Thursday, February 23, 2012

Give Back Our Moral Freedom!

    Give back Our Moral Freedom!

    How Obamacare Forces

    Americans to Pay for

    Abortions They Don’t Want

    The current debate on Obamacare’s contraception mandate is focused on forcing Catholic institutions and all pro-life Americans to violate their consciences and pay for insurance policies that provide sterilization, and contraceptive and abortifacient drugs. The uproar tends to make us forget another egregious and immoral abuse inflicted by Obamacare upon Americans…

    Obamacare forces unwilling, pro-life Americans to PAY for the abortions requested by others


    Tricking Americans to Pay for Abortion-on-Demand

    A March 25, 2010 Legal Analysis prepared by the Office of the General Counsel of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops points out that the

              The Hyde Amendment

    In 1973, the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade made abortion legal in the U.S.

    An immediate consequence was that Medicaid funds (taxpayers’ dollars) were used to pay for procured abortions. This changed in 1976 when a bill introduced by Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) was enacted into law by Congress.

    The Hyde Amendment forbids the use of certain federal funds — typically Medicaid — to pay for procured abortions.

    In the years 1973-1976, before the Hyde Amendment was enacted into law, Medicaid funds were used to pay for some 300,000 procured abortions.

    Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) violates the Hyde Amendment in two ways.

    First, Obamacare’s nearly 1,000 pages does not include Hyde-type language that forbids certain federal funds from being used to pay for abortions.

    As the Legal Analysis observes, Obamacare “makes a separate appropriation of billions of dollars for [Community Health Centers] without including Hyde Amendment language to cover that appropriation.” This ommission has consequences, since  “courts are highly likely to conclude that the CHC program must provide tax-funded abortions.”[1]

    Abusing the Conscience of Millions of Americans

    The second way Obamacare circumvents the Hyde Amendment is when it dictates that abortion-on-demand is to be paid for by  forcing individual insurance enrollees,even when these individuals are morally opposed to abortion, to pay for abortions procured by others.

    Obamacare provides that health plans can choose if they will cover elective abortion or not. For plans choosing to cover abortion, Obamacare stipulates that abortion costs cannot be funded with federal dollars and the plans should bill enrollees for this service on a regular basis.

    This directive makes the abortion surcharge tantamount to a federal tax, and its tortured way of being collected amounts to an accounting gimmick to circumvent Hyde Amendment restrictions.

    Pro-life Americans enrolled in health plans that cover abortion will be compelled to pay for a “service” they do not want, did not request, and are morally opposed to.

    The Legal Analysis prepared by the Office of General Counsel of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops had already denounced this socialist violation of the moral freedom of pro-life Americans:

    “[U]nder Section 1303, the tax credits are still used to pay overall premiums for health plans covering elective abortions. …

    “This part of [Obamacare] would also impose a serious burden on the consciences of millions of Americans. Any family having to buy such a subsidized plan—for example, because its coverage or provider network are necessary to meet the family’s health needs—will be forced by the Act to provide a separate payment, on a regular basis, solely to pay for other enrollees’ abortions. The Act specifies that a plan including elective abortions “shall” obtain this fee from every enrollee, allowing no accommodation for conscientious objection. PPACA, § 1303(b)(2)(B).

    “Thus, even if this mechanism succeeds in preventing taxpayers from being forced to pay for abortions through their federal taxes, it does so at the cost of forcing them to pay for abortions directly from their own pockets.”[2]

    As Family Research Council’s Cathy Cleaver Ruse observed in her February 8, 2011 testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, “The abortion surcharge is, arguably, an even more egregious violation of the Hyde Amendment principle.”[3]
    Pro-life organizations who signed on to an incisive Friends of the Court brief submitted on February 13, 2012 to the U.S. Supreme Court in connection with U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services v. State of Florida mention this threat to the moral freedom of millions of Americans. Their legal brief states: “Found in Section 1303 of the Act, the infringing provisions impose inescapable requirements upon millions of Americans who will be, even unwittingly, enrolled in employer or individual health plans that happen to include elective abortion coverage.”

    No Conscientious Objection Allowed

    Obamacare does not allow conscience protections for these Americans. The legal brief continues: “Such enrollees are compelled by the Act to pay a separate premium from their own pocket to the insurer’s actuarial fund designated solely for the purpose of paying for other people’s elective abortions. As explained below, the Act denies enrollees the ability to decline abortion coverage based on religious or moral objection.”[4]

    The Sexual Revolution and Socialism

    Both contraception and procured abortion are part of a mindset obsessed with immediate self-gratification and immersed in hedonism and idolatry of sexual pleasure. This mindset is in full harmony with a socialist and materialistic mentality.
    Socialists like Herbert Marcuse, Wilhelm Reich and Simone de Beauvoir  were the mentors of the Sexual Revolution (which has tormented society since the sixties). They transposed the premises of socialist class struggle to a fight between the sexes and linked the “liberation of the proletariat” to the abandonment of “bourgeois” sexual morals based on marriage and chastity.

    Morals began to be seen as an instrument of “oppression” of men’s natural instincts, above all the sexual instinct, which they claim, must not be subject to any rule, norm or limit.

    This revolution gradually spread from groups of hippies or rebel students to the rest of society and influenced fashions, customs, and ways of thinking, without the vast majority of people perceiving.

    Sexual Freedom, Contraception and Abortion

    If sexual intercourse should be free from all responsibility, the conceived child is eventually seen as a “violence” or “illness” to be avoided by all means.

    Contraception and abortion then become the normal means to avoid this “tragedy.” Conceiving a child becomes the enemy of limitless pleasure, of pleasure without responsibility.

    This is the mentality behind “Obamacare.” More than a mentality, it is a socialist ideology which has instrumentalized the power of government to impose itself on the whole of society.

    Repeal Obamacare

    In light of this socialist abuse of the sacred right to follow our right conscience—doing only what is good and avoiding all that is evil—the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property—TFP calls on all Catholics and Americans of good will to sign a pledge to fight Obamacare at

    www.TFP.org/pledge:

    I am a free American;

    Free to follow God’s commandments,

    Free to do what is good and right,

    Free to oppose the culture of death,

    Free to fight Obamacare’s religious persecution against the Catholic Church, and so…

    I pledge to fight socialist State control over healthcare.

    Seeking the Help of St. Michael the Archangel
    To the diverse legal and peaceful efforts that must be used to repeal Obamacare, we must add the power of prayer. Thus, the TFP urges all Catholics and Americans of good will to pray to St. Michael the Archangel. He who thrust Satan and the fallen angels out of Heaven is always ready to come to the aid of Christians in distress. He will only do this if we ask, pray, and pray with all our heart!
    With St. Michael’s help, and that of the Blessed Mother, Obamacare will be repealed.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            February 20, 2012
    The American TFP
    [1]Legal Analysis of the Provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and Corresponding Executive Order Regarding Abortion Funding and Conscience Protection, Mar. 25, 2010, p. 3, http://www.usccb.org/about/general-counsel/upload/Healthcare-EO-Memo.pdf. (Emphasis in the original.)
    [2]Legal Analysis, Mar. 25, 2010, p. 4, http://www.usccb.org/about/general-counsel/upload/Healthcare-EO-Memo.pdf. (Emphasis in the original.)
    [3]Cathy Cleaver Ruse, Testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Feb. 8, 2011 at http://www.frc.org/testimony/cathy-ruse-testimony-before-the-house-judiciary-committee.
    [4]Brief of amici curiae American College of Pediatricians, Christian Medical & Dental Associations, American Association of Pro-life Obstetricians & Gynecologists, Catholic Medical Association, Physicians for Life, National Association of Pro-life Nurses, and Medical Students for Life of America in support of Respondents and Affirmance on the individual mandate issue, United States Department of Health and Human Services, et al. v. State of Florida, et al., p. 6., http://www.bdfund.org/uploads/file_606.pdf.. (Our emphasis.)

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