‘Puter’s still fired up about the Obama Administration’s ill-considered decision to cram down its version of morality on the Catholic Church, 2,000 years of carefully considered theological consistency and 224 of American Constitutional law be damned.

If anything, ‘Puter’s more infuriated by the logical leap the media’s permitting the Obama Administration to get away with. Let’s assume for the moment that every massively intrusive program the Democrats can devise, from Social Security to Welfare to ObamaCare, is a right. Even assuming these to be rights, there is no basis in law or tradition to require third parties to pay for exercise of your right.

Czar noted here ‘Puter’s recurring debunking of this logical and legal fallacy. ‘Puter’s example goes as follows.

If ‘Puter is required to pay for your abortion and/or birth control, then you have to pay for his guns. Not so please now, are you hippie?

It is not ‘Puter’s fault if you don’t have the cash to exercise your so-called rights. You know why? Because real rights cost nothing at all to exercise. Let’s go to the place most Americans look when they think of rights. It’s time for Con Law, boys and girls! Put on your helmets, and keep your hands away from ‘Puter’s face. He bites.

Amendment I, U.S. Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

1. Generally, ‘Puter’s view is that the phrase “Congress shall make no law” is clear. So clear that even the most addle-pated morons gone soft-brained through years of public education indoctrination can understand it. Congress (that’s the U.S. one, dimwits) shall make no law (a prohibition, or, for the MSNBC cadre out there, a no-no). So, Congress can’t make a law. A law regarding what? Let’s look.

1a. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. Pretty simple. Congress can’t establish a national religion. As a citizen, you have the right to be free from a state imposed religion. This was a huge deal back in the day, when many of the lands our predecessors left required you belong to the correct religion in order to work, or to own property or to marry. This is a right that costs nothing, and yet it’s vitally important.

1b. Congress shall make no law … prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]. Congress can’t make a law that prevents you or your Church from following your belief system, within reason. This sounds as if it would prohibit HHS from using ObamaCare, passed by Congress, from forcing the Catholic Church from violating its tenets regarding a consistent ethic of life (read: birth control). As ‘Puter’s noted elsewhere, if Congress wants to prohibit free exercise, courts review the law under a strict scrutiny standard, which in layman’s terms means it’d better be the only way Congress can do something that’s vitally important to the nation, so important it requires us to ignore the plain prohibition on doing so.

1c. Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech. It’s the same thing here. Congress can’t mess with your right to speak freely. No matter how abhorrent your views.

1d. Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom … of the press. This is a favorite of the media, one they never fail to trot out when they’ve irreparably damaged nation security by printing nuclear warhead design or confidential diplomatic cables. Guess what? Congress has a really tough time preventing the media from disseminating whatever it damn well pleases. It’s that pesky Constitutional protection of rights.

1e. Congress shall make no law … abridging … the right of the people peaceably to assemble. First, let’s admire the good grammar of our Founders, not splitting the infinitive. Second, let’s agree that the First Amendment prevents government from infringing on your First Annual Black Panther/Ku Klux Klan get together, no matter how much your craptacular viewpoint may deserve it.

1f. Congress shall make no law … abridging .. the right of the people … to petition the government for a redress of grievances. So Congress can’t prevent you from bitching up a storm to your representative’s office, or sending hateful (nonviolent) email to them. That’s pretty cool.

We’ve run through the First Amendment. We’ve found that it defines our rights by limiting what the government can and cannot do to you, the individual, in certain areas. Over the years, Americans have wrongly internalized this to mean the Constitution created these rights. Actually, these rights are God-given, the birthright of every human wherever located, but protected from government interference in only very few special places, America among them.

In the First Amendment’s limited arena we learn that the Founders believed that we each possess certain rights, and among them are those listed above, primarily concerned with communication, criticism and religion.

How much does your right to bitch and moan about taxes, or the one percent, or Whitey T. Mann cost? Nothing. Not one plug nickel. Sure, this doesn’t guarantee your shitstravaganza of poorly reasoned diatribes any audience, but that’s not what your right is. You don’t have a right to 30 minutes of airtime on MSNBC to pontificate about how you used to fluff Tip O’Neill and Teddy Kennedy like Chris Matthews (a favorite nominal Catholic of ‘Puter’s) has. You have a right to say what you think, and that’s it. You also have a right to suffer the consequences of your dipshittery as the Dixie Chicks found out to their surprise, but that’s for another column.

This analysis goes for anything we consider rights.

‘Puter’s got the right to keep and to bear arms. This right does not provide a concomitant obligation on the Brady Campaign to pony up its misbegotten dough so ‘Puter can go buy himself a Barrett M82, as much as ‘Puter would like that.

The Supreme Court created a Constitutional right for women to have abortions. To the best of ‘Puter’s knowledge, the Supreme Court hasn’t yet gone so far as to hold that aborters have the right to force the rest of us to pay for the murder of their child. But sit tight, it’s sure to come if President Obama gets to appoint more Supreme Court nominees.

So if health care wasn’t important enough to make it into the Constitution, whether originally or by amendment, why should it be treated any differently than those more important rights acknowledged therein? It shouldn’t. Even assuming you have the right to health care (including birth control), you don’t have the right to insist anyone else pay for it.

Congress is not prohibited from legislating health care law. Congress is not prohibited from taxing us to fund its ill-considered whims. It is, however, prohibited from doing so where the enacted laws violate the Constitution, as the HHS regulations do.

Man up and pay for your own birth control. If ‘Puter’s not getting laid, he’s sure as Hell not paying for any portion of the transaction.

‘Puter will now walk off, slowly muttering to himself, along with Sleestak and Dat Ho.

Exeunt omnes.

'Puter

Always right, unless he isn’t, the infallible Ghettoputer F. X. Gormogons claims to be an in-law of the Volgi, although no one really believes this.

’Puter carefully follows economic and financial trends, legal affairs, and serves as the Gormogons’ financial and legal advisor. He successfully defended us against a lawsuit from a liquor distributor worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid deliveries of bootleg shandies.

The Geep has an IQ so high it is untestable and attempts to measure it have resulted in dangerously unstable results as well as injuries to researchers. Coincidentally, he publishes intelligence tests as a side gig.

His sarcasm is so highly developed it borders on the psychic, and he is often able to insult a person even before meeting them. ’Puter enjoys hunting small game with 000 slugs and punt guns, correcting homilies in real time at Mass, and undermining unions. ’Puter likes to wear a hockey mask and carry an axe into public campgrounds, where he bursts into people’s tents and screams. As you might expect, he has been shot several times but remains completely undeterred.

He assures us that his obsessive fawning over news stories involving women teachers sleeping with young students is not Freudian in any way, although he admits something similar once happened to him. Uniquely, ’Puter is unable to speak, read, or write Russian, but he is able to sing it fluently.

Geep joined the order in the mid-1980s. He arrived at the Castle door with dozens of steamer trunks and an inarticulate hissing creature of astonishingly low intelligence he calls “Sleestak.” Ghettoputer appears to make his wishes known to Sleestak, although no one is sure whether this is the result of complex sign language, expert body posture reading, or simply beating Sleestak with a rubber mallet.

‘Puter suggests the Czar suck it.