Guest Article - Why It's So Bad...

Only Solution to ObamaCare’s Tyrannical Attack on Religious Freedom is Full Repeal

by Senator Jim DeMint (Diary)

"“Everything about ObamaCare is about restricting your freedom”

Well, we can’t say they didn’t warn us. Nancy Pelosi famously decreed that Congress must first pass ObamaCare to find out what’s in it.

The problem with passing a 2,700 page government takeover of health care is that it gave unprecedented authority to Washington bureaucrats to infringe upon our most personal health care decisions. So when Congress passed the bill they didn’t really know what we’d end up with, but conservatives had a bunch of good guesses. It turns out we were right. And now we know for sure what’s in it: assaults on religious liberty, government bureaucrats with the power to strip away our most basic freedoms, increases in health insurance premiums, trillions in new costs, and a drag on our economy that is killing jobs.

The controversy surrounding the Obama administration’s mandate that all insurance plans cover contraception, sterilization and morning-after pills that induce abortion goes right to the heart of the problem with ObamaCare. These latest regulations, including the President’s ‘accommodation’ announcement, are a blatant infringement on Americans’ First Amendment religious freedoms.

It is not the role of government to force individuals, companies or organizations to buy or subsidize a product that runs against the core of their religious beliefs. Using state power to force Americans to purchase products and services they view as immoral is a not a church-state controversy – it’s tyranny. But, of course, so is government rationing of health care, an unelected board deciding which patients may receive which medicines, and passing massive new laws without reading them.

Everything about ObamaCare is about restricting your freedom, taking health care decisions away from you and giving them to a collection of bureaucrats, politicians, and lobbyists, as if the same collection of people who have saddled us with a $15 trillion debt “know better.”

This is why Americans of all religious backgrounds – including those with no religious beliefs – should stand together against the fatal conceit of ObamaCare and fight to repeal the entire law. It is not enough for religious groups to plead, hat in hand, for carve outs and exemptions from these rules, like some special interest, as if the First Amendment were an earmark.

The contraception controversy is only the beginning of Obamacare’s tyrannical reach into our personal lives. It is not enough to for certain groups to be given “accommodations,” based on their national influence, campaign contributions or friends in high places. The next group of Americans whose freedoms are taken away may not be large enough to get their concerns on the nightly news, but their rights must be defended with equal zeal. That’s why I will fight this week for a vote on full repeal of Obamacare. To protect all Americans’ religious freedom, and every other kind, the only acceptable “reform” is for ObamaCare — the entire law – to be repealed."