liberal tolerance - Justice Scalia at Wesleyan University

[detbuch]

Originally Posted by spence

You have the liberty issue backwards. Letting a company deny legally protected access to contraception through insurance for moral reasons is taking away someone's liberty.

Liberty is freedom from coercion. This includes freedom from coercive association. ALL parties in an association must be free from coercion, the employer as well as the employee in this case. You seem to feel that it is only the employee's freedom which must be protected. The Federal Government (unconstitutionally) mandated (through unelected bureaucrats of the NLRB) that employers must bargain collectively with unions under some guise of free association (free for employees, but not for employers who MUST associate with the collective group and cannot collude, associate, with other employers as a collective group). Though Ms. Fluke is not a member of a union, she is free to bargain for certain benefits, and the Church is free to agree or not--that is, in the world that the Constitution envisions. Of course, in the progressive world of our Administrative State, it is not up to either Ms. Fluke, nor up to the Church to bargain for or against something that a particular unelected administrator wishes to impose--for whatever reason that administrator wishes to conjure up. Nor does the administrator of this new regulatory agency need to feel any compunction to follow a pattern regulated by another regulatory agency (bargaining). As we keep "progressing" down this road toward complete Central planning and regulation, we can more blatantly dictate.

It's saying that the religious belief supersedes US Law...which is exactly what the Constitution sought to prohibit.

-spence

Herein lies the dissonence in arguments about what the Constitution sought to prohibit. The Constitution PLAINLY circumscribes the limits of Federal power. But the Federal Government has PLAINLY exceeded those limits--to a point nearing omnipotence so that the Constitution can prohibit nothing. The Constitution, as written and intended, is irrelevant. It is the Federal Government now that does the granting and prohibiting. When some of us argue that a Federal mandate is unconstitutional, we are speaking in terms of the Constitution that was originally, clearly, plainly, written and intended. And the original intentions were clearly debated and recorded during and after the Constitutional convention and well after in commentaries by the founders and framers. When others argue about current legally protected "liberties" they are speaking of mandates created, for the most part, by unelected, unrepresentative Federal regulatory agencies, the existence of which does not comport with the Constitution.