PICAYUNE —
“I feel like Justice Roberts cheated on me,” said a friend, half in jest, half expressing honest disappointment. Having once emceed a “Women for Roberts” press conference for C-SPAN back in the day, I heard a lot of similar sentiments in the wake of his penning the majority opinion for the Supreme Court decision that “upheld Obamacare,” as many have put it.
But the whole of the president’s health care legislation wasn’t actually the question before the Court.
I was not alone Thursday morning, thinking about the man who appointed the chief justice, former President George W. Bush. Reading the majority opinion, my mind went to an April morning in 2008, on the West Lawn of the White House.
Welcoming Pope Benedict XVI on his visit to the capital, the president said: “In a world where some treat life as something to be debased and discarded, we need your message that all human life is sacred and that ‘each of us is willed, each of us is loved.’”
“Elections matter,” a friend and colleague said to me that day. It wasn’t until recently that this idea started to become a palpable realization in the hearts and minds of many Americans. The “Fortnight for Freedom” observations called for by Catholic bishops were inspired by the encroachments of the Obama administration, which has stomped on the conscience rights of religious organizations in the name of its health care crusade. While accusing Catholics and other people of faith of imposing their views on the rest of the country, the government is using its coercive power to insist that everyone subscribe to its radical ideology, conscience be damned — or pay a fee.
My friend’s declaration about elections is the point of a line in Chief Justice Roberts’ majority opinion: “It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.” Translated for our political season: “This is what you elected.”
The debate about the health care legislation has played itself out, as framed by the architects of the policy, as a “war on women” involving access to contraception and abortion. But the question before American voters is not the morality of contraception or any theological issue but something quite fundamental and universal.
“For the first time in the history of health care in the United States,” said Rep. Jeff Fortenberry, R-Neb. who led a recent bipartisan discussion of the law with other congress members, “this law would force Americans to choose to either obey the government or violate their personal convictions ... It is wrong ... and it is an affront to the very purpose of our government, derived from the consent of the governed.”
This goes back to the very thing that the pope and the president talked about on the White House lawn in 2008: the value of human life and the future of freedom itself.
Once all of the dueling commentary, despondency and celebrations pass, I’d rally around what the chief justice said. His ruling wasn’t an infidelity inasmuch as a nudge about staying awake and answering our civic calls.
(Kathryn Lopez is the editor-at-large of National Review Online www.nationalreview.com. She can be contacted at klopez@nationalreview.com.)
Opinion
Did Roberts mislead women?
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I haven’t seen the Ladies’ Home Journal in about a million years, except maybe in the dentist’s office when I was trying to avoid a television permanently set on Fox News.
Somebody’s grandchild was selling magazines for a school project, and Ladies’ Home Journal was the only one on the list I recognized. Now it comes to the house.
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Sometimes the best journalism explains what’s right under our noses. In Steven Brill’s exhaustive Time magazine cover article, “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,” it’s the staggeringly expensive, grotesquely inefficient and inhumane way Americans pay for medical care.
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VA’s appalling failures not recent
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While recent national press attention to ongoing problems at Mississippi’s G.V. (Sonny) Montgomery Veterans Administration Medical Center in Jackson is welcome and needed, the failures of the overall VA service apparatus in Mississippi are not recent problems.
In short, former U.S. Rep. Sonny Montgomery — Mississippi’s “Mr. Veteran” and author of the modern G.I. Bill that bears his name — must be spinning in his grave. There have been significant failures and poor service to veterans documented by state and local media since 2008. -
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Mississippi isn’t immune from national college tuition trends
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Higher education in Mississippi has not been immune from national trends cited in a recent Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report which concludes that over the last five years, the global economic downturn and a “no new taxes” political climate have increasingly shifted the burden of higher education finance to students and parents at a time when enrollment is increasing and the percentage of state support is decreasing. -
Right to vote not ‘racial entitlement
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The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Shelby County v. Holder — a challenge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, specifically Section 5, which requires states and localities with a history of voting discrimination against racial and language minorities to get “pre-approved” by the federal government before changing how elections are conducted or voters are registered. -
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The first day of spring! My favorite month, April, is just around the corner. Now we just need one big gullywasher to get rid of the pine pollen.
Normally, spring gives me a strong sense of rebirth and renewal, but this spring I seem surrounded by moments crystallizing the passage of time.
It was a year ago, I walked up the porch to my mother’s home to box up her possessions following her funeral. -
Soaking up in tiger paw-shaped hot tub
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist
No springtime ritual was better at Auburn than sitting on hard rocks at a nearby state park to let cold water rush over your feet. You wore cut-off blue jeans and Dr. Scholl’s sandals, the unofficial uniform for coeds in the 1970s, and when you left, you felt ready to tackle tests, term papers and blind dates.
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Medicaid or not, costs will be paid
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
While the battle continues between state Republicans and other fiscal conservatives intent on focusing on the long-terms costs of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act and Democrats, health care advocates and state hospitals intent on focusing on the short-term benefits, the fact remains that one way or another, the costs of providing health care for the poor, the blind, the aged and the disabled will be paid by the taxpayers one way or another.
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Multiculturalism is not rational
By Thomas Sowell/Syndicated columnist
Among the many irrational ideas about racial and ethnic groups that have polarized societies over the centuries and around the world, few have been more irrational and counterproductive than the current dogmas of multiculturalism.
Intellectuals who imagine that they are helping racial or ethnic groups that lag behind by redefining their lags out of existence with multicultural rhetoric are in fact leading them into a blind alley. - More Opinion Headlines
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