Politics and Insights from History

Barack Obama’s administration has not only decided that everyone must have health insurance, but they have also decreed that said health insurance must provide contraceptives.  Now, this is only in the news because various Catholic organizations have decreed that being forced to provide contraceptives goes against their conscience and the first amendment.  By the way, you should ask yourself if you even knew that providing contraceptives was mandatory according to the health care bill until this came out.

Here’s the thing, the entire health care legislation violates the first amendment and the Constitution.  The government has not only mandated the purchase of a commodity (health insurance), but they have also mandated what that commodity must consist of.  The government has decided.  They have decreed.  Where is our individual choice?  Where is the right of the individual and of individual organizations to decide if they want health insurance and all that it offers?

The federal government has not right or authority to mandate the purchase of any commodity and that includes health care.  It doesn’t matter if they think it is best.  To mandate this is overstepping hteir bounds.  The federal government also has no right or authority to force any organization (religious or non-religious) to provide contraceptives.  What kind of health insurance is offered should be left to businesses and organizations to decide.

The Catholic, and other religious, organizations and groups are right to stand against the Obama administration on this issue.  Their very freedom is at stake.  Our freedom is at stake.  If the federal government can get away with forcing groups to provide contraceptives, what else will they force us to do?  What is to stop them from demanding that every organization provide monetary assistance in helping poor families purchase healthy food as part of their insurance coverage?  After all, we have an obesity crisis according to Michelle Obama.  (She might want to follow her own Let’s Move It campaign.)

There is more to this contraceptive controversy than just the forcing of religious groups to provide it.  The is really government forcing people to accept its mandates and ideology while at the same time saying that your personal conscience does not matter.

Where is the ACLU in all this?  Are they not going to stand up and help protect the rights of religious organizations and individuals?  Whenever children are asked to pray in school, whenever one student mentions God in a speech. the ACLU is right there to stop the forcing of religion upon unsuspecting people.  But whenever a religious person is forced to go against his religion the ACLU is absent.  (By the way, the mandate to provide contraceptives does not apply to Muslim groups.)

We have the right to the free exercise of religion.  Government is not supposed to force you to participate in any one religion.  It is to treat them all equally, while allowing individuals to worship according their conscience.  Within reason of course.  You cannot kill in the name of religion.

On the other side of the coin, the government cannot deny you the right to practice you religious beliefs.  Catholics do not believe in contraceptives.  Forcing them to provide contraceptives violates their right to the free exercise of religion.  Which means the federal government is violating the law.

Here is something that everyone should ask themselves: What gives the government the right to tell you that you must have health insurance.  What gives the government the right to force organizations to provide contraceptives as part of their insurance program?  What gives the federal government the authority to dictate to us how we should live, what health care we will have, what education our children will receive, and anything else that falls into personal choice and personal responsibility?

We have a Constitution and Bill of Rights for a reason.  It is to keep the federal government in line and to prevent it from becoming too big.  But for the last century we as a nation have not followed our own Constitution.  As a result, we have a bloated government that is encroaching into our lives and spending us broke.  If we continue our current course we will have a society where everyone is equally poor, on government assistance, uneducated, have our lives run by bureaucrats, and a worthless economy as our money continues to lose value.

What happens in this contraceptive case will affect your personal life.  You may not think so   But it will in the end.

Unemployment is down according to the media, so we should all rejoice and praise Obama.  But what is there to be overjoyed about?  The rate is only down by a miniscule amount and unemployment still hangs around the 8% line.  These unemployment numbers released by the government should always be taken with a grain of salt.

For the past three years the federal government has not been honest about the unemployment rate.  When it was around 9% according to them, it was probably closer to 11% or 12%.  But Barack Obama and the Democrats needed us to believe that his stimulus package was working, when it truth it has crippled the economy causing it to stagnant.

The government only counts people who are recently unemployed.  They stopped counting those who have been out of work for over six months, have given up looking for a job, and the amount of people forced to take part time jobs instead of full time work.  There are also a lot of people who manage to find temporary work.  But when it is over, they are back in the unemployment line.  However, you won’t find them included in the latest unemployment statistic.

Even if unemployment is around 8%, give or take a few percentage points, it is still an abysmal number.  The government claims that there were 240,000 jobs created last month.  What they fail to mention is that in prior months we have probably lost three times that amount and that doesn’t include 2009 or 2010 job losses.  The other thing the unemployment rate does not tell you is the rise in the cost of living.  Even if the amount of people out of work has decreased, most have settled for low wage or part time work, when they used to have high paying, full time jobs.  Add that to the increase in the cost of living.  If you’ve bought gas lately, or groceries, you have probably noticed that prices have increased.  In many places gas is around $4 a gallon and milk is close to $4 a gallon.  Produce prices have gone up as well as the price of bread and eggs.  Add this all together, Americans are not better off now than they were three years ago.  But the Democrats and Obama want you to believe differently.

This is an election, so politicians will do anything to get elected, especially incumbents.  Obama loves the perks of being he president.  He won’t give that up.  You can bet that he will tout the latest unemployment numbers as proof that his policies are working.  Under Obama unemployment has reached and remains close to double digits, the economy has stagnated, consumers are spending less meaning they have little confidence in the economy, and the deficit has increased by $4 trillion dollars.  What does it matter if unemployment goes down when the government spends money like water?

In truth, the economy is not on the road to recovery.  People have little confidence in it and in their leaders.  Prices on basic consumer goods continue to rise while the number of full-time well-paying jobs decrease  Obama and the Democrats want us to settle with what we have, instead of striving to achieve better results.