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“I’m not a lawyer and I don’t pretend to understand the nuances of the constitutional balancing tests,” admitted Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelious to Congressman Trey Gowdy (R-SC) in testimony before the House Education and Workforce Committee, “I’m not going to wade into constitutional law, I’m talking about the fact that we are implementing the law (ObamaCare) that was passed by the Congress, signed by the president, which directed our department to develop a package of preventive health services for women. We have done just that with the advice of the Institute of Medicine and promulgated that rule.”

The Sebelius “rule” gives Catholic institutions one year to decide how to become complicit in killing the unborn, which has become a secular blood offering to the Progressive gods.

This led to a rare constitutional “teachable moment.”

Rep. Gowdy: “Do you agree with me that government cannot force certain religious beliefs on its citizens? Why can they not do that?”

Sebelius: “Why can government not force religious beliefs?”

Rep. Gowdy: “What’s the basis of that?”

Sebelius: “The separation of church and state.”

Rep. Gowdy: “Can government decide which religious beliefs are acceptable and not acceptable?”

Sebelius: “Ah, no sir.”

Rep. Gowdy: “And why can they not do that?”

Sebelius: “It’s part of our … (gulp) … Constitution.”

Gowdy added an exclamation point to the exercise, “It’s a legal analysis. For me, this is not a political analysis, this is a legal analysis.”

A man is running for president who has shown nothing but contempt for the United States Constitution. And that contempt drips from every pore of every Obama administration functionary.

Sebelius says she is not a lawyer schooled in the fine points of constitutional law. So, she defers to the wisdom of the Institute of Medicine for advice on the matter. It’s difficult to say medical bureaucrats who receive much of their research funding from government – not to mention the harvested embryonic stem cells from aborted fetuses – are disinterested constitutionalists. That’s why we have courts.

This June, the Supreme Court will further the constitutional instruction for Sebelius and Progressives in both parties that we are a nation of laws and not overreaching men … or women.

If the embattled Obama should win re-election, say the pundits, you can thank the “gender gap.” And Democrats have packaged a campaign slogan that seems to be winning the hearts and minds of soccer moms across the nation: “The Republican War on Women.”

Since the good-old-days of the New Deal, Progressive Democrats have carved out a substantial piece of political real estate by buying off various constituencies with taxpayer cash or by placing the self-appointed leaders of these political factions in the media spotlight.

Recently, Georgetown University Law student Sandra Fluke testified before Congress that mean old Republicans, if they get their way, will hit her unfairly in the pocketbook by refusing to pick up her $3,000-a-year contraception tab.

“We, as Georgetown LSRJ [Law Students for Reproductive Justice], are here today because we’re so grateful that this regulation implements the non-partisan medical advice of the Institute of Medicine,” said Fluke.

The regulation she referred to was a ruling by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that Catholic institutions, like Georgetown University, must provide “free” contraception although it conflicts with church doctrine, tramples on the separation of church and state and the Constitution’s Free Exercise Clause.

“Scientists have abundant evidence that birth control has significant health benefits for women,” insisted HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, adding that contraception “is documented to significantly reduce health costs.”

Fluke and Obama administration thralls used the claim once employed by global-warming alarmists that scientific truth demands we submit to, well, their demands.

Unfortunately for global-warming alarmists, e-mails surfaced unmasking a conspiracy among the globe’s leading climatologists to skew temperature data in a way that supported their alarmist computer models. The e-mails also detailed efforts to discredit and deny peer-review publication of articles by scientists whose conclusions differed from what former Vice President Al Gore insisted was a universal “scientific consensus.”

The “climategate” scandal reduced the Academy Award-winning Gore to shrilly denounce his opponents as “Holocaust deniers.”

Gore, once the darling of the talk-show circuit, is conspicuously missing from the public eye.

Georgetown coed Sandra Fluke breathed new life into the better-living-through-science nostrum. She insisted that the Institute of Medicine recommendation to ObamaCare bureaucrats trumped the Constitution – whether the question was separation of powers, lawmaking by unelected technocrats or trampling the conscience of individuals. To deny her claim to free contraception was a declaration of war against sacred science not to mention an entire gender.

And American women seem to be responding. According to a recent CNN poll, women view President Obama more favorably, by 16 points, than his presumptive Republican opponent Mitt Romney.

Then the New York Times’ Science Section ran a story with revelations as shocking as climategate. An investigation conducted by Dr. Ferric C. Fang, editor in chief of the journal Infection and Immunity, and Dr. Arturo Casadevall, of  the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, found a dramatic increase in the number of peer-reviewed science articles retracted after it was discovered they contained false claims, and that the retractions “were just a manifestation of a much more profound problem – ‘a symptom of a dysfunctional scientific climate’ …  a winner-take-all game with perverse incentives that lead scientists to cut corners and, in some cases, commit acts of misconduct.”

In an editorial published in Infection and Immunity, Dr. Fang explains why he believes misconduct among scientific researchers is on the rise:

“Overall success rates of research proposals, including both renewal and new applications, submitted to the National Institutes of Health have fallen by more than 50% … As the amelioration effects of the 2009 ARRA (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) stimulus funding come to an end, the full impact of the deficient federal investment in science is only now being fully felt … Funding agencies cannot continue to reject more than nine-tenths of grant applications without seriously damaging science.”

This is pure speculation on my part, but Dr. Fang seems to suggest that cutthroat competition among science researchers hungry for federal funds is driving them to tilt their findings in order to legitimize the political prejudices of the funding agencies. If HHS says ripping up the Constitution is good for women’s health … federally-funded scientists can rustle up a study proving it. It’s either that or face the humiliation of standing in a long line at the unemployment office.

Junk science nearly put America’s crippled industries in the hands of United Nations carbon bureaucrats. Today, junk science works to diminish our liberties and return a community organizing political hack to the White House – by cynically reducing American women to frightened lab rats.