Continuing on the theme

I wrote about Culture Clashes yesterday. The struggle for supremacy between the "traditional" American culture, the statist/dependency culture and the invading islamic culture.  The expansion of that last culture is being actively aided and abetted by the statists.  They believe they can use islamics against the traditions that built this country.  So far, they have been successful because we, the members of that traditional culture have been complacent.

Continuing with this theme, I bring you a column written by Dr. Milton Wolfe, Obama's cousin.  The subject? Control Freaks and how they attack our traditional culture.

WOLF: Is this still America?

Control freaks assault the land of the free

By Dr. Milton R. Wolf - The Washington Times, Monday, February 27, 2012 

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction,” warned the late President Reagan. It’s probably a good thing the Gipper hasn’t been forced to witness what the current generation of authoritarian rulers has done to the land of the free and home of the brave.

Public schools in San Antonio have installed video cameras, not to monitor for foul play or intruders, but to spy on kids’ eating habits. Federal food police in North Carolina have begun confiscating preschoolers’ homemade lunches because they didn’t meet U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines. Aghast parents have noted that one 4-year-old’s confiscated lunch of a turkey and cheese sandwich, banana, potato chips and apple juice sounds more nutritious than the state-provided chicken nuggets. But that entirely misses the point. In America, parents are free to give their kids pizza and pudding with Twinkies and Twizzlers, and the government has no right to intrude.

Under the sweeping powers of Obamacare, the state has forced Catholic institutions to choose between their God and their government by demanding that they violate their own beliefs and provide birth control to their employees. Their insulting rationalization? Most Catholic women are bad Catholics and don’t follow the teachings of the church anyway. What’s more, the government has deified itself to determine which organizations are Catholic enough to be exempt. What’s next, mandated pork-chop night at the synagogues? Bacon should be a right.

Brace yourself; I’m just getting warmed up.

Armed federal agents of the Department of Education conducted a pre-dawn SWAT-style raid on the home of a Stockton, Calif., man. Read that again: The Department of Education has taken up arms against the citizenry. Meanwhile, federal Transportation Security Administration officials routinely grope our 6-year-olds and conveniently arrange that attractive women are subjected to their full-body porn cameras. Not even George Orwell’s 1984 dystopian police state went that far.

So the same federal government that waved the white flag in southern Arizona by posting signs warning American citizens to avoid American soil - effectively surrendering an 80-mile swath of our border to Mexican drug cartels - at least has the wherewithal to secure your child’s private parts.

But the heavy-handed authoritarians aren’t finished harassing your kids yet. Police officers in Midway, Ga., closed down three girls’ front-yard lemonade stand. Why? “We were not aware of how the lemonade was made, who made the lemonade, of what the lemonade was made with, so we acted accordingly by city ordinance.” Well, at least the enterprise-crushing control freaks can’t be accused of age discrimination.

Fortunately, the feds are concentrating on the most ominous threats against Americans: fresh dairy milk and the ruthless Amish farmers who push their addictive contraband. “I can’t believe in 2012 the federal government is raiding Amish farmers at gunpoint, all over a basic human right to eat natural food,” said one milk addict. Believe it.

Back to the Golden State. Los Angeles County control freaks made a quick about-face after declaring that throwing a football or a Frisbee on the beach would result in a $1,000 fine. So would digging a hole in the sand. Quick - confiscate those plastic pails! Control freaks in the California Legislature, you may recall, recently attempted to mandate the use of government-controlled thermostats in homes and businesses. Why not? 

President Obama, the control freak in chief, once decreed: “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times.” Well, not with Democrats in charge, anyway.

Power-grabbing Democrats always promise if we give them the power to control our lives, they will use it only in times of emergency. Of course, emergencies are in the eye of the beholder, and dictatorial power for control-freak Democrats is like whiskey was for 20th-century comedian W.C. Fields: “Always carry a flagon of whiskey in case of snakebite and furthermore, always carry a small snake.” Democrats will make sure there’s a snakebite soon enough.

Our land of the free is under assault by control freaks, most of whom call themselves “pro-choice” but simply don’t trust you to choose your own light bulbs, salt intake or home thermostat settings. They even want to regulate how much methane gas your cow can expel. One wishes politicians were as concerned with debt reduction as bovine flatus.

Reagan warned of freedom lost: “We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States, where men were free.”

But there have been some victories for our side in this culture war, a step backward in the statists' attrition of our basic rights.

GREEN: Right to refuse

Conscience-case victory contradicts contraceptive mandate

By Anneke E. Green - The Washington Times, Monday, February 27, 2012

Religious organizations fighting the Department of Health and Human Services‘ (HHS) contraceptive mandate should take heart from Wednesday’s federal district court ruling in Stormans v. Selecky. Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire and her Planned Parenthood cronies were defeated in their campaign to compel pharmacies and their employees to choose between their religious beliefs and their livelihoods.

Judge Ronald Leighton found unconstitutional a State Board of Pharmacy rule targeting pharmacists with conscience objections to dispensing Plan B and ella, the so-called “morning after” and “week after” pills. These drugs are in the same heap of free contraceptives/abortifacients that HHS is forcing all insurance plans to cover along with sterilizations to female policyholders. Like pharmacists in the Evergreen State, faith-based employers are being told to abort their religious convictions or face serious penalties. In his legal opinion accompanying the ruling, Judge Leighton asked the million-dollar question: “Can the state compel licensed pharmacies and pharmacists to dispense lawfully prescribed emergency contraceptives over their sincere religious belief that doing so terminates a human life?” The Obama administration says yes.

In announcing his purported compromise on the mandate, President Obama painted the issue as a choice between “individual liberty and basic fairness for all Americans” that he refused to make. By requiring insurance companies to pay for services religious organizations find abhorrent, he thinks he found a way around the pesky conscience objections. But “this putative accommodation is … no accommodation at all,” Rabbi Meir Soloveichik of Yeshiva University told Rep. Darrell Issa’s House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on Feb. 16. “The religious organizations would still be obligated to provide employees with an insurance policy that facilitates acts violating the organization’s religious tenets.”

Though Rabbi Soloveichik’s religion doesn’t prohibit contraceptive use, he has joined other religious leaders in opposing the mandate because of its threat to every American. “The policy is an unconscionable intrusion by the state into the consciences of American citizens,” C. Ben Mitchell, a professor of moral theology at Union University, explained to the committee. “Contrary to portrayals in some of the popular media, this is not just a Catholic issue. All people of faith - and even those who claim no faith - have a stake in whether or not the government can violate the consciences of its citizenry.”

...

Stormans v. Selecky found that the state cannot require conscience-violating obedience from the religious minority. The Obama administration is forcing a constitutional showdown between its radically coercive ideology and the right to individual liberty upon which this nation was founded. Our freedom hangs in the balance.

The facetious argument from Obama is that insurance will provide these service. But just who pays for that insurance? The churches and other religious organizations that oppose these edicts that violate their Church teachings. Instead of forcing the religious organization to provide contraceptive and abortion services, Obama will just force them to pay for those services instead. What difference does that so-called compromise provide?
 

None.
 

The time for complacency in these culture clashes are over. It's now time to response, seize the offensive and take our country back.