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<p style="line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px 0px 10px; color: #000000; font-size: 12px; padding: 0px;">I was talking to a friend in California yesterday about the Obama administration’s latest assault on religious liberty — the “interim final rule” issued by the Department of Health and Human Services requiring all health plans, including those at Catholic institutions, to cover prescription contraceptives, sterilization, and abortion. Paul Rahe, in a brilliant historical reflection called “<a href="http://ricochet.com/main-feed/American-Catholicism-s-Pact-With-the-Devil" style="color: #24839f; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">American Catholicism’s Pact with the Devil</a>,” shows how this latest example of government-by-decree “unmasked in the most thoroughgoing way the despotic propensities of the administrative entitlements state and of the Democratic Party.” Mr. Rahe also shows how closely the Roman Catholic establishment has collaborated in that despotism since its embrace of the New Deal in the 1930s.</p>
<p style="line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px 0px 10px; color: #000000; font-size: 12px; padding: 0px;">Step back even further. We’re always hearing people — well, some people — go on about the ideals of “limited government.” It was, remember, a leitmotif of<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em>The Federalist</em><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>and other founding documents of the United States. Government should be limited to protect the individual, and groups of individuals, from the coercive power of the state.</p>
<p style="line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px 0px 10px; color: #000000; font-size: 12px; padding: 0px;"><a href="http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2012/02/13/limited-government-religious-liberty-and-joe-bidens-rosary/?singlepage=true">READ MORE ON PJMEDIA&gt;&gt;&gt;</a></p>
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