The gift that keeps on giving

Oh the magical health-care bill. The goose that lays the golden eggs, the gift that keeps on giving.

"We need to pass the bill in order to see what's in it." So said Nancy Pelosi on that fateful day, before she walked to the capital building, arm in arm with her accomplices, eager to put the final nail in the coffin of individual freedom and personal reponsibility for Americans.

The recent furor over the contraception clause in the Obamacare monstrosity is the latest example of the creeping Liberal Leviathan, hungry to gobble up the last vestiges of freedom and liberty in this land. It's not enough for them to control our wallets and our bodies. Now they want to take away our freedom of conscience as well.

Obama has, in the past, lamented the fact that the constitution is a set of negative liberties. "It spells out what the government can't do to you, not what the government can do for you." Only he and his kind would see that as a negative. The fact that the framers wanted to limit the size and scope of the power of the state is only a bad thing to those that wish to increase the power and authority of the state, that wish to control every last facet of our lives, that think they know better than us what is best for us.

Naturally, many in the media are portraying church-sponsored abortion as a women's rights issue. Women should have the right to choose what they do with their own bodies. They should also have the right to pay for it themselves.

In this new era of "no harm, no foul", responsibility is transferred from the actor to the innocent bystander. The auto companies don't have to suffer for bowing to the unions and creating an unsustainable business model. The investment companies, at least those deemed too big to fail, don't have to pay for their shaky investment strategies. Homeowners that signed up for mortgages they couldn't afford are allowed to walk away from their contracts, not only without any repurcussions, but now with a nice little check from the taxpayers, courtesy of the extortion tactics of the Obama regime.

They don't have to pay, but we do. Big government has taken over the banking industry, the automotive industry, and the healthcare industry. "We're looking out for the middle-class" they say. How, by making us foot the bill for other people's mistakes? Does anyone in the middle-class want that kind of looking out for? We'll find out in November.

The purpose of the constitution is to protect the citizens from the government, not the other way around. The "Wall of separation" between church and state was not erected to protect he state from the church, or the church from the state. It was intended to protect all of us from collusion between the two. Each and every right granted by the constitution is an individual right.

The Catholic church got into bed with the democratic party a long time ago. They bought into the ideology, and now they are seeing where that ideology leads. The church is no longer the sheppard, but the sheepdog, herding the flock to where? Wherever the state tells it to.

Most Americans, Catholics included, now agree that reproductive rights are a personal issue. It is really up to the couple, not just the woman, to decide for themselves. But shouldn't that decision come with some consequence? If abortion is, as it has become, socially acceptable, should it be free as well? By free I mean, of course, funded by the taxpayers through organizations such as Planned Parenthood, or in this case, the other people covered by the insurance companies that will be forced to provide these services at no cost to some people, forcing them to raise rates for all people.

Individual freedom only works when it is combined with personal responsibility. When there are no consequences, people are willing to take more risks than they normally would, "insert mortgage meltdown comment here."

The new statists are using the back door on us. Instead of limiting our freedom directly, they are taking away our sense of responsibility, then using that as an excuse to curtail our liberty. There are no longer any consequences to our actions, we make reckless choices, we can no longer be trusted to make these decisions for ourselves, they will make them for us.

To paraphrase W.B. Yeats, what rough beast, it's hour come round at last, slouches towards Washington to be born. It is the quasi-socialist, semi-fascist, soft totalitarian ideology of the left that will be our undoing.

It may be halftime for America, but if we are to survive for the second half as America, let's hope it's the fourth quarter for the Obama regime.