2. Marxism and Islam claim their sacred text is a complete blueprint that conflates the public and private orders, and both create totalitarian states in order to realize the perfect society on earth. --WW IV: Seven ontological similarities between Islam and Marxism
California Supreme Court has ruled 6-1 that Catholic Charities must offer its employees prescription contraception as part of their health insurance plan. This decision highlights just about everything that is wrong with this society, except maybe broadcast/cable TV and rap music.
The key point of the ruling is that Catholic Charities is "not a religious employer", which would make it exempt from state requirements for employer insurance plans. Instead, as AP reported , CC is secular
because it offers such secular services as counseling, low-income housing and immigration services to people of all faiths, without directly preaching Catholic values. . . .
In fact, Justice Kathryn Werdegar wrote that a "significant majority" of the people served by the charity are not Catholic. The court also noted that the charity employs workers of differing religions.
The ACLU "applauded the ruling and called it 'a great victory for California women and reproductive freedom'". The ACLU's version of the First Amendment separates church and state in only one direction. The state must be religion-free even to the point of hostility to religion, but it can intrude on church affairs to define the social scope of the church's mission. When a church creates an agency to put its teachings into practice without explicit "God talk", then it's being insufficiently religious. If it does preach and proselytize (crucifixes on the wall) then it cannot act with the state in pursuit of a common goal.
You would think that if the welfare-statists really had helping people foremost in mind, they would welcome strong and resourceful partners, and even leave the field to them when possible. But no. The welfare-statists are not motivated by charity. They are ideologues, Marxist at root, and their first interest is to subdue any competing source of righteousness and moral guidance.
The statists consider all social welfare--which is to say all provision of benefits that they can manipulate to bring us under their control--to be exclusively a state prerogative. They resist bitterly and lethally any intrusion into that sphere by independent, private agents. This decision demonstrates that behind the soft, sentimental face of the welfare state is the socialist longing for the police state: the police powers collect the taxes and the police keep any free competition under control.
The case also demonstrates that socialism is a substitute religion, and a particularly nasty, totalist kind of religion, that makes no allowance for free will. Like Islam, socialists claim their sacred texts are a complete blueprint for living. They make no distinction between the public and private orders, and they both create totalitarian states in the process of affirming their own righteousness. No wonder liberals are always going on about how rigid and authoritarian and oppressive the Church is. They always clear their consciences by projecting their guilt upon their opponents.
As my sister, the recovering lawyer, says, a complicating factor "with Catholic Charities is that they take Caesar's coin big time". CC might not survive cutting the juncture with government funding; certainly it would not be Catholic Charities as we know it.
But there is another systemic imbecility evident here, namely, employer health insurance (which is really not insurance but prepaid medical services). Catholic Charities could cut this Gordian knot with advantages all around. It could take the money it spends on premiums and give its employees a raise&emdash;a big raise. Then it could offer medical savings accounts and sponsor group catastrophic insurance with a large deductible option.
This course would give employees control of their health care dollars and remove one of the hooks the statists like to plant in private sector institutions.
