Hobby Lobby, and the Rule of Law

By Douglas V. Gibbs

The healthcare law being heralded by the democrats is something the progressive liberal left socialists have been seeking for over a hundred years.  Obamacare a shining trophy for the Democrats, because enabling government to insert itself into healthcare moves America toward Socialized Medicine, and ultimately, full, dictatorial control by the central government.  It is the greatest power grab in the history of the United States.  Through the guise of tax-payer paid healthcare, the federal government is using the law to dictate to people what they can and can't do, because it influences their need for healthcare.  But, even deeper than that, the Affordable Care Act targets a precious American concept. . . our God-given rights.

Among the rights targeted by Obamacare is religious freedom.  Religious freedom is among our most basic rights, and along with property ownership, and was the primary reason a large segment of colonists came to the New World.  Our religious freedoms are being attacked, now, from all directions.  The homosexual agenda has politicized morality, and is targeting Christian organizations as fast as they can.  A battle over non-profit status has silenced the church for nearly a century, with the status having been created, in my opinion, with the explicit intent of silencing pastors.  The Left believes your religious beliefs, if you are a Christian, belongs inside the four walls of your home, and that is it.  Churches are even being openly attacked, for daring to oppose the rising call for sexual perversion in our culture.

Through Obamacare, religious freedom is being targeted through what the liberal left calls "reproductive rights."  The common belief that a business has the right to refuse service to anyone, or to conduct their business as they see fit, does not apply when the owner of the business is a Christian.  Not only are the courts mandating that Christian-owned businesses perform services homosexual in nature despite any religious belief to the contrary, but they are now using Obamacare to force Christian-owned businesses to provide employees, through health insurance, free access to contraceptives that include abortion-inducing drugs.  In other words, not only has the liberal left made the wholesale slaughter of the unborn the law for the last forty years, but is now mandating that in addition to houses of horrors like Planned Parenthood being paid for by our tax dollars whether we like it or not, but that businesses owners, whether they like it or not, have to provide access to drugs that kill recently conceived persons through insurance plans that cover all costs related to these "contraceptive" drugs.

Why does the federal government have the say over how a private business operates?  Why does the federal government have the say over the religious beliefs of a business owner, or how the Christians in the United States can operated their lives?  Better yet, irregardless of the law, who gives the courts the right to, as in the case of the Hobby Lobby case, to tell the business owner, it is mandated that health insurance now fully cover contraceptives, and if you don't like it, if you have moral objections to birth control, pay the fine for breaking the law so that you don't have to provide health care coverage for your employees?

Chief Justice Roberts interjected that this was in opposition to what Hobby Lobby presented in its lawsuit.

“I thought – I thought that part of the religious commitment of the owners was to provide health care for its employees,” Roberts said.

“Well, if they want to do that, they can just pay a greater salary and let the employees go in on the exchange,” Sotomayor said.

Cato Institute’s Ilya Shapiro points out, that’s not a view in line with the Constitution’s protection of religious freedom. He writes: “These individuals don’t check their religious values at the office door…The government can’t force individuals to forfeit their free exercise rights when they incorporate a business – just as it can’t force them to forsake these liberties when they enter the workforce, attend school, or engage in any other secular pursuit.”
This whole issue brings us back to the age-old argument about the Rule of Law.

The people who believe in big government will tell you that the courts are the rule of law, because they rule on the law.  However, going back to the words of the Founding Fathers, that is not true.  In fact, the founders knew that the courts were a danger, and in the beginning, the Judicial Branch was the weakest of the three branches of government.  The Rule of Law is based on Nature's Law, and what the written Law of the Land is, not the wavering interpretation of man.  When the Rule of Law is abandoned, we become governed by the whims of culture, politicians, and judges.

"It was understood to be a rule of law that where the words of a statute admit of two constructions, the one just and the other unjust, the former is to be given them." --Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson, 1813.

"Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions." -- James Madison

John Locke proposed that the rule of law was governed by Nature's Law (God's Law) and that no man, including a country's leader, or members of the judicial system, are above that law.  Because the rule of law is based on natural law it cannot be interpreted, or changed, by the whims of men.  To allow such latitude in the law is to have no law at all, and the society under such a system is not governed by the rule of law, but by the rule of man.  When courts can make rulings as the arbiters of the law, they are not ruling based on the rule of law, but by judicial fiat.

Like the law, our rights are provided by The Creator.  Our rights are natural rights, and the authority belongs to natural law.  Because those rights are God-given, they are not subject to governmental control, or removal by the government.  The definitions governing those rights are also based on Divine Virtue.  Therefore, to determine if something being called a "right" is indeed a right, all we must do is determine if God would sanction such an action.

The central argument regarding the Hobby Lobby case is "reproductive rights."  More specifically, the argument centers upon abortion inducing drugs, and if the business owner should be compelled to offer insurance that provides access to these aborticides in direct violation of their religious beliefs, based on their Christian Faith.  The liberal left has classified these abortion aides as "contraceptives" to muddy the waters of the argument, and to lead people away from the fact that this is not about condoms and birth control pills, but about access to over-the-counter abortion to be used in the moments after conception.

The question, then, must be if the law is in line with the rule of law, and if "reproductive rights" are indeed "rights," after all.

God, and what God would be willing to sanction, must be the focus of the discussion.

It is argued that the termination of pregnancy during the early moments following conception is not abortion, and therefore drugs like the morning-after pill is not an aborticide, but merely a safe and easy method of contraception.

The Bible shows that life, and personhood, begins at conception.  God fashions us while we are in the womb (Psalms 139:13).  The prophet Jeremiah and the apostle Paul were called by God before they were born (Jeremiah 1:5, Galations 1:15).  John the Baptist leaped in his mother's womb when the voice of Mary, the mother of Jesus, was heard (Luke 1:44).  Children, in the womb, have an identity.

Conception, according to biblical writings, and common sense, is the beginning of a progression of development that continues throughout our lives.  The practice of abortion, in fact, was unthinkable to the people of God.  All throughout the Bible the women yearned for children.  A baby is a gift from God.  A righteous woman would not turn against her own children to destroy them.

Based on biblical teachings, it is obvious that God would never sanction the purposeful termination of the life of unborn children at any point during the pregnancy, unless of course carrying the child to full term would end the lives of both people - but that is a discussion for another time.  So, since God would not sanction the termination of a person in the womb, He would not sanction the use of aborticides, making the claim that abortion, or abortion-inducing drugs, are a right is a false claim.

Therefore, the mandate of "reproductive rights," in the Obamacare law, is not in line with Nature's Law, or the rule of law, but is a mandate based on the whims of man, and is, in turn, illegal.  Such a law is also a direct violation of a person's right to his religious freedoms.

The problem is that the courts, and the executive, have a total disregard for the United States Constitution, any of the principles that influenced its writing, or the principles of Nature's Law which were so influential in the writing of the Declaration of Independence.  Natural Law is established as the foundation of the country in the very first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence.  But the ruling elite do not care about the rule of law, whether or not something is authorized by the Constitution, or whether or not the action would be sanctioned by The Creator.  Theirs is a determination based on the Rule of Man, meaning that they believe they know more than the Lawgiver of whose natural law our system is based upon.  They believe they are above the law, and above God.  The judiciary has determined that their interpretation of the law is the law of the land, not the force of law through the Constitution, or Natural Law.  Theirs is a world ruled by judicial fiat, whether you like it, or not.

Such disregard for the written constitution, and Nature's Law, is a trademark of tyranny, and a system that refuses to abide by the Rule of Law, and instead prefers to use the Rule of Man in order to rule over the people using fear as their weapon, and the courts as the enforcers.

-- Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary

Sotomayor, Kagan: Hobby Lobby Should Drop Insurance, Pay Penalty, and Let Employees Use Exchange - CNS News

Supreme Court Should Uphold Hobby Lobby's Religious Freedom, Overturn HHS Mandate - LifeNews