About That "Accommodation"
President Obama's support team, that is to say, not just the people working in the White House but close to the entire elitist establishment that shapes the "message" transmitted day by day via the secular media (with the notable exception of Fox Television News, The Wall Street Journal, a few other papers like the Washington Times, sundry radio talk shows, and a couple of magazines like The Weekly Standard and the National Review-such principal exceptions aside, the Obama cheerleaders these past few days have been "spinning" like a manic centrifuge to shape the public's  perception of the president's latest tweaking of his health insurance program as an "accommodation" of the needs of the religious conscience. (And isn't it wonderful, they seem to be implying, with just the suggestion of a smirk, that the president is actually willing to offer an accommodation to those dinosaur Catholic bishops). A shift in the shuffle is all that this "accommodation" represents. Genuine accommodation it is NOT. True, the threat of ruinous fines for non-compliance-shades of Henry VIII and the recusants!-has for the moment been lifted, but there's nothing to prevent such fines being reimposed down the road, or to prevent surgical abortions being added to the list of preventive services covered. What the latest tweaking constitutes is just a shift of the immediate responsibility for the funding of a program that includes provision of abortifacients, a program therefore in which no exponent of a pro-Life creed can in good conscience participate. Immediate responsibility for such payment is now shunted from the religious corporations to the insurance companies, (though religious corporations that self-insure will not evade such responsibility.) But ultimately even religious corporations that are not self-insured will find themselves compelled to subsidize what their creed defines as immoral, for the simple reason that insurance companies will NOT provide contraceptive medications, abortifacients and sterilization procedures "free of charge", as the president is now "requiring" them to do; they will simply pass on the costs to the corporations that they insure in the form of higher premiums. This is a certainty for two reasons. First of all, the president has no constitutional authority to "REQUIRE" private companies to provide a service "free of charge". This is not, after all, the Soviet Union. At least not yet. Secondly business corporations that are successful must cover their costs. Ergo.

This bureaucratic "bullying" of religious corporations into subsidizing what they deem to be immoral is a flagrant violation of our Constitution's First Amendment. And that amendment was prioritized by our Founding Fathers precisely as first because they correctly judged freedom of conscience and freedom of religion to be the foundation and guarantor for all the other freedoms, that Americans would enjoy. Tweaked or untweaked Mr. Obama's health insurance dictate is a direct assault on the very root of American freedom. No wonder, then, that this dictate has evoked a firestorm of opposition from across the whole spectrum of Americans' religious affiliation, from Orthodox Jewish rabbis to Protestant Evangelicals to non-practicing Catholics and even to some of no religious faith at all who are nevertheless alarmed at this effort on the part of government to establish itself as the new magisterium in matters of religious belief. Once such magisterial power is conceded in matters pertaining to God, will anything else be so sacred as to be untouchable? Like the Christians of pagan antiquity who were commanded to offer incense to the empire's gods at the emperor's behest, we respectfully but adamantly decline to obey our Caesar on the Potomac when he would have us, in practice surely if not yet in word, repudiate our faith.