Obamneycare And Religious Freedom

The government is trying to force Catholic institutions to go against their religious beliefs by making them provide contraceptives and birth control to their employees. I am not aware of all of the details of this issue, but from what I have heard from several commentators it seems to be a power grab by the government and an infringement of religious liberties. I have not heard any good arguments in favor of it. I don't see what the problem is with birth control--quite frankly a lot more people need to use it. Mark Steyn draws a parallel between this issue and the main reason that the first European settlers came to America:

The church model the young American state wished to separate from was that of the British monarch, who remains to this day supreme governor of the Church of England. This convenient arrangement dates from the 1534 Act of Supremacy. The title of the law gives you the general upshot, but, just in case you’re a bit slow on the uptake, the text proclaims “the King’s Majesty justly and rightfully is and ought to be the supreme head of the Church of England.”[...]

Welcome to Obamacare.[...]

The bigger the Big Government, the smaller everything else: First, other pillars of civil society are crowded out of the public space; then, the individual gets crowded out, even in his most private, tooth-level space. President Obama, Commissar Sebelius, and many others believe in one-size-fits-all national government — uniformity, conformity, supremacy from Maine to Hawaii, for all but favored cronies. It is a doomed experiment — and on the morning after it will take a lot more than a morning-after pill to make it all go away.

Obama has walked back from requiring that religious employers provide birth control by stating that the insurance companies must provide it. Rush Limbaugh seems to think that this not really walking back or caving in and relates this issue with the broader lost of freedom in America:

The Associated Press has learned. The administration instead will demand that insurance companies will be the ones directly responsible for providing free contraception." And we're supposed to applaud this? We're supposed to think that we have emerged with a big victory here? Obama can mandate that we buy insurance, and now Obama can mandate what insurance companies must offer -- and after mandating what insurance companies must offer, then Obama can mandate what insurance companies can charge for it? [...]

Since when...? I'm gonna ask this again: Since when does a president have the power to threaten to issue a rule gutting religious liberty and then claims the power to make compromises on that issue? This is how, folks, we lose our liberty. This is how we lose the Constitution. The suggestion that Obama has the power to alter that which he doesn't have the power to do in the first place, is simply unacceptable. The first thing he does he doesn't have the power to do. He doesn't have, constitutionally, the power to mandate that religious organizations provide -- free of charge or otherwise -- any abortion-related service with which they disagree. He doesn't have the authority. Then to supposedly correct it, he then engages in more authority that he doesn't have![..]

From violating religious rights where there is no power permitted to do so, to mandating the purchase of products, to now mandating insurance companies sell certain products at a price that's also mandated, from czars, to denying the right to travel, it's all here. We're living in a country that's becoming unrecognizable!

If the government is the entity that is providing people's health care and controlling 1/6 of the U.S. economy, then the government has every right to have all of these mandates that violates people's and religious institution's most fundamental rights. This is the slow creeping danger to people's fundamental freedoms in Obamneycare. People can't have the government provide everything for them and have freedom at the same time. The sad thing is that the Republican party is flirting with nominating a candidate who implemented a version of Obamacare that actually had a similar mandate for religious institutions. America's leaders ,to include Republican leaders, are selling the American people into slavery and bondage to the state. People need to wake up and get informed, especially republicans that are voting for Romney in the primaries. But as history shows people won't wake up until it is too late, I am reminded of the condition of the German people after being seduced into following a charismatic leader that resulted in loosing WW II and having tens of thousands of their women raped by Russian soldiers and their cities destroyed.