RELIGIOUS FREEDOM, LIMITED GOVERNMENT, AND POLITICAL LIBERTY: Paul Rahe at Ricochet:
I believe that, when Barack Obama stated in 2008 that he wanted to “fundamentally change” the United States and when he called his administration The New Foundation, he meant precisely what he said. He meant to reverse what Locke and the American Founders had achieved. He intended to establish in this country a political regime unlimited in its scope and power. That is the meaning of the Hosanna-Tabor Case pursued by Attorney General Erich Holder, and it is the meaning of the individual mandate. It has rightly been said that Obamacare changes the relationship between the citizen and the government radically. The HHS Mandate has made that fact manifest, and I have made it clear in earlier posts, linked below, that I hope that its issuance serves as a warning to the American Catholic Church.
I say this because that Church has contributed mightily to placing in the hands of Barack Obama the power he is now wielding against the Catholic Church in the United States. For decades now the American Church has been allied with the Left in domestic affairs – pressing with vigor for ever-more extensive and ever-more expensive social programs. For decades the American Church has been pushing for one form or another of universal healthcare, demanding as its first priority that the federal government enact a health care policy that “ensures access to quality, affordable, life giving health care for all.” In the process, the American bishops asserted on 27 January 2010 that “health care is a basic human right” and claimed that “there are nearly 50 million Americans who do not have access to health care.”
Leave aside the fact that the numbers the bishops provided on this occasion were grotesquely inflated. Their propensity to descend into demagogy is by no means the worst of it. The real problem lies with their theoretical claim concerning the extent of “basic human rights” conceived of as legitimate claims on the political community and with the larger implications of such claims.
I would submit that one cannot make good on such claims without concentrating tyrannical power in the hands of the government. I would submit that the social teaching of the Catholic Church, as it has been applied in the United States by the American Catholic Bishops, is inconsistent with the principles of limited government and that in rejecting the principles of limited government the American Catholic Church has rejected the foundations of religious liberty. The bishops have been hoist with their own petard. They contributed mightily to fashioning the weapon now being wielded against them.
Read the whole thing.