A Unique Perspective on the HHS “Cram-Down”
Posted by John Jansen (March 7, 2012 at 7:11 pm)
One of the more fascinating commentaries on the HHS Mandate that has appeared recently is that written by University of St. Thomas law professor Michael Stokes Paulsen, entitled “Obama’s Contraception Cram-down: The Pork Precedent.”
Paulsen’s use of the words “cram-down” was quite deliberate, calling it “a perfect term” to describe the HHS’s policy:
The whole point, it seems, is to override religious objections to such a policy to the maximum extent politically possible, out of an intense ideological commitment to contraception and abortion as ‘preventive health care.’ It is vital, the ideologues say, to prevail over religious objections precisely in order to advance, and permanently entrench, this particular ideology and, further, to vindicate the power of government to impose such policies on everyone. Religious objections must be overcome, in part for the sake of overcoming religious objections.
He goes on to say that the HHS Mandate calls to mind a story from the book of Fourth Maccabees, one of the books of the “Apocrypha.”
In the second century B.C., the Seleucid Emperor Antiochus IV Epiphanes decreed that all Jews would be forced to violate their consciences by eating pork and food sacrificed to idols. [Continue reading …]