Video Transcript:

Hello, I’m Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council here in Washington D.C.

The White House was in damage control this week as the opposition to their latest mandate has reached historic proportions. Religious leaders have said if all else fails they would rather go to jail than comply with the Obama Administration’s mandate that religious organizations provide contraceptive, abortifacent drugs and sterilization as part of the healthcare coverage.

To pu this in the proper context, as I have spoken with Protestant and Catholic religious leaders, the opposition was not about contraception, but rather a violation of the religious freedom and conscience rights of Americans.

Hoping to quell the uprising the President announced that a compromise was being put forth that would provide the drugs and services to employees without the religious organization having to pay for them. The insurance company would provide the contraception to the employees free of charge. This service would not appear on the organization’s list of services, so they are not responsible for providing something they are morally and religiously opposed to. Right?

It’s not that easy.

How will the insurance company pay for this? The Administration says it is good business, because it saves the insurance company money in the long run because they don’t have to pay for the cost of pregnancies.

Really. If this is good for business and saves money, why didn’t the insurance companies do this years ago? Nothing has prohibited insurance companies from providing contraceptives.

Insurance companies are not charities. They will be offsetting the costs by increasing the administrative costs of organization plans, and religious employers will still have to pay for those plans.

So, goes the old saying, there is no such thing as a free lunch. So there is no such thing as a clear conscience when you violate the tenants of your faith, whether it is in writing or not.

One of the wisest men who ever lived once said: “If you say, ‘Surely we did not know this,’ Does not He who weighs the hearts consider [it]? He who keeps your soul, does He [not] know [it]? And will he [not] render to [each] man according to his deeds?”

It was true when Solomon wrote it, and it is true today.

This latest fig leaf from the Obama Administration is not only deceptive, this mandate remains fundamentally wrong and still violates the religious freedoms and conscience rights of Americans.

Even if this compromise were legitimate, it applies only to religious organizations. The freedom of religion was granted to every American, not just those who work at religious organizations.

This is yet another example of President Obama’s flawed view of our rights as Americans. He has repeatedly said he supports the freedom of worship. Freedom of worship is what happens within the four walls of a church or possibly under the roof of your own home.

The freedom of religious, which our Constitution serves to protect, recognizes our ability to lives our lives according to our faith, just as the Bible instructs us to do.

However, he ignores two huge “elephants in the room.” The first is the role of behavior change in reducing infections. A Ugandan AIDS prevention official wrote in the Post in 2008 about his country’s success in dramatically reducing AIDS prevalence through use of the “ABC” message—“Abstain” from sex until marriage, “Be faithful” to your spouse, and “use Condoms” only if you fail at A and B. Gerson celebrates that the cost of treatment is now less than $350 per person; but Sam L. Ruteikara noted, “Our successful ABC campaign cost just 29 cents per person each year.”

Gerson noted that circumcision has reduced “the risk of transmission from women to men,” and that early treatment reduced “transmission to a heterosexual partner.” This may be encouraging for Africa, but is less so at home, where the CDC reports that “more than half (53%) of all people living with HIV” are men who have sex with men (MSM), “the only risk group in which new HIV infections have been increasing steadily.” Discouraging anal intercourse and sex with multiple partners—practices not unique to homosexual men, but more prevalent among them—are part of “the only morally acceptable strategy” to help America share in the end of AIDS.

This is not news any family wants to read.  The last thing our recession-bound country needs are rising health care costs, particularly when we know these costs will be augmented dramatically should the Obama health care plan go into effect.

Buried within the Bloomberg article is a story that is underreported but finally seeping-out into the mainstream press: “Contributing to the rise in premiums are … fewer young and healthy people in the insurance pool.”  This assertion is being made by the respected insurance association president Karen Ignagni, but it is verified by cold data.  The Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics projects the following:

… by the end of the 2004 to 2014 period, most of the baby boomers will have turned fifty-five. Consequently, the age fifty-five and older segment of the labor force is expected to grow most rapidly, increasing by 11.3 million, or 49.1 percent. Because of the aging of the American population, this segment of the labor force will increase at almost five times the rate of the overall labor force (10 percent). The numbers of those twenty-five to fifty-four years of age in the labor force will grow by only 3.4 percent, a significantly lower growth than in the previous decade (8.8 percent). The growth rate of the youth labor force, workers between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four, will actually decrease between 2004 and 2014 by 0.5 percent.

What does this blizzard of mathematical factoids mean?  Simply that we have a shrinking number of people entering the laborforce, one that cannot sustain our so-called entitlement programs (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) and that is too small to infuse the insurance pool with enough youth and health to keep it fiscally viable.

My colleagues Pat Fagan, Henry Potrykus and I have explained this in detail in “Our Fiscal Crisis: We Cannot Tax, Spend, and Borrow Enough to Substitute for Marriage.”  We argue that our current economic slowdown, “coupled with the increased numbers of dependent citizens, makes closing the deficit impossible for President Obama or anyone else who uses the present welfare state as the economic model to be sustained. It cannot be. This reality arises from two facts: 1) We have proportionately fewer children … (and) up to 20 percent of these children are unequipped to compete in the modern economy because of a lack of essential skills formed within the intact married family.”

What’s the bottom line?  Husbands and wives need to have more children and truly parent those children if our economy is going to thrive.  However substantial our technology-driven productivity gains, they will not compensate for a steadily declining supply of capable, teachable young men and women.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, “the rate of population growth, referred to as the average annual percent change, is projected to decrease during the next six decades by about 50 percent, from 1.10 between 1990 and 1995 to 0.54 between 2040 and 2050. The decrease in the rate of growth is predominantly due to the aging of the population and, consequently, a dramatic increase in the number of deaths.”  In other words, we will have a larger population, but the rate of growth will slow to the point that existing citizens will live longer, not because of the size of our families.

For more on the crisis of America’s population and how it is grounded in the erosion of the family unit, visit the Marriage and Religion Research Institute at http://www.marri.frc.org/.  Families are more critical to our nation’s economy, more than education or technology.  As families fail, so fails our country.

This action is not unique.  As today’s Wall Street Journal notes, “The White House has apparently decided that it won’t enforce the unpopular parts of its health-care plan until after the 2012 election. The latest evidence is its decision not to slash Medicare Advantage, the program that Democrats hate because it lets seniors choose private insurance options.”

And this week’s decision regarding DOMA is not a new departure from allegiance to the law.  As George Will wrote in 2009, “The Obama administration is bold. It also is careless regarding constitutional values and is acquiring a tincture of lawlessness.”

The President of the United States takes an oath when he assumes office, assuring us that he will “defend the Constitution of the United States.”  That Constitution makes Congress the legislative body, not the Executive branch.  Thus, when Congress passes legislation that is signed into law by the President, it becomes incumbent upon the President — as the chief constitutional law enforcement office in the nation — to defend it.

When this or any President refuses to defend any given law, he is placing himself above it.  How, in principle, this distinguishes the United States from any tin-pot autocracy, where law is made by the fiat choices of an unaccountable dictator, escapes me.  For that matter, why bother with having legislative (Congress) or judicial (the Supreme and other federal courts) branches if the President can simply choose to ignore defending laws he dislikes?

Family Research Council’s Senior Fellow Chris Gacek (JD, Virginia) notes that DOMA “affirms the power of each state to make its own decision as to whether it will accept or reject same-sex marriages created in other jurisdictions … The Defense of Marriage Act preserves the right of the states to govern themselves with respect to family law and domestic relations. DOMA impedes judicial activism regarding marriage and provides needed uniformity in federal law. It is an essential part of preserving traditional marriage in America.”   In other words, as Quinn Hillyer writes in The American Spectator, “Without DOMA, state and local decision-making would be nil. In fact, the decisions of 49 states could be superseded by the decision of one state to allow such ‘marriages’.”

The rule of law is essential to the future of representative self-government in the United States.  The future of marriage hinges, in large measure, on DOMA.  President Obama has succeeded in undermining both this week.

Part 2

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Part 4

From 1:00-2:30 p.m., the National Catholic Partnership on Disability (NCPD) will host a national training for ministers, medical personnel and others in the Washington, D.C. area who are interested. This will be followed by the Archdiocese of Washington’s Affirming Life Symposium starting at 2:45 p.m., also for ministers, pastoral workers and medical staff. Register at www.ncpd.org. For more information, contact Peg Kolm, Department of Special Needs Ministries at 301-853-4560.

The patch has reportedly caused at least 23 deaths in women who have taken it since FDA approval in 2003. This is in part likely due to the fact that the patch allows for a large amount of estrogen to enter a woman’s body (60% more than “the pill”). MSNBC is claiming that Johnson and Johnson have known about the deadly risks, but have hidden this information. Apparently the FDA has also been looking into these allegations for two years, but have not taken any action…