Obama’s Health Care Mandate

Editor’s note: Dr. Kengor will be a participant in an April 19-20 conference
hosted by The Center for Vision & Values on [4]"The Challenge 2012: The Divided
Conservative Mind."

February 6 was the anniversary of [5]Ronald Reagan’s birth. It comes at an
appropriate time. February is also the month of Presidents Day and the birthday
of [6]Lincoln, the other Republican standard-bearer. Every Republican
presidential candidate tries to claim the mantle of Reagan: "I believe as
Ronald Reagan believed…."

Well, what did Ronald Reagan believe? It’s a question I get often. I’ve been
giving a lecture titled, "[7]What is a Reagan conservative?" I’ll be giving it
again at the CPAC conference on Feb. 11 and our [8]Center for Vision & Values
conference in April. In that lecture, I lay out the core fundamentals of
"Reagan conservatism."

Some of those fundamentals have special relevance in light of the ongoing
scandal known as [9]the "Obama mandate;" that is, President Obama’s
unprecedented "healthcare" decree mandating that all Americans—including
Catholics and Catholic organizations—forcibly pay for contraception,
sterilization, and birth-control drugs that cause abortions. Two core Reagan
fundamentals stand out: 1) Reagan’s belief in the sanctity and dignity of human
life; and 2) Reagan’s thoughts on the "idea" of America.

On the first, Reagan insisted that without the right to life, there can be no
other rights. The right to life is the first of all freedoms, without which
other freedoms literally cannot exist. "My administration is dedicated to the
preservation of America as a free land," said Reagan in 1983. "And there is no
cause more important for preserving that freedom than affirming the
transcendent right to life of all human beings, the right without which no
other rights have any meaning."

For Reagan, that right to life began in the womb. It began at conception. As
president, [10]Reagan supported a Human Life Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution, which would have inserted into the Constitution these words: "the
paramount right to life is vested in each human being from the moment of
fertilization without regard to age, health or condition of dependency." He
favored providing every human being—at all stages of development—protection as
"persons" with the "right to life" under the 14th Amendment.

That amendment never passed. Too bad. It would have killed Obama’s mandate, or
at least posed a significant challenge.

In addition, Reagan extolled America as a country based on timeless, eternal
values: on universal, God-given [11]inalienable rights. Reagan gave innumerable
statements on these rights, but I’m struck by one he gave way back in June 1952
at tiny William Woods College in Missouri.

There, Reagan said that America is "less of a place than an idea," a place that
resided deep in our souls. "It is simply the idea," said Reagan, "the basis of
this country and of our religion, the idea of the dignity of man, the idea that
deep within the heart of each one of us is something so God-like and precious
that no individual or group has a right to impose his or its will upon the
people so well as they can decide for themselves."

Well, the Obama mandate imposes President Obama’s personal will upon all of the
American people, and especially Catholics whose consciences dictate otherwise.
The mandate violates something God-like and deep within the heart of religious
believers who profess the dignity of man from the moment of conception—whose
faith implores them not to violate that dignity. President Obama, via his fiat,
has instructed certain believers not only to go against their conscience and
Church’s teachings but to subsidize the transgression.

In another speech years later, in August 1983, Reagan referred to Americans’
inalienable rights as "corollaries of the great proposition, at the heart of
Western civilization, that every … person is a ressacra, a sacred reality, and
as such is entitled to the opportunity of fulfilling those great human
potentials with which God has endowed man."

For many Americans, their faith calls upon them to defend those persons, each
one of which is a sacred reality that must be permitted to achieve the great
human potential that is God’s hope for all of us.

This is what Ronald Reagan believed. The current president’s "healthcare"
mandate is a flagrant rejection of these principles.

— Dr. Paul Kengor is professor of political science at Grove City College and
executive director of [12]The Center for Vision & Values. His books include
[13]"The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism" and [14]"Dupes: How
America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century." Dr. Kengor
will be a participant in an April 19-20 conference hosted by the Center on
[15]"The Challenge 2012: The Divided Conservative Mind."