Employer-Provided Health Care Is Not a Religious Issue

[Draggingtree]

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Employer-Provided Health Care Is Not a Religious Issue

 

Mises Daily: Tuesday, July 15, 2014 by Ryan McMaken

The fact that opponents of private property rights have managed to frame the debate over health-care mandates as some sort of religious issue is one of the great public relations coups of our time.

 

Note below, for example, the top of a full page ad in the New York Times taken out by a group called the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

 

After approvingly quoting eugenicist Margaret Sanger, the ad goes on to claim that the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision is a Catholic plot to impose “dogma” on the United States legal system. Further down (not pictured), the ad then claims that allowing employers to choose what sort of compensation they give their employees in exchange for labor is proof that the United States is becoming a “theocracy.”

This sort of thinking is part of a larger, and truly bizarre, assertion that a respect for freedom or civil liberties demands that employees use the power of the state to force one’s employer to provide certain types of health care.

 

[Draggingtree]

Senate Democrats Want to Give Priority to Their “Religion”

By: Sen. Marco Rubio (Diary) | July 15th, 2014 at 05:48 PM

 

Two weeks ago, in a narrow ruling that won’t affect the vast majority of Americans, the U.S. Supreme Court simply applied the provisions of the bipartisan Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which protects Americans from being forced by government to violate central tenets of their faith. This Hobby Lobby ruling was little more than a straightforward application of a law reflecting the common sense of a country founded on the very ideals of not just religious liberty but individual liberty in general.

 

However, as is often the case in today’s political environment, there was no shortage of liberal activists and politicians who immediately focused on ways they could turn this ruling into an opportunity to divide our country for short-term political gain.

 

This week, Senate Democrats are attempting to play out the next act in their political theater by introducing legislation to override the Supreme Court’s ruling

http://www.redstate.com/2014/07/15/senate-democrats-want-give-priority-religion/

[Draggingtree]

Senate Mischief

JUL 28, 2014, VOL. 19, NO. 43 • BY TERRY EASTLAND

On the topic of Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, the contraceptive mandate case decided on the last day of the recent Supreme Court term, the Democrats are fighting mad. They don’t like the decision. No, they despise it. Indeed, their rhetoric on Hobby Lobby has become so misleading, even strange, that the fact checkers at the Washington Post have felt compelled to call them to task, reminding the Democrats, among other things, that the decision does not outlaw contraceptives, and it does not allow bosses to prevent women from seeking birth control.

 

The Democrats want to “negate” the ruling. But as the Senate bill that would achieve that goal makes clear—a meas-ure Majority Leader Harry Reid vows to keep pushing over the next two years—they want to do far more than that. They want to nullify religious freedom guarantees in the context of health care. http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/senate-mischief_796737.html