In his essay on membership in The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis says this: “in the first place, when the modern world says to us aloud, ‘You may be religious when you are alone,’ it adds under it’s breath, ‘and I will see to it that you are never alone.'” I thought of this when I was pondering the outrageous behavior of the Obama administration, continuing down to the present, with regard to Catholic institutions having to make the payments for contraception. “you may have religious freedom in every area where the federal government does not have jurisdiction, and by the way, the federal government has jurisdiction everywhere and in everything.
Before getting to a brief analysis, let me make just a few focused observations on the behavior of these bureaucratic miscreants, trying to avoid, as I proceed, a descent to personalities. This decision in the first place, the doubling down afterwards, and the risible compromise suggested last Friday, were among the scaliest moves of an administration that has already shown itself adept at this kind of thing. This turpitudinous bit of business is clearly the work of pop-eyed and secularist bleaters, who have the Constituion up on derricks and pulleys, and are swinging it around like they knew how to keep from wrecking it, which they don’t. They are frankly trying me a little high these days, this group of serious thinkers are. These apostles of Uplift know that you can’t fight sacraments without a sacrament, and so they are offering the nation their sacrament, which is free birth control. And “offering” states it too mildly — they are insisting on their parody of free grace.
I am a broad-minded man, and so I don’t mind be governed by dumb people. But what strains me to the breaking point is being governed by dumb people who believe they have contrived to keep that datum invisible.
Bureaucrats come in two categories. The first is lazy and intelligent. These are the guys who have been asleep at their desks so long that one side of their heads is flat. The other is the busy-pants variety, and these guys are not so intelligent. And the less intelligent they are, the more insistent they are that we all partake of their version of the one true faith, which, since they are modernists, comes in the form of a pill and which guarantees fruitlessness.
If we have any patriots left in the country, the election next November will need to be the kind that will, to use Churchill’s phrase, make the rubble bounce, than which thought few are pleasanter. The electorate needs to go up in a sheet of flame and ask questions about what happened later. This officious hoodoo, this diktat that has all the constitutionality of a mass of inert porridge, needs to be told . . . words fail me.
So then, having cleared the air, let us conclude with a bit more dispassionate analysis. This decision embodies everything that was wrong with Obamacare, and it shows that Obamacare’s fiercest critics were perhaps too mild. An over-reaching and tyrannical health care package was jammed through Congress, but even in their over-reach there were things they left out of the bill. After we read it in order to find out what is in it, and we discovered there were tyrannies left unstated, no matter. A cabinet officer can just announce that this gap is now filled, and the sacrament of fruitlessness is now available to everyone, whether Jew or Greek, male or female, slave or free. Then, when there is an outcry because freedom is not yet dead, the president comes out with a royal decree that will solve everything. He says that institutions that have objections of conscience to this tawdry stuff need not worry — he has issued a royal decree, the kind the Sun King used to do, that will require insurance companies to provide this sacramental service free of charge. They don’t have a conscience, but they do have money, and so he fixes the problem that way. It turns out that hope n’ change is tyranny n’ theft.