Senator and republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum claims that requiring health care institutions covered by national health care to offer affordable birth control is an infringement on the First Amendment. And in a sense he is right. But for all the wrong reasons.
Santorum is not alone. It turns out that former Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Governor Mitt Romney share Santorum’s belief that the application of consistent standards of health care delivery for all covered providers “forces” individuals opposed to abortion to adopt President Obama’s “secular values.”
As you might have gathered, none of the republican candidates are particularly interested either in history or in the values that shaped and are now memorialized in the U.S. Constitution. And that includes the self-proclaimed historian, Newt Gingrich.
However, both as a practicing Episcopalian and as a real historian, history holds some importance to me.
The claims by Santorum and his colleagues brings to mind the flood of Anglicans who in 1783 boarded ships and returned to England because of their allegiance to their sovereign, the King of England, who also stands as the Head of the Anglican Church. At issue for these faithful was the question of republican institutions and values, which they claimed violated their religious principles and values.
Now, on one level, these faithful Anglicans were absolutely right. By definition, an individual cannot without contradiction embrace republican values and institutions and honor their sovereign. And so their long and painful migration back to England following the revolutionary war.
Yet some Anglicans remained, eventually becoming Episcopalians. These Episcopalians decided that their allegiance to the English monarch was less central to their faith than was their commitment to republican institutions and values. Or, rather, they determined that res publica, shared or common wealth, was more central to their religious identity than was their sovereign.
I think they were right. But I also know that many Americans, Episcopalians and not, have disagreed fiercely over the policies of their elected leaders over the years without feeling they needed to challenge the fundamentally republican, and therefore secular, foundations of their nation.
What Senator Santorum, Newt Gingrich, and Mitt Romney have all announced clearly in this election is that they will no long stand by the republican and secular principles upon which their nation was founded. But—and here is where they differ from my fellow-religionists in 1783—instead of returning to England, they have decided to incite a revolution against these founding principles, in effect promoting a theocracy.
No, Rick, no one is going to compel your co-religionists to abort a pregnancy. That is not simply hype. That’s a lie, which I am guessing is still a sin for Catholics too.
Are they going to compel you to embrace republican institutions and values? Well, no, not yet. But when the new President is inaugurated next Spring, that President will swear to uphold the Constitution. And, should you be that President, you will then be forced to choose: do you want to overthrow the republic or do you want to uphold the Constitution.
Perhaps we should ask all three of the leading Republican candidates to let us know right now what they intend to do.
Don’t lie.
Obama Addresses Ire on Health Insurance Contraception Rule – NYTimes.com