Stacy McCain:

This issue isn’t about employers imposing anything on anybody. It’s about whether the federal government can mandate certain types of insurance coverage for private employers, even to the point of requiring Catholic organizations to pay for insurance that includes full coverage — no deductible, no co-pay — for contraception, sterilization and abortifacient “morning after” drugs.

In this battle, the defense of Catholic organizations is actually a libertarian position, and the only people who could possibly take the side of the Obama administration are . . . well, crazy people, or perhaps well-meaning people who have been deliberately misinformed about the issue.

And just where may such “perhaps well-meaning people who have been deliberately misinformed about the issue” be getting their information?

Why, the mainstream press!

Who, if we don’t make the case has begun in many cases actively working to usher in a progressive democratic socialist remake of the US, will by dint of its purported “objectivity” or “neutrality,” continue to act as an effective propaganda arm for the activist left.

Those in the New Left have spent years entrenching themselves in the information dissemination and academic fields, as well as in the Democratic Party. Is it really so hard to believe that, having worked tirelessly and with cynical political purpose to take over those institutions, they might actually have a plan for how they’d hoped to use their positioning, should they ever achieve a perfect storm of power? That is, that people like Bill Ayers, or Ms Piven, or a host of other Obama mentors who were born of that revolutionary leftist mindset and never renounced it, would have strategies and blueprints for the kind of “fundamental transformation” of the US they have spent their adult lives promoting and then, they hope, ruling over?

Or is that just more Visigothic crazy talk from the cranks and conspiracy nuts who won’t admit that Obama is just an ordinary Democrat doing ordinary Dem Party things, and that the reason he drives us so crazy is because he’s a strong, educated Black man?

Stacy is correct — and this is a point we here at pw have been beating consistently since the announcement of the original, pre-“compromise” HHS dictate: this is certainly an attack on religious freedom and the First Amendment, but even moreso, it is a power grab by the federal government, who now believes it has the authority to dictate to private companies what they must sell, and for how much they must sell it.

Too, and by extension, they now believe that you as the consumer be mandated to pay for things you don’t want — and that may violate your freedom of conscience — even though they’ve tried to hide that piece of the puzzle by labeling the services as “free”.

The fact is, the services and contraceptive devices have to be paid for, and that cost will be factored in to the overall costs of coverage. Meaning, you will be paying for all the free things whether you want to or not.

To me, it matters not whether “most Catholics” favor the mandate. Most Catholics vote Democrat, too — and they’re just as wrong for doing that.

This is not a Catholic issue, or even a strictly religious issue. This is about individual sovereignty, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the fundamental relationship between the State and the individual being forcibly altered such that we are no longer a government of and by the people, but rather subjects who must petition the State for our “rights,” and who the State can mandate engage in economic behavior that we cannot opt out of, be we a private business or a private citizen.

It is the trick of the Left to try to turn this into a battle in the culture wars. It is, but that is only the facet of the fight they wish to focus on.

It’s ideological prestidigitation. And those idiots who are sending out warnings that to oppose the government on this is to free up, say, Muslim employers to impose Sharia law on their employees, would do well to understand that this is not about employers imposing anything — after all, the Catholic Church, as employer, is not mandating that their employees not use birth control, or that they go to church, or that they carry a rosary, or that they love the baby Jesus; instead, it is about a central authority’s push to overthrow the constraints of the Constitution and Declaration and “fundamentally transform” the US by way of a coup against the very foundation of American exceptionalism: individual sovereignty, a limited government of enumerated powers, and natural rights that cannot be taken away by government.

(thanks to JD)