Obama’s Deceptive Hidden Premises

[Draggingtree]

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE:

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/291299

 

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE

 

Obama’s Deceptive Hidden Premises

By Michael Novak

February 17, 2012 4:00 A.M.

 

The most evil thing about the Obama administration’s recent violation of the separation of church and state is its deceptiveness. With his order requiring inclusion of contraception and abortifacient drugs in insurance coverage, the president is smuggling the hidden premises of NARAL, Planned Parenthood, and other supporters of abortion into U.S. law, and doing so untruthfully.

 

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) instruction attacking religious institutions such as hospitals, universities, and programs for the poor rests on four hidden premises.

 

(1) The first deception is that the president has issued a “contraception mandate.” It is not that; it is a presidential power grab. No state or other jurisdiction is trying to ban contraception. Neither the Catholic Church nor any other religious body is trying to ban contraception. The means of contraception are even more widely available than in drugstores; one can pick up condoms in restrooms, even in restaurants. The reason for this deception is to make opponents appear to be doing something they are not. They are not banning contraception. It is dishonest to focus on contraception instead of on the real issue, the attempt to extend presidential power into areas constitutionally forbidden to it.

 

The genius of this deception is its explicit attack on the Catholic Church. This tactic was aided by the Church’s long and well-known moral disapproval of contraception, as an artificial barrier between a man’s and a woman’s complete self-giving. Yet the Church does not try to ban contraception even among its own congregants, only to teach that it is morally wrong, because it reveals a self-absorbed form of love.

 

In this way, by distorting Church doctrine, the president and his enablers in the press masked his power grab of forcing conscientious objectors to pay for contraception. The press also masked his violation of the Constitution in defining which religious bodies are religious, according to his ideas. Beginning with George Stephanopoulos, most of the press has been a delighted accomplice in misdescribing the issue.

 

(2) The second deception is that sterilization, contraception, abortifacients — and by logical extension, at the proper hour, abortion — are not matters of private choice, but matters of women’s health. This definition is then expanded into an enforceable right to women’s health. This supposed right is then expanded into a duty upon others to pay for the private choices and values systems of some women. In other words, this is naked coercion in its most deceptive form, and an illicit and twisted use of rights talk.

 

[RandyM]

Good article. Thanks, Draggingtree.@

[Pepper]

Excellent article and good comments as well.