OPINION:
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
The real shocker out of this whole fracas over President Obama forcing contraceptives on everybody is not the naked slap at religious freedom or this strange new requirement that American taxpayers must buy their neighbors’ birth control.
The real shocker has been how all these suddenly pious politicians and appeasing religious leaders who paved the way for Obamacare pretend to be surprised that the right to rubbers, diaphragms and pills has been enshrined in the pantheon of American rights, up there with free speech.
Seriously, what did these people expect when they signed up for nationalized health care? Did they actually believe health bureaucrats in Washington would give a rip about anybody’s particular religious beliefs? Did they actually believe there is room in a socialist health regime for the individual? Or for God?
For all the operatic squalling we’ve heard lately, you would think the crime against Catholics had just happened. In truth, this is precisely what opponents warned against in the whole fight over nationalized health care.
Democrats like former Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, a Catholic, have no one to blame but themselves for being so unburdened by history and so deaf to the concerns of religious freedom that they didn’t stop this lurch toward godless socialism when there still was time to do something about it.
I mean, have these people ever read a history book? Did they look at a single newspaper before the fall of the Soviet Union?
For all of Pope John Paul II’s worries about American consumerism and the sex and violence that come with broad freedom, they paled in comparison to the godless annihilation of the soul and abomination against freedom that come with socialism. That is why he made destroying communism alongside Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher the defining issue of his papacy.
And then these pious Democrats who cling to their religion just to stay in office wake up one day and realize that socialized health care doesn’t care about the tenets of their alleged religion.
“You’ve got to have a vigorous religious employer exemption,” Mr. Kaine said last week. But he called the contraception mandate “a historic step forward in women’s health care.”
Seriously? So now he is saying he loves the mandate so long as people who don’t want to follow it don’t have to follow it? Wow. So these clowns failed both basic religion and simple logic.
With every single one of these exemptions, Mr. Obama and Obamacare supporters admit that this is a great fraud perpetrated on the American people and that only the suckers out there who don’t have lobbyists inside the White House will suffer under it.
Plenty of other pious politicians who shoved Obamacare down our throats have been embarrassing themselves recently as they have tried to evade blame over the blasphemous mandates of socialized medicine. But few deserve the skewering more than Mr. Kaine, who was the administration’s head cheerleader as Democratic National Committee chairman during the fight over Obamacare.
Few people deserve more credit — and, today, more blame — over setting loose this monster they now claim they want to stop.
• Charles Hurt can be reached at charleshurt@live.com.
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