The Tyranny Of The Left

The Susan G. Komen Foundation recently announced that it was going to stop giving money to Planned Parenthood, and the events that transpired thereafter are highly instructive.

Now, in order to understand this episode, you need some background information.

First, it is very significant to keep in mind that Planned Parenthood is the largest abortion provider in the country.

The Susan G. Komen Foundation is a charity whose mission is to find a cure for breast cancer. It collects donations and then gives money to various organizations that are somehow involved with fighting breast cancer. They have been giving hundreds of thousands of dollars every year to Planned Parenthood to be used for breast cancer screening. And they decided to stop.

Left-wing liberals started squealing like a stuck pig. Abortion, and therefore Planned Parenthood, are sacrosanct to the left, so they sprang into action. Public condemnations of Komen poured forth from the left. Phone calls were made to Komen threatening to cut off their donations. Mayor Bloomberg of New York City announced that he was personally giving $250,000 to Planned Parenthood as a show of support. Within twenty-four hours, Komen caved and retracted their announcement of ceasing donations to Planned Parenthood.

What are the lessons learned from all of this? One thing we have clearly seen is that the Komen Foundation is run by wimps. Rather than stand by their decision, which no doubt they must have considered carefully, they immediately caved in.

More importantly, we see the tyranny of the left on full display. We see that they absolutely refuse to allow anyone to have a different opinion than they do on anything, but especially on abortion. Where was all of the tolerance and inclusiveness of liberals with regard to the Komen Foundation?

What we saw here was actually a lot worse than intolerance from the liberals. Keep in mind that Komen is a private charity; it’s not any sort of a government institution. Thus, in this episode we see the liberals excoriating a private charity over a decision by that charity on what to do with its own money. The liberals are not only totally unwilling to grant this private charity the right to use its money as it sees fit, the liberals actually demand that Komen give its money to the liberals’ favored institutions! Failure to comply with the liberals’ demands on how a charity is to use its own money results in a public campaign to demonize that charity. Remember, the institution that the liberals viciously attacked in this whole sorry affair is a private charity whose mission is to find a cure for breast cancer!

Exhibit B of the intolerance of the left is the recent decision by the Obama administration to force Catholic institutions, under Obamacare, to provide contraception services in their employees’ health care plan, even though the Catholic Church is morally opposed to contraception as part of its religious views and teachings. But the Obama administration said no matter, you have to do it anyway.

Again, in order to fully understand what is going on here, we need to review some background material.

Liberals talk a lot about the separation of church and state, going to such extremes as saying that having a prayer before a high school football game violates this separation.

So let’s dissect this decision by the Obama administration in light of the principle of separation of church and state.

We have religious freedom in this country thanks to the concept of the “separation of church and state”. This is a principle written into our nation’s constitution, but those words are not there. The Founding Fathers wanted to set up a form of government under which there would be no official government mandated national religion, but rather a government where people would be free to practice their religion s they so desired. This principle of religious freedom became known as the separation of church and state, meaning that churches and the government are completely independent of each other and neither is allowed to control the other.

Thus, churches in this country pay no taxes. That’s because if they did, they would be under the control of the government. The government could just tax churches out of existence, for example, or use the tax laws as a way of controlling churches in one way or another. So, as part of our principle of the separation of church and state, churches pay no taxes. That’s how important it was to the founding fathers to ensure that the government would not be able to find a way of controlling churches; they are totally exempt from taxation. Even sales tax. If you go to a store and buy something for your church, that store must provide a mechanism whereby no sales tax is paid on that transaction.

Enter the Obama Administration. It has decided to dictate to church institutions (such as colleges) the specific provisions of the health care benefits they are to provide to their employees, even if those provisions violate a church’s religious beliefs. Did you get that? Obama’s government is demanding that church institutions provide government specified health care to employees. If that isn’t the government controlling the churches, nothing is.

So “separation of church and state” has come to mean that the government can’t control churches by taxing them, but the government can control church institutions by dictating to them what kind of healthcare benefits they must provide to employees.

Why aren’t the liberals up in arms over this egregious violation of the separation of church and state, as they were over something as innocuous as a prayer at a high school football game?

The answer is, again, the intolerance of liberals, which trumps everything. Liberals are extremely intolerant of people being allowed to openly practice their religious beliefs, and “separation of church and state” is a very useful way of shutting that down. But when this same “separation of church and state” gets in the way of liberals imposing their views concerning abortion on everyone else, “separation of church and state” is suddenly gone and of no concern to liberals. Imposing their views on society is what really matters.