Columnist.
The zeal and expertise of the federal government in using modern technology is not evenly distributed across all its functions -- legitimate and otherwise. Our government cannot build a website to efficiently sell insurance to people whom it has compelled by law to buy insurance, but it can collect the domestic phone records of Americans and store them for years in a massive database. That database is theoretically so efficient -- as opposed to the Obamacare website -- that the government can use it to track down terrorists operating clandestinely in the United States.
The Supreme Court over the past four decades has issued some decisions that not only defied the Constitution, but imposed changes on our society that go so far as to challenge fundamental principles of our civilization. For example, our Founding Fathers believed all men are endowed by their creator with an inalienable right to life -- a principal derived not only from natural law, but also from the commandment thou shall not kill.
Daniel and Samuel were both born in Monterrey, Mexico on the same day in 1990 and baptized by the same priest two Sundays later. Both attended the same primary and secondary schools. Both dreamed of some day moving to the United States. But there the similarity ends. Samuel dropped out of school in tenth grade. Daniel graduated from secondary school, went on to the university and graduated at the top of his class.
God may not have invented competitive ball games, but man, endowed with a creative intellect and a passionate spirit, soon discovered such games -- and began re-shaping and refining them until a few generations of inspired collegians, in the decades between the Civil War and World War I, developed the greatest of all ball games, American tackle football. Parke H. Davis, who played at Princeton in the late 1880s, and who later chronicled the early days of college football in the United States, believed he discovered its earliest antecedent in the Old Testament.
Who had more freedom? Was it the pioneer who rode horseback across the Midwest, settled in a wide-open space without paved roads, grocery stores or hospitals, and he had to build his own home, cultivate his own food and educate his own children?
It will be brought to you by the same people now bringing you Obamacare. In May, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration published its "Preliminary Statement of Policy Concerning Automated Vehicles." It pointed to a "continuum" of automobile development that "runs from vehicles with no active control systems all the way to full automation and self-driving."
A week after he signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama went on a road trip to Portland, Maine, to boast and prevaricate about what he had just done. "So now that this bill is finally law and all the folks who have been playing politics will finally have to confront the reality of what this reform is, they're also going to have to confront the reality of what it isn't," said Obama, introducing a lie that has gotten belated, but much-deserved, attention in recent days.
"I had to say Mass in my room," says Father Ray Leonard, recalling the years he served in the Tibetan region of the People's Republic of China. In that country, where the Communist government has created a state-sanctioned facsimile of the Catholic Church and driven faithful Catholics underground, Father Leonard saw firsthand how totalitarians approach religion.
There are three cousins, each born in the same year in the same town. Two are females named June and Jane, one is a male named Jim. June goes to college, earns a degree, gets married, buys a house with her husband, has four kids -- and at the age of 32 goes back into the workforce, holding down two part-time jobs to help pay the family's property taxes and tuition bills. Jane graduates from high school but not college, gets married but is almost immediately divorced and has one illegitimate child. She drops out of the workforce in her 20s and never returns. She collects food stamps and enrolls in Medicaid.
The Department of Defense this month took what almost certainly will be the most telling symbolic act the Obama administration ever takes. "The doors to the Kings Bay Chapel were locked on Oct. 4, 2013, with the Holy Eucharist, Holy water, Catholic hymn books and vessels all locked inside," says a lawsuit filed Monday by the Thomas More Law Center. "Father Leonard and his parishioners ... were prohibited from entering."
The Obama administration has prohibited the Kennedy family from practicing its Catholicism, and the Kennedys now intend to ask the Supreme Court to restore their First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion. Their case could become one of the most consequential in our nation's history. The issue: Will the most fundamental liberty of all -- freedom of conscience -- survive in post-Obama America?
Beginning now, with the opening of government-run health-insurance exchanges, President Barack Obama will be prohibiting American Catholics from practicing their faith in the way they live their daily lives. This is an act of tyranny. Yet, many Americans in positions of public authority and influence have greeted it with silence and inaction.
In the next few days, politicians in Washington, D.C., will do and say many things to make it look and sound as if they are against Obamacare when in fact they are ultimately planning to use the power that has been vested in them by the people of their districts and states to ensure that Obamacare is funded and implemented. But make no mistake: If Obamacare is funded and implemented it will be because Republican members of Congress decided to do it.
Six months ago, Cardinal Sean O'Malley of Boston made a very simple and straightforward request to House Speaker John Boehner and other members of the House of Representatives. "I urge you to support H.R. 940 and to help incorporate its policy into upcoming 'must-pass' legislation," O'Malley said in a March 8 letter to all House members. H.R. 940 advances a proposition you might expect any decent person to embrace -- and it does so by making a small amendment to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.
At the end of this month, members of Congress will face a binary choice. The House and Senate will pass a bill to fund the government past Sept. 30, the last day of the fiscal year. That bill will either permit or prohibit funding for implementation of Obamacare. Members will need to vote for it or against it. There will be no middle ground.
President Barack Obama is simultaneously saying he intends to take military action against the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad to punish it for using chemical weapons, but that he will not put U.S. troops on the ground in Syria. Is such a plan more likely to advance the interests of the American people or those of the Assad regime's most vehement foe -- al-Qaida? Will it increase or decrease future acts of evil?
"We're actively looking at the various legal angles that would inform a decision." That is what an anonymous administration official told the Washington Post this week about President Barack Obama's deliberations on whether he will personally involve the United States in another Middle Eastern war by ordering military action in Syria. But the only law that ultimately matters here is the one Obama swore to preserve, protect and defend: the Constitution of the United States.
When the despotic King Herod plotted to kill Jesus by sending his agents to slaughter every boy under the age of 2 in and around Bethlehem, an angel appeared to Joseph and told him, "Get up, take the child and his mother, and escape to Egypt." That, says the Gospel of Matthew, fulfilled what God said through the prophet Hosea: "Out of Egypt I called my son." Now, two millennia later, we may live in a time when Christians must flee for their lives out of Egypt -- not into it. They do not fear being slaughtered by King Herod, but by the Muslim Brotherhood.
Obamacare attacks the liberty and financial viability of the traditional family, and nothing demonstrates this more clearly than the system of federal subsidies it puts in place starting next year. This system rewards people who don't marry, don't work and don't take care of their own children. It punishes people who do marry, work hard and take care of their own children.
In the past week, The New York Times Co. announced it was selling the Boston Globe to Boston Red Sox owner John W. Henry and Washington Post Chairman Donald Graham announced Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos was buying the paper that Graham's family has run for decades. Both papers went cheap. The Times bought the Globe in 1993 for $1.1 billion and is now selling it for $70 million. The price tag on the Post was just $250 million.
