Month: November 2013

US Supreme Court v. the First Amendment

Standard

Religious Freedom

From Wikipedia:

“The First Amendment (Amendment I) to the United States Constitution prohibits the making of any law respecting an establishment of religion, impeding the free exercise of religion, abridging the freedom of speech, infringing on the freedom of the press, interfering with the right to peaceably assemble or prohibiting the petitioning for a governmental redress of grievances. It was adopted on December 15, 1791, as one of the ten amendments that comprise the Bill of Rights.”

Give it second reading, it’s not at all confusing!

From CNN: Two local women brought suit against Greece, New York, officials, objecting that the monthly public sessions on government open with invocations they say have been overwhelmingly Christian in nature over the years.

With this amendment in mind, the rationale for the Supreme Court’s decision to hear the case brought by extremist Atheists against the small town of Greece, New York is far from clear. In fact it’s obviously frivolous nonsense; the court should have seen that and turned down the case for just that reason.

Read the damn amendment again if you must! If anyone is interfering with the free choice of religion it is the Atheists interfering with the religious choices of the town officials and those in the town who have no problems with prayer. Incidentally they are also attempting to interfere with the rights of the citizens of Greece to “peaceably assemble.”

So why did the Supreme Court, or any court in the country, choose to hear this First Amendment case and render an opinion on the obvious non-Constitutional issue of a government body allowing prayer to begin their meeting? The only rationale I can think of for accepting this case is that the Justices have their own closely held prejudices and opinions and have  covert urges to MAKE law rather than interpreting existing law.

Seriously, is there anyone in Washington suited to do their job??

For sure there are many areas of the Constitution that are “grey areas” and need to be interpreted but the First Amendment is not one of them.

I’m a life long atheist but I’m not one of THOSE atheists who assumes they have all the rights and those who hold different views have none.

Beneath the Surface of Obamacare

Standard

ObamacareIf you feel, as I do,  that we are rapidly  loosing our country to the whims and wishes of a man who seems to be  able to get away with doing pretty much anything he wishes while ignoring/bypassing the Constitution, the public will and traditional  American freedoms, you must feel pretty bad about the United States’ system of government right now.

In CNN’s top “Politics” article today titled: Obamacare: It’s about government’s role, future elections , CNN calls Obamacare: “the new reality they are bringing to the health insurance market.”

How very true! And what a sad reality!

The idea behind Obamacare CNN states is: “a system (that) would provoke competition between insurers for lucrative markets, meaning lower premiums and a minimum standard of benefits to provide security against financial ruin over a major illness or bad accident.”

That certainly, at least on the surface, sounds noble but, aside from the fact that it is a lie, the fact that it could not, by design, have ever been intended to provoke competition and the obvious fact that it’s not working like that, we should dig a little deeper and think about the ramifications of such a system.

As broke as the implementation of Obamacare seems to be, Obamacare is not the real enemy! It’s the mindset behind Obamacare that’s the enemy. It’s the mindset of a big government socialist; the mindset that says it’s OK for the central government of a country to take an entire industry captive (in this case the health insurance industry) and eventually do away with it altogether. What industry will be next?

This is not Cuba, this is not England and this is not Canada (countries where such a concept would be de rigueur) and  hopefully, after the sad realities of Obamacare sink into the consciousness of Americans, we won’t want the United States to emulate any of those countries.

Free enterprise built this country and just 8 years of unfettered Obama can easily do a world of damage to what free enterprise took centuries to create. President Obama is a socialist at heart and he’s been very open about his socialist tendencies. Even while running for Senate in Illinois he was making public statements about “leveling the playing field” and he stated that “the Constitution does not go far enough”. President Obama and his ilk would just love it if the government ran everything it wanted to run and ran everything else into the ground. It’s a sickness based on power and an extreme lack of foresight. WE (those of us who believe in free enterprise, free markets, honesty and a good work ethic) MUST defeat this socialist mindset.

What to do?

Limit the damage! Take the U.S. Senate back and reinforce the U.S. House of Representatives in 2014.

Use every avenue available to you to respectfully inform others how you feel;  use social media, letters to the editor, phone calls and emails to your representatives, add your support to the many organizations that have sprung up opposing the president’s socialist agenda, use lunchtime and water cooler conversations and especially use your ‘voice’ in the voting booth in November of 2014.

Remember that, if we all work hard at it and elect the right people in 2014 (just a year from now) we can render our ‘socialist dictator’ and his minions in Washington nearly impotent for his last two years in office.

In spite of Liberal/Progressive rhetoric, the sad reality is that the focus of the Obama administration has NOT been to make poor people better off, it has been to make them more and more dependent on government.

The very nature of dependency works to rot away self-determination, ambition, self-respect, independent thought and free will.

As  Thomas Sowell is quoted as saying:

“Helping those who have been struck by unforeseeable misfortunes is fundamentally different from making dependency a way of life.”