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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
February 19, 2012
Chaff in the machine
The matter we were discussing last Sunday - you and I, gentle reader; let's just ignore the rest of them - was in the light of breaking news. A certain President Obama, of a neighbouring Republic, had managed to endanger his party's hold on millions of lapsed Catholic voters, and a few million more non-Catholics, in the course of attacking faithful Catholics through an ObamaCare "mandate."He, and his health and human services secretary, Kathleen Sebelius - a former Kansas governor and political heavyweight in her own right - had just announced an "accommodation," in reply to widespread outrage about a measure that would force Catholic hospitals, schools, and other charitable institutions to cover contraception, abortifacients, and sterilization in employee health plans. The administrative override, on an issue of conscience, was a fairly obvious breach of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, and needed some quick papering over. The method used was a joke, that involved the alteration of not a single comma in the original order, only a verbal promise to perform a ludicrous shell game. That, in principle, the issue is not only Roman Catholic, but fully universal, is brought home in the following mental exercise, which has been touring the Internet in several forms: You "mandate" all Orthodox Jewish restaurants to serve ham, bacon, and pork chops. And they tell you to take a hike, and everyone gets excited, and it starts to look like you might lose even the Reform Jewish vote. So you come up with an "accommodation." Orthodox Jews don't have to put any of these items on their menus. A Gentile will come in with a cart and offer them to all customers, free of charge. The restaurant owner need only pay this caterer whatever he's charging for the blintzes and latkes. Question: what if the caterer is also an Orthodox Jew? Or if the restaurant actually cooks its own food? The shell game does not even pretend to address the moral objections of Catholic insurance providers, only those of insurance purchasers. This is wilfully obtuse. Another exercise: You want to kill somebody. But you think that would be unethical. So you hire a hit man to clear the snow off your driveway for a mutually agreeable sum, and he agrees to perform the hit free of charge. You are thus, by the Obama reasoning, in no way responsible for the murder. Only the hit man is responsible. And since he obviously doesn't have a "conscience issue," what's your problem? As I said last week, and often before, the offer of administrative expedients to solve moral problems is a symptom of advanced moral idiocy. But without moral idiocy, we could have no nanny state. Perhaps we think we don't have a problem in Canada. That is because the issue that hit the fan, Stateside, was never seriously discussed up here. Having been around for a while, I can attest that there were plenty of people willing to discuss it, but we didn't get the "airtime." We have no First Amendment in Canada, only a Trudeau-era Charter of Rights with vague clauses which can be interpreted to mean almost anything. Indeed, the Charter served to stand all conscience arguments on their head, when unfettered abortion was legislated by our own Supreme Court in 1988, going well beyond even Roe v. Wade. We take it almost for granted that, under our unambiguously socialist health care system, taxpayers like me, who consider abortion to be a grave crime - the killing of a defenceless human being - must pay for abortions under any circumstances. And I give the example of abortion only because it is obvious and unmistakable, not subtle and progressive like so many other moral issues in which the centralized state imposes social policies with moral dimensions on an entire population; often not even by majority vote, but by administrative fiat. And the individual citizen becomes so much chaff in the face of bureaucratic tyranny. Americans do not yet fully realize that ObamaCare is a "work in progress." What they see now is only the thin end of the wedge, and the current controversial HHS Mandate is modest compared to what will arise farther down the road. A "Preventive Services Task Force" has been empowered to "prioritize" (thus effectively decide) everything to be covered by private health insurance - and with perfect Kafkaesque serenity, for it makes all decisions behind closed doors, need not announce decisions in draft, and is under no obligation to consider any external suggestions. Its decisions cannot be directly appealed, and it cannot be sued for the consequences of them. If the Americans fail to repeal ObamaCare, they will soon learn it was a stalking horse for the full "socialization" of their health-care system - for there will be no other way to resolve the contradiction between commercial competition and total regulation. And then they will have a system like ours, in which an abortion is about the only thing you can get without waiting, committees can decide what your life is worth, and every moral nuance is crushed beneath the weight of administrative expediency. Or in a word: "progress." David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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