Is Obama Trying To Pick A Fight? And, If So, What Does He Hope To Accomplish?

Christian Leaders Vow to Be Jailed Rather Than Cave to Obama’s HHS Law

From Gateway Pundit:

In the last 24 hours Pastor Rick Warren pledged on his twitter page:
“I’d go to jail  rather than cave in to a goverment mandate that violates what God commands us to do. Would you? Acts 5:29”

Likewise, one of the nation’s top Boptist leaders Dr. Richard Land vowed to do time rather than comply to Obama’s new HHS mandate.
Lifesite News reported:

One of the most influential evangelical leaders in the United States says Christians should go to jail rather than comply with the Obama administration’s mandate to provide all contraception, including abortion-inducing drugs, in their health care plans.
Dr. Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), told LifeSiteNews.com “we will not comply” with the Dept. of Health and Human Services’ mandate requiring religious institutions to cover abortifacient products such as Plan B, Ella, and the IUD.
“We want the law changed, or else we’re going to write our letters from the Nashville jail, just like Dr. King wrote his from the Birmingham jail,” Dr. Land said.

Today Barack Obama spoke with democrats and doubled down on his HHS mandate that forces Christian organizations to provide free abortifacient and birth control drugs to all employees.

Cardinal-Designate Dolan: Obama Regime “Has Drifted Dangerously Beyond Its Constitutional Boundaries”…

The gloves are off.

MEANWHILE, OBAMA IS MAKING IT CLEAR THIS IS A VERY IMPORTANT FIGHT FOR HE AND HIS FELLOW DEMOCRATS:

Senate Dems Say Obama “Reinforced” His Stance On Contraception Mandate To Them At Democratic Retreat…

He’s digging his own political grave and they’re cheering him on. Not that I’m complaining.

(ABC News) — President Obama “reinforced” his stance on the controversial contraception mandate while speaking at the Democrats’ annual retreat at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C. today, Senate Democrats said.
The retreat was closed to media.
Following President Obama’s speech at the retreat, a small group of Senate Democrats, mostly women, left the retreat early in order to hold a news conference on Capitol Hill to counter the Republicans’ news conference today at which they called for the mandate to be overturned.
Democrats said they will “fight strongly” to keep the mandate in place.
Keep reading…

EXIT QUESTION: ARE THE RECENT ASSAULTS ON THE CONSTITUTION BY RUTH BADER GINSBURG AND THE NEW YORK TIMES THE NEW "TALKING POINTS" OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY AND THE OBAMA REGIME, DESIGNED TO WEAKEN THOSE WHO WOULD ARGUE THE "CONTRACEPTION MANDATE" CROSSES THE 1ST AMENDMENT PROTECTIONS OF THE CHURCH?

New York Times Publishes Hit Piece On US Constitution

The only good thing I can see about this piece is at least they implicitly admit that Leftism and it's attacks on our system are at fault for the waning respect our Constitution is afforded throughout the world.

From the NYT:

WASHINGTON — The Constitution has seen better days.

Sure, it is the nation’s founding document and sacred text. And it is the oldest written national constitution still in force anywhere in the world. But its influence is waning. 

In 1987, on the Constitution’s bicentennial, Time magazine calculated that “of the 170 countries that exist today, more than 160 have written charters modeled directly or indirectly on the U.S. version.” 

A quarter-century later, the picture looks very different. “The U.S. Constitution appears to be losing its appeal as a model for constitutional drafters elsewhere,” according to a new study by David S. Law of Washington University in St. Louis and Mila Versteeg of the University of Virginia. 

The study, to be published in June in The New York University Law Review, bristles with data. Its authors coded and analyzed the provisions of 729 constitutions adopted by 188 countries from 1946 to 2006, and they considered 237 variables regarding various rights and ways to enforce them. 

“Among the world’s democracies,” Professors Law and Versteeg concluded, “constitutional similarity to the United States has clearly gone into free fall. Over the 1960s and 1970s, democratic constitutions as a whole became more similar to the U.S. Constitution, only to reverse course in the 1980s and 1990s.” 

“The turn of the twenty-first century, however, saw the beginning of a steep plunge that continues through the most recent years for which we have data, to the point that the constitutions of the world’s democracies are, on average, less similar to the U.S. Constitution now than they were at the end of World War II.” 

There are lots of possible reasons. The United States Constitution is terse and old, and it guarantees relatively few rights. The commitment of some members of the Supreme Court to interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning in the 18th century may send the signal that it is of little current use to, say, a new African nation. And the Constitution’s waning influence may be part of a general decline in American power and prestige. 

In an interview, Professor Law identified a central reason for the trend: the availability of newer, sexier and more powerful operating systems in the constitutional marketplace. “Nobody wants to copy Windows 3.1,” he said. 

In a television interview during a visit to Egypt last week, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court seemed to agree. “I would not look to the United States Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012,” she said. She recommended, instead, the South African Constitution, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms or the European Convention on Human Rights.

Other nations routinely trade in their constitutions wholesale, replacing them on average every 19 years. By odd coincidence, Thomas Jefferson, in a 1789 letter to James Madison, once said that every constitution “naturally expires at the end of 19 years” because “the earth belongs always to the living generation.” These days, the overlap between the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and those most popular around the world is spotty. 

Americans recognize rights not widely protected, including ones to a speedy and public trial, and are outliers in prohibiting government establishment of religion. But the Constitution is out of step with the rest of the world in failing to protect, at least in so many words, a right to travel, the presumption of innocence and entitlement to food, education and health care. 

It has its idiosyncrasies. Only 2 percent of the world’s constitutions protect, as the Second Amendment does, a right to bear arms. (Its brothers in arms are Guatemala and Mexico.) 

The Constitution’s waning global stature is consistent with the diminished influence of the Supreme Court, which “is losing the central role it once had among courts in modern democracies,” Aharon Barak, then the president of the Supreme Court of Israel, wrote in The Harvard Law Review in 2002. 

Many foreign judges say they have become less likely to cite decisions of the United States Supreme Court, in part because of what they consider its parochialism. 

“America is in danger, I think, of becoming something of a legal backwater,” Justice Michael Kirby of the High Court of Australia said in a 2001 interview. He said that he looked instead to India, South Africa and New Zealand.

CASS AGREES WITH RUTH: THE US CONSTITUTION SUCKS

I BETCHYA BARRY HUSSEIN SOETORO OBAMA AGREES WITH WHAT CASS WROTE HERE AT THIS LINK, TOO: THE US CONSTITUTION SUCKS; THE SOUTH AFRICAN CONSTITUTION RULES!

Punditarian rightly commented earlier:

The purpose of the Constitution is not to grant or guarantee rights to the people. The rights of man are an endowment from the Creator. The purpose of the Constitution is to create a government whose powers are specifically limited, and which is required always to respect the rights with which we are endowed.

Since the left does not accept that there is a Creator capable of endowing His creations with inalienable rights, they typically concoct vast, turgid constitutions that grant to the subjects of the state all sorts of theoretical rights, none of which the state actually respects or promotes.

EXCERPT FROM 1971 PAPER IN THE NEJM:

ABSTRACT 

From man's primary right - the right to his own life - derive all others, including the rights to select and pursue his own values, and to dispose of these values, once gained, without coercion. The choice of the conditions under which a physician's services are rendered belongs to the physician as a consequence of his right to support his own life.  

If medical care, which includes physician's services, is considered the right of the patient, that right should properly be protected by government law. Since the ultimate authority of all law is force of arms, the physician's professional judgment - that is, his mind - is controlled through threat of violence by the state. Force is the antithesis of mind, and man cannot survive qua man without the free use of his mind. Thus, since the concept of medical care as the right of the patient entails the use or threat of violence against physicians, that concept is anti-mind - therefore, anti-life, and, therefore, immoral.

RTWT.


CASS AND RUTH AND BARACK ARE IMMORAL AND ANTI-AMERICAN, TOO BOOT.