The New Tea-Party Uprising
I’m deeply encouraged that Americans are out in the streets again protesting tyranny.
That’s what we witnessed Friday when tens of thousands of Americans in as many as 164 cities rallied against Obamacare and its mandate to require employers to provide health insurance coverage that violate their consciences.
While the Obama administration has framed this debate as opposition to “contraception,” that is the biggest deception since he promised to fix the economy in 2008.
Neither should this issue be seen as one affecting only devout Catholics. As a non-Catholic employer who has no problem with contraception, I will refuse to comply with this mandate out of principle and my own personal conviction against subsidizing abortifacients.
This is a religious freedom issue – pure and simple. America was founded on the principle of religious freedom.
And that’s why I am so pleased to see a new, broad-based, tea-party-style movement arising to protest Barack Obama’s outrageously tyrannical and anti-American “mandate.”
May it result in his political demise.
The “Stand Up for Religious Freedom” protests come as the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to make its decision this month on the constitutionality of the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act.
The rallies are a project of the Pro-Life Action League, united with 70 other organizations. The groups are demanding Obama and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius withdraw mandates requiring nearly all private health insurance plans to cover the prescription contraceptive drugs and devices, surgical sterilizations and abortion-inducing drugs, such as Plan B.
It’s certainly bad enough that the federal government exceeds its constitutional authority by requiring employers to provide health insurance of any kind. It’s certainly bad enough that the federal government exceeds its constitutional authority by requiring American citizens to buy a service against their will. But mandating that all employers, regardless of their deepest religious convictions, subsidize the taking of innocent human life is, quite simply, an abomination.
“[T]his president, on that day of his inauguration, lifted up his right hand and he swore before all of America to that he would uphold and defend and protect the Constitution of the United States,” Rep. Michele Bachmann told the rally in Washington. “But he had had no problem telling the religious organizations and religious oriented people of this nation that they must be forced to violate their religious beliefs under his health-care mandate. Never before, in the history of the United States of America, has this government required an employer to provide health insurance that would include taxpayer-subsidized abortion, that would mandate the provision of contraception, that would mandate sterilization and abortion-causing pills. We know this wrong.”
Lila Rose of Live Action, producers of many video exposés on the abortion chain Planned Parenthood and one of my personal heroines, disputed “war on women” propaganda used by abortionists and the Obama re-election campaign.
“We’re all here because we love our country, right?” she began. “And we love our faith and we love our freedom. And we believe – we know our country was founded on the right to life, liberty and the pursuit to happiness. And so we’ll do whatever we can in our power and the power of God, Who’s all-powerful – through prayer – to take back the freedoms that belong to us and to complete the fight [for] the right to life of every human being. We will not comply – we cannot comply with the unjust mandate coming from Kathleen Sebelius and coming from the president of the United States.”
But do 164 rallies taking place on the same day around the country make an impact if the media ignore them or treat them merely as small local events?
They can if they continue – and build momentum.
The mainstream media tried to bury the tea-party movement. It didn’t work.
Americans are rising up and fighting for liberty, again. That’s refreshing. That’s what America is all about.
In fact, it was Thomas Jefferson who wrote in a draft of the Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom in 1779, three years after he wrote the Declaration of Independence: “Well aware that the opinions and belief of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds; that Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments, or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do, but to extend it by its influence on reason alone; that the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time: That to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical. …”
In the spirit of Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams and America’s other founders, we have a duty and an obligation to resist attacks on religious freedom today without compromise and by any and all means necessary.
Tea-party-style uprisings must never be constrained to economic issues. They should always be about fighting for liberty and against tyranny.
This fight is not about contraception. It’s about deception and tyranny.
