.

Of course, the insurance companies will pass the cost of this additional expense onto policy holders.  So, Catholic institutions, for instance, will still pay more for policies, and their money will still be used to pay for morally illicit practices, just not directly.

President Obama believes that the American people are that stupid.  Maybe we are; this scam of fungible money entering one pocket rather than another has worked for Planned Parenthood for decades.

Not everyone is fooled, however.  Former US ambassador to the Vatican Mary Ann Glendon, Princeton professor Robert George, Notre Dame law professor Carter Snead, Catholic University President John Garvey, and Yuval Levin of the Ethics & Public Policy Center explained their objection in an open letter:

This so-called “accommodation” changes nothing of moral substance and fails to remove the assault on religious liberty and the rights of conscience which gave rise to the controversy. It is certainly no compromise. The reason for the original bipartisan uproar was the administration’s insistence that religious employers, be they institutions or individuals, provide insurance that covered services they regard as gravely immoral and unjust. Under the new rule, the government still coerces religious institutions and individuals to purchase insurance policies that include the very same services.

Had the two women in the bible brought their baby to Solomon Obama's court, how would he have responded?  Perhaps he would have split the baby in half even after determining who the real mother was because, after all, feminists' rights always require that some baby be denied life, or existence.