prevention © by brains the head

If there were any doubt as to whether this administration is waging a war on religion, it should have disappeared by now.

The administration has ordered — without congressional input — that most health insurance plans cover preventive services for women including recommended contraceptive services without charging a co-pay, co-insurance or a deductible. That would include sterilization and emergency contraception, colloquially known as the morning after pill.

The federal government — actually just one branch of the federal government — ordering private companies to offer services at a certain price goes beyond the pale of decency in a free society. By itself, such an order would merit strong backlash from the people.

But it gets worse.

The order forces religious entities, ones that might have a moral aversion to birth control, to provide, i.e., pay for, this insurance for their employees.

Or as Green Bay, Wis., Bishop David Ricken said during Mass in St. Francis Xavier Cathedral on Jan. 29: “If we pay for those services for people who work for us, we are in effect saying don’t do it, but then giving the money to pay for it.”

So much for religious liberty.

“The government has entered the sanctuary,” said Sister Mary Ann Walsh, spokeswoman for the Conference of Catholic Bishops. “The Constitution says you can’t prohibit the free exercise of religion. Those are religious values we have, related to the life issues. And now the government is saying, ‘No, you have to go against your teaching.’”

This rule came a little more than a week after a unanimous Supreme Court decision reaffirming that the Constitution’s First Amendment gives churches a broad right of autonomy.

While it applies to all religions, the rule is really an attack on Catholicism, which has proscribed the use of contraceptives for two millennia. Most Protestant faiths changed their rules on birth control beginning in the 1930s. Most Jewish traditions permit birth control in certain circumstances. The rest of the world’s religions either specifically permit birth control or do not address the issue at all. Even Islam permits birth control.

As a matter of disclosure, I am a lifelong Catholic. That being said, I do not agree with the church’s proscription against contraception. In fact, many polls show that a majority of Catholics disagree, including an American Enterprise Institute poll that placed that number at 78 percent of Catholics.

However, religion is not, nor should it be, run by opinion polls. The church leaders who set policy have consistently opposed birth control. I respect that.

Because the church’s official teaching is anti-contraceptive, the First Amendment requires the government to recognize and respect that belief.

The Supreme Court will strike down any law that restricts religious liberty unless there is a compelling governmental interest, the law is narrowly tailored to achieve that interest and it is the least restrictive way to achieve the governmental goal.

This rule does not pass muster.

The government’s goal is to provide greater access to contraception.

Or, as Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said, “This rule will provide women with greater access to contraception by requiring coverage and by prohibiting cost sharing.”

Ideally, the federal government should have absolutely no interest in contraception. I fail to see how that is a federal interest.

Even if one believes the federal government has an interest in birth control, providing greater access is certainly not a compelling interest, especially given that contraceptives are easily available and not prohibitively expensive.

Nor will this rule achieve that goal. Forcing Catholic institutions to offer health coverage for contraceptives at best might result in a marginal increase in availability.

This rule was simply not necessary. It addresses a nonissue. There is not a pressing need to provide coverage for contraception for employees of Catholic institutions. There are other options for those who want such coverage. They can simply work elsewhere. They can also choose to purchase private insurance.

Finally, the rule will likely cause more problems than it solves. Catholic hospitals and charities provide a valuable service to their communities. Many poor people would not have access to health care if not for Catholic hospitals. Most of the Catholic hospitals with which I have dealt will subsidize the cost of the health care or offer it free.

St. Rita’s Medical Center here in Lima offers free care for any person who earns up to twice the federal poverty guidelines. That means a family of four earning less than $44,100 a year can receive free care. It also offers substantial discounts for those who earn more than that.

However, these organizations will now have to decide whether to violate their core beliefs or no longer offer health insurance to employees. They might also decide to close their doors. None of these options seem worth the marginal increase in access to birth control for a small number of Americans.

The biggest problem, though, is the attack on the Constitution by President Barack Obama and the militant liberal secularists in his administration. If left unchallenged, the damage to religious liberty in this country will be irreversible.

If this is allowed to stand, the administration will likely attack medical conscience clauses, which permit health care providers to opt out of providing services that violate their religions beliefs. It is easy to see a future rule forcing Catholic hospitals to actually perform sterilizations and abortions if Obama gets his way this time.

This rule should be shot down by the courts. Also, a Senate bill has also been introduced to repeal the rule. However, Obama should see the error of his ways and avoid such a costly battle.

He should remember there are 25 Catholics in the Senate and 134 in the House of Representatives, including House Speaker John Boehner. They sit on both sides of the aisle. Vice President Joseph Biden is also Catholic.

More importantly, about 25 percent of the American electorate is Catholic and this is an election year.

Now that is an argument that even Obama can understand.

Microphone © by liftarn

I will be on the “Talk With Ron Williams” show at 4 p.m. EST today on WCIT-AM as I am every Thursday.

You can listen on AM 940 in the Lima, Ohio, area or online at http://tho.lu/listen940.

Call in at: +1 419-228-9494 or +1 888-894-3776. You can email questions and comments to talkwithron@wcoil.com.

If you miss it, the show will be archived at Talk With Ron Archives.

In the Jan. 22 edition of New York Magazine, journalist Joe Hagan said this year’s campaign will ”be the most negative in the history of American politics.”

While his piece was great reading, his statement may just be hyperbole. I love it when journalists talk about things being the “most,” “worst,” “best,” etc., without any real justification. It is just pure hyperbole without research. What he meant to say is that it will be the most negative in recent memory or recent history. And even that might be questionable.

One good example of a truly negative campaign was the 1800 election between John Adams, a Federalist, and Thomas Jefferson, a Democratic-Republican (the party was founded by Jefferson and was commonly known at the time as simply Republican). It was so contention and caused a sea change in American politics that it is often referred to as the Revolution of 1800. It also, because of a tie between Jefferson and Aaron Burr, also a Democratic-Republican who was supposed to be running for vice president, was sent to the House of Representatives to decide the winner. That resulted in a change in how elections were held.

This video from Reason uses the candidates’ own words to give just a sampling of how nasty the candidates were. The only difference is that we have television today, which allows the nastiness to move at the speed of light.

However, it is all just politics. We shouldn’t be too concerned as the nastiness does serve a purpose, especially given that we can no longer trust the national press corps to give us real coverage.

As Reason.TV says:

Have this year’s negative political ads really “taken dirty to a whole new level, as CNN’s Anderson Cooper frets? Is a “return to civility…a relic of a bygone era,” as President Barack Obama laments?

Er, not exactly.

If anonymous political speech, the other widely decried villain of this political season, helped found the United States, attack ads are as American as apple pie. If you fancy yourself a patriot or a history buff, you will most certainly approve this message, which is taken from statements made by, for, and against the nation’s founders.

Approximately 1.45 minutes. Written and produced by Meredith Bragg. Voiced by Caleb Brown, Michael C. Moynihan, and Austin Bragg.

Check out “The Positives of Negative Campaigning,” why “Attack Ads Are Good For You.” and Reason’s 2006 list of the “Top 10 Dirtiest Political Campaigns” in U.S. history.

For links to those stories and historical sources of the statements made in the video go to
http://reason.tv/video/show/the-negative-campaign-of-1800

How would Sen. Barack Obama view President Barack Obama’s administration? Find out by watching this debate.

The 39th anniversary has passed marking the worst Supreme Court decision since Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). I am referring, of course, to Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that gave women a right to commit murder under the rubric of a “right to privacy.”

Conservatives challenge this rule by arguing there is no right to privacy in our Constitution.

This is wrong. There clearly is a fundamental right to privacy. Things such as the Fourth Amendment, the right to be free from unreasonable searches, requires a right to privacy or it makes no sense. The right can also be discerned in what lawyers call the “penumbras” of the First, Third, Fifth and Ninth Amendments.

While the court has not always used the phrase “right to privacy,” it has recognized the right since the founding of the Republic. In 1928, Justice Louis Brandeis said “the right most valued by civilized men” is “the right to be left alone.”

So it is easy to see that there is a zone of privacy around our bodies and homes that the government may not casually breach.

Still, the right to privacy does not give one the right to kill, as liberals argue.

A person’s right to privacy allows one the right to choose with whom to have sex. It gives one the right to use contraceptives. It even gives one the right to marry whom one wishes regardless of race or (someday) sex.

However, once one makes those private decisions and becomes pregnant, she no longer has the right to kill that baby simply because she finds it inconvenient. Even in cases of rape (no one ever said life was fair).

John Stuart Mill, in his essay “On Liberty,” wrote: “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercise over any member of a civilized community against his will is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.”

This is known as the Harm Principle. No one has the right to cause harm to another. It is at the core of my classical liberal philosophy. Under this principle, the only legitimate function of government is to protect people from harm from others. (That, by the way, does not include protecting them from harming themselves.)

And what greater harm can a mother do to an unborn child than kill him or her?

When the Supreme Court ruled that a woman’s right to privacy allows her to kill an unborn child, it violated the Harm Principle. Egregiously.

The pro-abortion crowd will argue that because I am a man, I should not be allowed to have an opinion on abortion, unless, of course, I support the mass murder of 50 million babies in the last 39 years. That’s akin to saying I can’t criticize the president unless I have been the president.

They also will argue the baby is not a human and therefore not worthy of protection. Mankind has often put forth that argument to rationalize mass murder. Hitler said the Jews and other Eastern Europeans were not humans. A rose by any other name?

In reality, a fetus is just at a different stage of human development, no different than babies, children or adults. Almost all species go through different stages of life. It is telling that 38 states have homicide laws that include an unborn fetus in the definition of a person.

Most abortions in this country are performed after the sixth week of pregnancy. The baby develops a detectable heartbeat around the fourth week.

How can someone claim a baby with a heartbeat is not a person just because it can’t survive on its own? Babies cannot survive without adult care. Many adults are also unable to care for themselves. Should we kill them too?

See the nonsense one has to adopt in order to accept the proposition that a woman can kill a child and claim a privacy right to that act?

It’s time to end the bloodshed and put an end to the idea that the right to privacy is an affirmative defense to murder. A healthy society does not allow the wholesale killing of one segment of its population.

Radio Free Strawberry © by cogdogblog

In case you missed it, below is the audio from Thursday’s “Talk With Ron Williams” radio show.

Guest host Kurt Neeper and I talked mostly about presidential politics and other national issues.

Enjoy.

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Microphone © by liftarn

I will be on the “Talk With Ron Williams” show at 4 p.m. today on WCIT-AM as I am every Thursday.

You can listen on AM 940 in the Lima, Ohio, area or online at http://tho.lu/listen940.

Call in at: +1 419-228-9494 or +1 888-894-3776. You can email questions and comments to talkwithron@wcoil.com.

If you miss it, the show will be archived at Talk With Ron Archives.

During the last decade, those advocating for school choice have made real inroads into breaking the government’s stranglehold on education.

In 1999, 349,000 children attended the nation’s 1,542 charter schools. Today, that figure has ballooned to 2.05 million. Additionally, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools reports that the waiting list to get into one of the nation’s 5,637 charter schools could fill almost 5,000 more schools.

Nearly 200,000 children are attending private schools as a result of 34 school voucher and other similar private school choice programs in 19 states. According to the Friedman Foundation of Educational Choice, 130 private school choice bills were introduced in statehouses across the country last year.

Home schooling has also doubled in the last 10 years with about 1.5 million families nationwide choosing to educate their own children compared to 850,000 in 1999, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

Unfortunately, there is still a long road to travel. That is why this week has been named National School Choice Week.

Government school officials across the country claim they want school choice but then they challenge it and complain about it every chance they get.

The fact remains, most private schools outperform most government schools and for less money.

I have heard all the arguments why this is true, i.e., private schools get to choose their students, parents who send their children to private schools are often more involved, etc.

In reality, it is a whole host of reasons, including federal and state regulations that hamper the efficient education of children.

When school officials are confronted with this, their only argument, which is silly even on its face, is that the private schools should have to suffer under the same restrictions as the government schools.

In other words, let’s bring all schools down to the lowest common denominator.

What this shows is that most of these government school officials don’t really care about education; they only care about government education.

Government education is a 19th century innovation that has outlived its usefulness, if it had any.

If we are going to have a government education system, then it should be a school of last resort. The real goal of all professional educators should be to get the government out of the business of education.

Still, if we are going to have compulsory education and we want the government to pay for it, there is probably a better way than building these education camps — which are more like prisons in some urban districts — where the Constitution prevents the government from properly controlling and educating the children sent there.

Historian Robert Wright postulated that it would have been cheaper if the federal government had purchased and freed all the slaves than fight the Civil War.

I suspect a similar idea would be true in the education arena. That is, it would be cheaper if the government paid to send children to private schools rather than run its own school systems.

A few seconds with a calculator seems to bear this out. There are 55.5 million school-age children in the United States. A $5,000 voucher for each child, which would cover tuition at the vast majority of private schools in the United States, would cost $277.5 billion. There are other factors that would come into play, of course, but you get the picture.

In fact, we could double that voucher to $10,000 and still spend less than we are today.

In the 2008-09 school year, as a nation we spent $604.86 billion on primary and secondary government education, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Of that amount, $311.89 billion went to the salaries and benefits of the government schools’ union workers. We obviously cannot afford that. At the end of the 2009 fiscal year, government school systems had a combined debt of $399.12 billion.

The fact remains that the United States spends more per pupil than any other nation in the world, with the possible exception of Switzerland. Yet, our students are routinely surpassed by children in nations that spend less.

Clearly, something is wrong.

For more than 150 years we have let the government educate our children. Now it is time to try something new.

Microphone © by liftarn

I will be on the “Talk With Ron Williams” show at 4 p.m. today on WCIT-AM as I am every Thursday. Not sure what we will talk about, but there is a lot going on, such as the Iowa caucuses recount, Texas Gov. Rick Perry dropping out of the presidential race, and the Lima City School District hiring a superintendent without so much as a job posting.

You can listen on AM 940 in the Lima, Ohio, area or online at http://tho.lu/listen940.

Call in at: +1 419-228-9494 or +1 888-894-3776. You can email questions and comments to talkwithron@wcoil.com.

If you miss it, the show will be archived at Talk With Ron Archives.

Here is the sequel to the video I posted yesterday.

Every member of the Occupy Wall Street “movement” should watch this video and learn a little something about economics and the free market, which they despise. Same goes for all you liberals out there. This is how the real world works. Your good intentions are putting good people out of work.