Religion aside, since 2008, health care workers have had the protection of law to say that they would not help with procedures such as abortion, sex changes, or other similar controversial medical procedures.
And now, the U.S. Health & Human Serviced Department (HHS) headed by Kathleen Sebelius is apparently attempting to remove the “conscience protections” for health care workers! This would eliminate any protection of a health care worker that attempts to opt out of helping with abortion procedures or other controversial medical procedures where the worker feels that his/her conscience tells them, no!
Elimination of the “conscience protections” would put many health care workers at risk of being punished, or actually fired from their jobs. There have been many cases prior to the 2008 implementations of these protections where the Pharmacist, nurse, or even doctors have been reprimanded, or even fired because they claimed “conscience protections”. Without these protections, there is no limit as to what may be required of health care workers.
In a letter signed by 46 members of the U.S. House of Representatives, it asks her to explain why her department is seeking to repeal conscience protections for health care workers in light of known attacks on such workers. The two situations cited in the letter involve clients represented by attorneys with the Alliance Defense Fund.
Another reason for the government to stay out of the private sector. The more money you give them is the more they can regulate your behavior.
After seizing a child from his parents and holding him in custody with virtually no visitation for 1 1/2 years because he was home-schooled, the Swedish government has now jailed the boy’s father for taking his son home from a supervised visitation when he wasn’t supposed to last week. Social services officials also told the 9-year-old boy’s mother that if she doesn’t stop crying at the limited visitations, which last for one hour every five to six weeks, they will further reduce the frequency of visits with her son.
After Swedish courts upheld the government’s right to seize Domenic Johansson, son of Christer and Annie Johansson, attorneys with the Alliance Defense Fund and the Home School Legal Defense Association filed an application with the European Court of Human Rights asking it to hear the case, Johansson v. Sweden. Swedish authorities will not permit the family to be represented within the country by an ADF-allied attorney and have instead required them to accept a government-appointed public defender.
“The government shouldn’t abduct and imprison children simply because it doesn’t like homeschooling. That’s exactly what happened here,” said ADF Legal Counsel Roger Kiska, who is based in Europe. “Despite the ill-advised decision on the part of Mr. Johansson, the only menace here is a government drunk with its own power. This sad circumstance is what happens when an over-powerful government pushes a parent to the point of desperation, so social services should not pretend to be surprised.”
“The parents complied with everything expected of them, and yet the government has continued to keep their son under lock and key,” Kiska added. “Americans beware: This is coming to your doorstep if you are not vigilant about your government.”
Swedish authorities forcibly removed Domenic from his parents in June 2009 from a plane they had boarded to move to Annie’s home country of India. The officials did not have a warrant nor did they charge the Johanssons with any crime. The officials seized the child because they believe home schooling is an inappropriate way to raise a child and insist the government should raise Domenic instead, even though home-schooling was legal in Sweden at the time he was taken into custody.
The Democrat party, and all secular leftist parties, are opposed to the idea of parents raising their own children because it offends their sense of “equality”. The left desires equality of outcomes for all citizens regardless of how they act. And that means that all children should receive state care and instruction during daylight hourse, virtually from the time they are born until the time when they become employed (hopefully by the government). The left is especially terrified of homeschooling, because in that arrangement, the parents, (and especially the father), are able to teach the child to have the beliefs that the parents prefer. The left is allied with teacher unions who have educated themselves to the point where they believe that parents are not their partners in educating children, but instead are enemies.
Homeschooling versus fascism
A common thread in fascist regimes is the effort to separate children from parents at a young age, so that adult teachers can impose the state’s values on the children when they are least able to resist them. That is why, accoring to the Guardian, the National Socialist party abolished homeschooling in fascist Germany in 1938. (A review of Goldberg’s book by Canadian author Denyse O’Leary is here). My favorite quote from Goldberg’s book is about the role of government-run schools in a fascist state:
Hence a phalanx of progressive reformers saw the home as the front line in the war to transform men into compliant social organs. Often the answer was to get the children out of the home as soon as possible. An archipelago of agencies, commissions, and bureaus sprang up overnight to take the place of the anti-organic, contra-evolutionary influences of the family. The home could no longer be seen as an island, separate and sovereign from the rest of society. John Dewey helped create kindergartens in American for precisely this purpose — to help shape the apples before they fell from the tree — while at the other end of the educational process stood reformers like Wilson, who summarized the progressive attitude perfectly when, as president of Princeton, he told an audience, “Our problem is not merely to help the students to adjust themselves to world life … [but] to make them as unlike their fathers as possible.”
The United States is also heading in this direction. In Democrat-run California, Human Events reported that homeschooling was effectively banned by an activist court. Christian apologist Dinesh D’Souza recently explained why the left is so intent on keeping control of the schools here. He notes that secular people do not form families and do not have children, because it is too much of a constraint on their autonomy. Instead, D’Souza writes, secularists simply seize control of the children of religious parents, and pass their values on to the children in the mandatory government-run schools.
Christians and the secular left
Some people, even some Christians, vote for Democrats because they don’t want to have to pay for the things they want by working themselves, but would prefer to pay for the the things they want by having their harder-working neighbors pay for the things they want. Parents who vote for leftists are really just delivering their children into the hands of an ever growing secular humanist educational bureaucracy that will have no respect – no respect – for the traditional family. And this is even worse for Christians, because the traditional family is the nursery for Christian beliefs. When a child has to please his peers and his public school indoctrinators more than his parents, Christianity is finished.
This is something that the church is largely ignorant of, and indifferent to, because they are more focused on providing feelings of happiness to their customers. The church does this by neglecting the truthfulness of Christianity as a knowledge tradition and emphasizing Christianity as an amusing musical show. Apologetics is replaced by entertainment.
Conservative and liberal justices on the Supreme Court dueled verbally over whether a student religious group has a constitutional right to receive state college funds while excluding homosexuals and others who violate its beliefs.
The case, argued Monday, stems from San Francisco, where the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law says its policy requires that student groups seeking benefits such as school funding or preferred access to meeting rooms admit any interested student.
Hastings refused to accept the Christian Legal Society as a registered student group because, starting in 2004, the organization has held members to a “statement of faith” prohibiting “fornication, adultery and homosexual conduct.”
The society sued, contending that the Hastings antidiscrimination policy violated its First Amendment right to associate with those it chooses and to select members and officers committed to promoting its beliefs. Lower courts agreed with Hastings, setting up a Supreme Court argument with both sides represented by lawyers who gained prominence during the administration of President George W. Bush.
[…]The student group was represented by Michael W. McConnell, a conservative scholar who has challenged prevailing views requiring a rigid separation between church and state. President Bush appointed him to a federal appeals court, but Mr. McConnell stepped down last year to head a center at Stanford Law School and litigate cases like this one.
“If Hastings is correct, a student who does not even believe in the Bible is entitled to demand to lead a Christian Bible study,” Mr. McConnell told the Supreme Court. While the school could bar discrimination based on “status”—such as race—it could not stop a student group from limiting membership to those who pledge fealty to its beliefs, he said.
And what about the wise Latina, who was appointed by Barack Obama, and hailed as a moderate?
Liberal justices said Hastings’s policy reflected a wish to avoid parsing the specific form of discrimination each student group might employ. Outside groups could still use campus facilities even if not officially registered, they said.
“Your group is not being excluded or ostracized completely,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor said. “You can meet in the cafeteria, you can meet in open spaces in the school.”
Elections have consequences.
Now I guess that there were apparently some people who thought that voting for Obama was consistent with authentic Christian faith. But look at how Obama’s judges like up on the issue compared to Bush’s judges. Real Christians are having their fundamental rights attacked by the secular left on campus, and the judges on the Supreme Court and going to decide what happens to those real Christians. University campuses are run by secular humanists who have no reason at all in their worldview to care about protecting anyone else’s rights – morality on naturalism is survival of the fittest and might makes right. They have no principles.
I vividly remember having a talk with two “Christians” who were heavily into NBA basketball and memorizing movie dialog in the parking lot of our office prior to the 2008 election. They assured me that all that was necessary to be a Christian was to attend church and to have a good time at church. They would not listen to a word I said about policies that were consistent with the Christian worldview – not even on abortion or traditional marriage. Obama had the right color of skin, and that’s all there was to it. And now we see the results of their voting. What will happen when they meet the authentic Christians they helped to persecute in Heaven?
In addition, let this be a lesson to Christians who are interested in making a difference in the world – we need more experts in the law like McConnell who have top tier credentials. Don’t waste your life – think about the most effective thing you think you might be able to do, and do that thing. It’s not meant to make you happy, it’s self-sacrificial service.
WINTERY KNIGHT 