The Audacity of Power

Charles Kadlec writes in Forbes Magazine about last week's governmental overreach into Americans' lives and liberties. If you don't know by now that the State has ordered the Church to violate its principles, and religious believers to violate their consciences by complying with an ObamaCare diktat to actively cooperate with evil, you are asleep at the wall of separation.

To be fair, the President has only overreached into traditional Americans' lives and liberties, on behalf of Left-wing, revolutionary Americans and their radical feminist ideology. It's not as if he's acting the tyrant without someone's support and encouragement.

Revolutionary Lefties don't worry about there being nobody around to speak for them when their time comes--Martin Niemöller, and all that--because they don't see themselves as aggressors, and they intend to force everyone into compliance with their monist obsessions. They don't suspect that anyone will come for them because they don't expect to leave anyone with a different mind hanging around.

They're like a cross between Don Ciccio and Sauron, that way. That's my view, incidentally, not necessarily Kadlec's.

[quote] [T]he Catholic Church can [make] a humble statement of principal that in the matters of religious practices and conscience, there is a higher authority than government Who it chooses to obey. If President Obama prevails and unleashes the full force of the federal government against the Church, the cost will be the closing of Catholic schools, hospitals and the loss of social services that play a vital part in communities across the nation. Such a stand would make clear to the American people that the alternative to religious freedom would be a mortal wound to our civil liberties and a complete disruption of civil society.

I am not a Catholic, nor do I believe in the Church’s opposition to contraception. But I pray that the leadership of the Catholic Church will have the faith and courage to stand for its core beliefs and use all of its moral power and political influence to defeat the President’s edict. I pray they will reach out across the political spectrum to people of all faiths, agnostics and atheists in the name of religious freedom and individual liberty. By so doing, they, and the institution of the Catholic Church, will have my love and respect for the rest of my life. [end quote]

With respect to the first paragraph, if the Church vacates the helping space in civil society, it will abandon it's divinely conferred mission. That is less likely to happen than its paying the fines, or Bishops going to jail for non-compliance.

It would also be contrary to what America needs especially at this perilous moment. Civil society of which the Church is a crucial element must increase; the government and its totalistic impulses, not to mention its outrageous cost, must decrease. Leaving the field would perversely accomplish just the opposite.

The preferable outcome is for the various groups mentioned in the second paragraph to join forces with the Catholic Church to raise such a ruckus that even emperor Obama hiding behind his pretorian press doesn't feel politically safe.

If "President Obama unleashes the full force of the federal government against the Church," then he should be removed from power by impeachment even before the election. He's already unleashed enough of it to warrant his defeat in November.

Conceptually, this firestorm has been provoked on behalf of a shibboleth and a fraud. The former is that women's healthcare mandates contraception coverage (paid for by somebody else, yet); that contraception is "[health]care she needs" rather than a service she requires by choosing to subject her natural, healthy physiology to her actions, rather than conform her actions to her physiology.

The fraudulent premise is that healthcare needs to be paid for by one's employer. Why? Why not by oneself, which would turn competitive market forces loose on escalating costs?

The most beneficial result from this social ordeal would be the public's conscious identification of what passes for women's rights in feminist circles as "a mortal wound to our civil liberties and complete disruption of civil society." Feminists of either sex are totalitarians and cannot be trusted with power.

The strident march of tolerance--for sexual rights, but not for those who consider them sinful--has left a shambles of American governance from the Supreme Court to the White House, not sparing the Capitol. Can we stop thinking with our pelvises now?

I am heartened that a non-catholic proponent of contraception can see that the Catholic Church stands on moral and American ground, while the government that deigns to impose sexual beliefs more congenial to him on resistant religious adherents is neither moral, nor American. As Mike Huckabee said the other day, we are all Catholics now.

Some of us were proud to be Catholic before being singled out to carry this cross for American liberty. Personally, I have not experienced this kind of solicitude from unlikely quarters since receiving condolences from around the world on 9/11.

I am encouraged by the Bishops stalwart defense of the Church's, and religious citizens' rights guaranteed under the US Constitution, and by the mobilization of resources in the lay Catholic world to fight the government's abuse, e.g., Ave Maria Radio's "STOP HHS MANDATE" Facebook page. I'd feel better for America's chances if the ACLU and other civil liberties Leftists raised their voices in defense of real liberty, rather than license for a change.

President Obama is deaf in the right ear. Maybe he would relent if the organs of Leftist piety spoke up. Now that I think of it, that's probably why they haven't.

This is a perilous, but transcendent moment for American culture. Evangelicals are casting suspicions aside to unite behind a Catholic contender for the Republican presidential nomination. "People of all faiths, agnostics and atheists" are reaching out to find common ground and join hands with faithful Catholics, not with people they have been heretofore content to let beat on the Church.

They're speaking out for us, even though they aren't Catholics and may not even like the Catholic Church, before Moloch comes for them. We'll be there to speak out for them then, as they are for us now.

These are historic shifts in posture and alliance. We have nothing to fear from cooperation but fear itself.

God bless America by preserving its freedoms for believers of all stripes, and non-believers alike. Ad arguendo, if there is no God, we can still wish for peace on earth to men of goodwill.

The only people turned away--by their own choice to rest faith in power rather than peaceable co-existence--are the monist obsessives. President Obama, Kathleen Sibelius, and the Democratic Congress that imposed ObamaCare on an unwilling populace have shown us which direction their banner in America flies: Leftwards, always Leftwards.

Kadlec begins, and I end, with the words of the first Jewish Supreme Court Justice, Louis D. Brandeis:

“Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent.”

2 posted on 02/15/2012 3:53:14 PM PST by Inyo-Mono (My greatest fear is that when I'm gone my wife will sell my guns for what I told her I paid for them)

“Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent.”

Words to live by!!!

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Outstanding article! Thanks for the post! We Baptists are outraged by this, as well. I am waiting for my next Touchstone magazine edition to come out! I’m sure it will have some great articles in relation to this. Touchstone is a wonderful magazine, rather on the scholarly side, but have a lot of good reading, and they are a mix of Catholic, Anglican, Baptist, and other theologians and writers. It has helped to broaden my view of the church, Christ’s true body of believers. This is the type of article you’d read there in its pages!

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