Let the Lawyering begin!!

     A milestone in the implementation of ObamaCare was reached recently, at least that is what the newspaper headlines trumpted.  While I know it is hard to believe that anyone reads the newspaper anymore, I found the proclamation a bit perplexing and premature.  It referred to the compromise that the HHS wonks and religious organizations agreed upon to resolve the controversy surrounding contraception.  You remember that the original law mandated that, for example, Catholic hospitals had to pay for their employee’s birth control through their insurance plan.  Well, as you can imagine, this played at the Vatican about as well as Kim Kardashian at a Mensa meeting, so more than 60 groups filed lawsuits to stop the implementation of this mandate saying it violated very basic precepts of their religious teachings.  The government and these groups apparently had a Kumbaya moment and settled most of the legal wranglings and reached a compromise recently that allows the employees of said religious groups to have their birth control and eat it too.  In other words, very little on principle was really achieved. 

         
     This issue is much deeper than birth control, there are multitudes of rulings in the law that can be seen as moral rather than legal issues, and this compromise goes nowhere to settle the real question as to whether we want government dictating morals and ethics.  You might argue that is precisely what a government is for, to legislate and implement law that is moral, ethical, and in the interest of the general welfare.  If that is the case, I hope you are satisfied when legislators who have a different moral and ethical belief system pass laws that totally oppose your point of view.  A republic is based on a representative government, not a democracy, so the premise for such action is the Constitution, not the Bible, Koran, of Bhagavad Gita.  I have yet to see anywhere in the Constitution that the national government has the power to compel me to buy insurance and, as a business owner, pay for services I might object to.  I see this ruling solving very little and opening the floodgates of lawsuits of businesses objecting to everything from contraception to hospice care.  Let the lawyering begin!!