Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…
BLAM! Here’s what Obama said in a proclamation concerning the National Day of Prayer:
“All of us have the freedom to pray and exercise our faiths openly,” Obama said. “Our laws protect these God-given liberties, and rightly so. Today and every day, prayers will be offered in houses of worship, at community gatherings, in our homes, and in neighborhoods all across our country. Let us give thanks for the freedom to practice our faith as we see fit, whether individually or in fellowship.
Really? All I have been hearing from him is a bastardization of the actual wording of the First Amendment: “freedom to worship” instead of the proper wording of “or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” (as in “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;”). He said that phrase often, freedom to worship, in trying to force those of faith into a tiny box when it came to HHS Secretary Sebelius ruling that ALL Obamacare insurance policies must be obeyed – no religious exceptions except for those who actually work in a “house of worship”. Does your church, synagogue, or other religious group have an “external” ministry?
Sidenote: can we please stop calling it “health insurance”? What it really is now is just a healthcare payment system – there is no risk so there is no sense of traditional insurance at play here.
Too bad – Obama has decided, from On High, that he has the power and the authority to arbitrarily decide who is religious and “worthy” to be given an HHS exception to the contraceptive and abortifacient to be provided by all new Obamacare mandated healthcare payment insurance policies – or not. Run a soup kitchen, a school, a hospital or any other entity that expresses your religious values to those out side of the “four walls” of your church? Pay for healthcare policies for your workers? You are still in deep sneakers.
Obama says “No – and that is final”. You see, in his continued “March to the Secular Sea” in “fundamentally transforming” America, Obama is as determined to reduce the footprint and influence of religious values in American life. In essence, Government is Obama’s God, his Idol, and is determined, like the priests of Baal, to have no other Gods before Government. He knows that once religious values have either been put into such a tiny box that they are irrelevant (or of no note at all), he and other Secularists / Socialists / Communists will have a free hand in completely undermining and setting, not just American culture, but our Constitution itself. Stripped of its foundation built on the idea that there is a Creator from whence our Rights come from, Obama and his fellow Big Government Statists will turn that notion on its head that Rights are simply what Government hands out – or takes away.
A notion, I would add, that was seen to be abhorrent to the Founders. As if that would have any hold on Obama. His God is simply “Power over Others” – will you aid and abet his determination to seize, hold, and pass that on to other like minded dictators-in-waiting?
The only good that is coming out of this is that We the People can still appeal and seek redress from our Government in filing suit in the Judicial Branch. It is a horrible place to be, that one must spend their time, their effort, and their money, in court to fight an Executive Branch that has so obviously overstepped and overreached in its maniacal dance to completely control its citizens life. A government by the people and FOR the people. Or one that seeks to be OVER the people?
One would think that others in Government would step forward to stop this, but when you have elected officials, like NH State Representative Leigh Webb:
“The role of government is to legislate behavior“
In this, they all strip us of our dignity (for in their eyes, we are neither worthy or smart enough to make decisions for ourselves). In this, people like Webb are complicit in furthering the overtaking of the Founders vision of a Sovereign People to regress back to when the ordinary person in subservience to a self-appointed elite. As Reagan said, Freedom must be fought for all over again in each new generation.
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Now, this was originally written a few months ago and then I lost track of it. Like many of us at GraniteGrok, we oft start a post and then never come back to them for whatever reason. I’m cycling through some of my older ones.
