Liberty Minute July 7 2014

The federal government's claimed power to compel Christian employers to underwrite the purchase of abortion pills for their female employees is the only thing preventing the imposition of a totalitarian theocracy. At least this is what hysterical leftists are pretending to believe in the wake of last week's Supreme Court ruling in what has come to be known as the Hobby Lobby case.

In a 5-4 decision the Court held that the company was not required to provide insurance coverage for birth control methods that violate the owners' religious convictions. This applies to four of sixteen birth control methods, all of which involve chemically induced abortions.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissenting opinion maintained that a corporation cannot claim protection under the free exercise of religion clause of the First Amendment because it is an impersonal abstraction, rather than a person. However, she repeatedly insisted that the government has a ?compelling interest? in forcing companies to cover all birth control methods, including those at issue in this case.

If a corporation is an abstraction, the government must also be regarded as one ? and if a corporation can't claim rights, a government can't claim a compelling interest. And the Constitution doesn't authorize any federal bureaucracy to force anybody to buy anything.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.