Gary Bauer today is piggybacking on other hysterical reactions from Religious Right commentators with a Human Events column today decrying President Obama’s new move on insurance coverage for contraceptives to accommodate religiously-based institutions. According to Bauer, ensuring that women have access to contraceptives makes the United States akin to Cuba and China and Obama similar to a “third world dictator”:
The Obama administration’s “contraceptive mandate” was an assault on the Catholic Church and on religious freedom. But more basically, it was an assault on the freedom of private institutions to exist free of state control.
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Obama’s disdain for the Constitution has become too obvious to deny. Obama once said that the Constitution “reflects some deep flaws in American culture.” More recently he complained that “our Founders designed a system that makes it more difficult to bring about change than I would like sometimes.”
Obama views the Constitution mainly as an impediment to controlling institutions such as churches and families that stand between the state and individuals.
Liberals usually invoke the imaginary “separation of church and state” in their attempts to banish public displays of faith. But the most radical leftists use the opposite means to achieve a similar end.
Instead of erecting a wall to divide religious and public life, they favor using the brute force of the state to control all that the church does. This is common in places like China and Cuba, where churches exist but are virtually powerless and where secularism is the real state religion.
Obama’s totalitarian impulse rivals that of any third world dictator. With the Obama administration’s contraceptive and abortion “accommodation,” those who respect the Constitution may think they’ve won. But Obama’s next assault on the Constitution and on our most basic rights is just around the corner.
