Back to Things That Matter: Actual Violations of Religious Liberty

By 

David French

|
August 23, 2012

2 min read

ObamaCare

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I hesitate to disturb the Left in the midst of its revelry over Representative Akin’s remarks — which, for all their egregiousness, did not actually impact any citizen’s rights — but it’s time to turn our attention back to the Obama administration’s unprecedented assault on religious liberty and its unquestioned pro-abortion extremism. This morning my colleagues at the American Center for Law and Justice filed a motion for preliminary injunction against the administration on behalf of O’Brien Industrial Holdings, a St. Louis company that faces a January 1, 2013, deadline to implement a new health-insurance policy for its 87 employees. You can read the motion here.

As we hear that the Democratic National Convention will amp up its abortion celebrations to capitalize on the Akin controversy, it’s worth remembering the extent to which Democratic celebrations of sexuality and “choice” invariably entail a healthy dose of government coercion. It’s simply not enough to invent a right to abortion, that right must be subsidized even by dissenters. It’s not enough that a radical view of sexual autonomy should dominate our popular culture and one of our great political parties, that radical view trumps even individual conscience.  

Incidentally, I always find it amusing when the Left says it’s not “pro-abortion” but merely “pro-choice.” If I took my Second Amendment advocacy so far that I believed that Americans had enforceable constitutional rights to gun shops within driving distance (and anything less constituted an “undue burden” on my rights), I advocated state subsidies so that poor Americans could buy guns, and prohibited parents from exerting any control over their child’s gun-ownership decisions, would any sane person alive think I was anything but radically “pro-gun?” And yet privately owned firearms are far less dangerous than abortions.

Rich Lowry is right. The real abortion extremist is Barack Obama, and his extremism is reflected not in clumsy responses to interview questions but in the law of the land.

This article is crossposted at National Review Online.