"It profits me but little that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquillity of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life."

--Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Thursday, February 2, 2012

Santorum on Obamacare

From a terrific interview with Hugh Hewitt, who is a long-time Romney supporter, but who has been very positive about Santorum during the campaign (suggesting, to me anyway, that a Romney-Santorum ticket is a real possibility):


I look at the American health care system, and I have always said one of the reasons I decided to run for president was because of Obamacare, and because of the government taking over health care. And I have stories from Canada and from Europe of children like my daughter, who simply are refused care because they just don’t see them as a life worth living, not a good use of government dollars, because she won’t be able to give back anything economically to the country. And that’s a tragedy. It’s a devaluing of human life. And I see that in our current health care system....

HH: Rick Santorum, what do you advise Catholic hospitals, Catholic colleges, Catholic…the centers of poverty assistance, the adoption agencies? What do you advise them to do in the face of, as Archbishop Olmstead said, we cannot comply with this unjust law?

RS: Civil disobedience. This will not stand. There’s no way they can make this stand. The Supreme Court, eventually, this thing’s going to get to the Supreme Court just like the ministerial hiring issue that was just decided by the Supreme Court the other day. And it was a 9-0 decision that said the Obama administration can’t roll over people of faith when it comes to hiring. Yet in the face of that decision, this radical, secular government of Barack Obama continues to have faith be the least important of the 1st Amendment. And I just think they fight. They fight in the courts, and they fight by civil disobedience, and go to war with the federal government over this one.

****

Update:   Here is Hugh Hewitt on the issue, echoing something I said a couple of days ago about the effect on Obama's reelection chances in the upper-Midwest:

To a certain extent, it won't matter even if the president beats a hasty retreat.  Every Catholic in America must know what a second term would hold: A mandate from HHS that insurance providers cover outright abortion, and not just contraception, sterilization and the "morning after pill." 

The mask dropped last week, and even if most of the president's blockers in the MSM didn't notice, Catholics did.  He cannot unring that bell.  Especially not in places like Pennsylvania and Ohio, where his economic policies are killing jobs even as his social policy assaults the Church.

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