In a column at Time Magazine’s website, college administrator and early childhood educator Erika Christakis argues that Christians who oppose the Obama administration’s decision to force them to pay for abortifacients are imposing their will on everybody else:
“Let’s see what our society would look like if we all had the luxury of imposing our unfettered will.”
This vaguely dystopian inversion of the truth – that it is progressive, secular champions of central-planning such as herself, and not Christians, who are imposing their “unfettered will” – informs her entire column. Her will, she will have you understand, isn’t unfettered or selfish, but an expression of rights: those who don’t want to pay for other people’s abortifacients, she says, are “unwilling to concede that the exercise of their deeply held convictions might infringe on the rights of millions of people who are burdened by unplanned pregnancy.”
You read that right: being disinclined to pay for the nominal – and presumably infrequent – expense of your neighbour’s abortifacients is an infringement upon your neighbour’s rights.
As for those recalcitrant Christians who are just too thick to understand that the beliefs of the proponents of big-state, enforced-secular leftism trump their own deeply-held spiritual belief that abortion is murder,
“At a minimum, the Catholic bishops and employers resisting contraceptive coverage should be willing to pay for the care of all those unwanted children. Or perhaps they’d be willing to spend some time in jail in protest. At my taxpaying expense, of course…”
“Luxury of imposing their unfettered will” indeed.
ok, quick fix
Christians start calling yourselves Muslims…..
Erika Christakis argues that Christians who oppose the Obama administration’s decision to force them to pay for abortifacients are imposing their will on everybody else:
Okay, there are somethings that you cannot reason with, nor debate … you must get a bat and beat it until the bat is very wet and slippery. Erika’s upside down logic is one of those things.
Christakis … right …. wasn’t it the Greeks that pioneered logic in the first place? Oh, wait, sorry … that was the Vulcans.
B*tch, buy your own condoms.
College administrator and early childhood educator…
That really gives one pause don’t it?
Her post on porn (which is watched by a large number of Christians she is quick to point out) has this curious statement: “Maybe Fair Trade porn could reconnect us to a better relationship with the human body.”
This woman is obsessed with sex.
She’s a house mother (well, it’s ‘master’ to be correct) to 400 students. What an influence she must be.
If’n I gots to pay,
do I git a poke????
maybe some people should learn self control, and if they fail at that, make them pay for their error, one way or the other
keep yer dang mitts out of my pocket
Anything and everything is imposing one’s will on someone else if they don’t like it. I have personal and practical objections to this proposed contraception/abortifacient bill. Why should I pay for, accept and even like supplying things I personally object to and see no pragmatic reason for?
Erika Christakis sounds like your typical, selfish leftist feminist with no clue of the outside world.
Black Mamba (9:47): Based on what I’ve read, it seems like most of the opposition to the new HHS mandate is based on being forced to pay for abortifacients, moreso than condoms/birth-control pills, etc.
I’m nominally pro-choice, in the sense that I would never consider it my place to try to stop a woman from having an abortion, but the arguments of the smug prog-statists who aver that they have a *right* to force people who are deeply, spiritually opposed to any form of abortion to pay for it are repulsive.
Christakis says that there’s a “social contract” which “requires that we must occasionally stomach government policies that offend and outrage us.”
Yeah — her noble “social contract” requires *others* to stomach policies she supports. It beggars belief to believe that she would adhere to her little maxim if a theocratic government got elected in the US and banned abortion; I doubt she’d be saying – or typing – “oh well, I must occasionally stomach government policies that offend and outrage me.”
“At a minimum, the Catholic bishops and employers resisting contraceptive coverage should be willing to pay for the care of all those unwanted children.”
Damn right! Those holier-than-thou Catholics need to step up and provide for . . . oh, wait, never mind.
But she’s owed. People who don’t want to pay for other people’s abortifacients are not owed anything.
I thought there was huge demand for adoption of unwanted babies. What care costs is she talking about?
Making time with YOUR sperm/eggs?…reap what YOU sow.
Leftists all me all the time!
Typical fascism from the Left! She cannot grasp, or more likely does not like, American constitutional freedom of religion. Even putting all that aside it is insane for a bankrupt nation to implement what is called Obamacare.
To be dictated to by communists is bad enough.
To be ruled by stupid communists and their hangers on is pure hell.
Daniel Greenfield, aka Sultan Knish, has a terrific piece up this subject: When Positive and Negative Rights Collide.
Last 3 paragraphs:
“The unwavering pursuit of ideals ends up destroying the very ideal being pursued. Trying to give everyone a home may have damaged home ownership, particularly among the poor and minority groups, for a generation to come. Fighting bigotry has created bigotry and in some cases even turned it into a matter of state policy, as is the case with affirmative action. But that is why the pursuit of ideals by the state are dangerous. A government has too much power and too little flexibility to pursue goals which involve the touchstones of human nature.
“When positive and negative rights collide, freedom is the first casualty, and the second casualty is the positive right which over time cannot survive the pressures of the self-destruction of the system that imposes it. Negative rights which require state inaction can be sustained so long as the state does not become too powerful. Positive rights can only be sustained so long as the money and power holds up. Their fate is thoroughly tied to the fate of the system. When the state that enforces them weakens, so do they.
“Negative rights put their trust in people. Positive rights put their trust in the state. All states fall sooner or later. Only the people survive.”
Thanks for that, Me No Dhimmi. I linked to it in Reader Tips just before your comment, but it really belongs in this thread.
Another excerpt:
“The Catholic Church is strongly in favor of health care for all, it does not however agree on the nature of what health care is with value systems to the left of it. The current controversy is a clash of value systems. Such a clash is easily resolved in a system built around negative rights that leaves all the parties free not to enter into agreements or obligations that they don’t want to enter into. However in a system based on positive rights, a clash of values ends with the government compelling one side to abandon its values…”
As an aside, Sultan Knish is a bookmark-worthy blog worth reading on a regular basis.
EBD @ 10:35, exactly!
What Sgt Lejaune said @ 11:33.
Freedom is under assault and it does not look good at the moment. If Obama is reelected the US will become a carbon copy of Europe.
“…Christians who oppose the Obama administration’s decision to force them to pay for abortifacients are imposing their will on everybody else:….” – The Christian is the chosen host of a parasite that wants to suck the soul out of the host along with condoms and other symbolic paraphernalia of the ecofeminist left. By saying no, the Christian has defended his free will by refusing to be enslaved by pure evil (to him) and statism. By the inverted morality of the ecofeminist left, standing up to their coercive statist thugs is somehow imposing your will on them. That is the ranting of a pathetic creature incapable of reason but likely representative of the pathos of a larger constituency spent marinating in leftist institutional ecofeminism.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
~Battle Hymn of the Republic
Witches like Christakis think the decadent society that spawned them will go on forever and are unaware that these days of Leftist debauchery are swiftly coming to a close.
Code of Canon Law applicable to catholics
Canon 1398: “A person who procures a completed abortion incurs a latae sententiae excommunication.”
The phrase “latae sententiae” means a judgment or sentence which is ‘wide’ (latae) or widely applied; it refers to a type of excommunication which is automatic. Such a sentence of excommunication is incurred “by the very commission of the offense,” (CCC 2272) and does not require the future particular judgment of a case by competent authority.
So the practising catholic would be dead to rights to tell the authorities you are infringing on my 1st Amendment rights re the “free pratice thereof”. Moreover, you can take your proposition and send it straight back to Hell where it belongs.
Not that the Obama-Nation(tm) bothered asking catholics if this offended their religion and conscience rights in any case. By my reading thus far they just don’t give a tinker’s damn…game on.
The teaching on abortion has been a constant feature of the Christian faith since about the 1st century as evidenced by the Didache or teaching of the twelve apostles.
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/didache.html
Chapter 2. The Second Commandment: Grave Sin Forbidden. And the second commandment of the Teaching; You shall not commit murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not commit pederasty, you shall not commit fornication, you shall not steal, you shall not practice magic, you shall not practice witchcraft, you shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is born.
Seems pretty clear to me, but the Obama-Nation(tm) has got pretty good hate-on for those who don’t share their abortafacient love in.
I have to laugh, because these clowns claim they love ‘diversity’ but they go into a deep funk hate on when they get some serious push back from those who don’t share their love for monochromatic homogenized stuff at the bottom of some aspirator tube.
Seriously, get a life…
Cheers
Hans Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North”
Christakis’s comment is stupid, but it’s a standard leftist trick to blur the distinction between voluntary and coerced (such as by calling lotteries a “tax on the poor”) and it’s just another example.
At a minimum, the Catholic bishops and employers resisting contraceptive coverage should be willing to pay for the care of all those unwanted children.
Um, we try to and then the gay marriage crowd comes in and shuts down our adoption agencies because we won’t adopt to them.
If you call something a “right” but someone else has to fund it, it’s not a “right” it’s a power grab. Pure and simple.
But keep it up. Friend who liked and voted for Obama in 08 won’t in 12 because of this issue, which has awakened him to the totalitarian nature of today’s liberal/Democrat party.
Oh I see. So, Christian or not, the left expects me to pay for the sexual misadventures of my neighbor. God forbid I infringe upon someone’s precious human right to sex without consequence.
Please Lord, bring on the purge…
Oh well, I’m sure the “Christian street” will rise up. I mean I’m sure they’re gathering and planning civil disobedience as I type…right?
Jamie MacMaster, did you know that the first American Revolution was organized in the churches?
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government
~Declaration of Independence, JULY 4, 1776
If you call something a “right” but someone else has to fund it, it’s not a “right” it’s a power grab. Pure and simple.
Posted by: Amy P. at February 23, 2012 6:57 AM
Bingo.
I’ve been trying to brief a good “fiscally conservative/socially liberal” (an impossibility) friend about rights.
I came up with this: if a “right” entails an obligation on someone else’s part, it’s not a legitimate right. It really is this simple.
I will not violate my beliefs on your say-so, no matter how good an idea you think it is that I do so. You are therefore left with two options: give it up, or use force. I am prepared for either eventuality.
What OZ said. And the Funding Fathers.
As well as Locke, Montesquieu and others.
“Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.” – Frederic Bastiat
“So that, in effect, religion, which should most distiguish us from beasts, and ought most peculiarly to elevate us, as rational creatures, above brutes, is that wherein men often appear most irrational and mere senseless than beasts themselves”
― John Locke
Seems to sum up this case nicely
The abortionists’ opine it’s their right to get abortion’s funded, actually no it isn’t a right and frankly I don’t want to fund their irresponsible behavior. What’s next pedophiles demanding six year old girls cause it’s their right to abuse children?
Self-control is for the righteous. It seems the responsibility for the behaviour of others is on the righteous too. Self-control has little to do with “if it feels good, do it.”
Curious. Why does someone who kills a pregnant woman get charged with two murders?
Oz at February 23, 2012 10:46 AM
Oh yeah?
Then let’s just say we’re waiting for the replay…and waiting…and waiting….