Why can’t family business owners — Conestoga Wood Specialties and Hobby Lobby in these cases — have the same freedom from government coercion as other exempt parties? Because the government says they can’t.
Not only is the government arbitrarily selective in how it doles out exemptions, it’s also arbitrary in its argument that business owners can’t exercise religious freedom.
The Obama administration is being handed a lesson in Christianity 101 as religious leaders rise up to condemn an Obamacare requirement that forces religious organizations to pay for abortifacients or face crippling financial penalties.
“Christian doctrine states it is a sin for a Christian to enable or aid another in doing what the Christian believes to be sin,” states a brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court by a coalition of dozens of prominent Protestant theologians, African-American pastors and participants in the Manhattan Declaration.
Dozens of lawsuits have been filed over the requirement in the Affordable Health Care Act that employers pay for abortifacents. Two cases, involving Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Woods, are pending for review before the Supreme Court.
Even members of Congress have weighed in against the provision, which effectively forces Christians to violate their faith by participating in the killing of unborn children.
Editor’s note: Sen. Murray’s totally wrong-headed point of view is very popular in the Seattle area, where liberal “Catholicism” has been the norm, for many years.
The left’s revolt arose from partisan politics. Since 2008 liberal Catholics have wedded themselves to the Obama campaign. But in January the president used Obamacare to coerce religious objectors to provide early-abortion inducing drugs and contraception.
Faced with a choice between their Council and their candidate, liberal Catholics chose the latter. After the president’s February 10 press conference attempting to quell public protest, “Catholics for Obama” have not missed a beat. Vice President Biden proudly defended the mandate entirely in last week’s debate. Pundits at venues like Commonweal magazine and theNational Catholic Reporter have followed suit, especially in endorsing the requirement that lay Catholics provide abortifacients and contraception.
This stands in stark contrast to Vatican II. The Council not only reiterated the Church’s teaching on sexuality, it also insisted on two principles irreconcilable with the Obamacare HHS Mandate: religious freedom, and the laity’s identity as “the Church.”
Editor’s note: The liberals hate it and the conservatives hate it. How’s that for Catholic unity?
The bishops of this country have just concluded their traditional fall meeting in Baltimore and have spent time on issues important to them and their people: help to those suffering from Typhoon Haiyan; an update on the situation in Haiti; matters of worship and teaching; service to the poor; and comprehensive immigration reform. Among those priorities is the protection of religious freedom, especially as threatened by the HHS mandate.
Pope Francis has reminded us that “In the context of society, there is only one thing which the Church quite clearly demands: the freedom to proclaim the Gospel in its entirety, even when it runs counter to the world, even when it goes against the tide.”
We stand together as pastors charged with proclaiming the Gospel in its entirety. That Gospel calls us to feed the poor, heal the sick, and educate the young, and in so doing witness to our faith in its fullness. Our great ministries of service and our clergy, religious sisters and brothers, and lay faithful, especially those involved in Church apostolates, strive to answer this call every day, and the Constitution and the law protect our freedom to do so.
In recent months, the mandate has become the subject of dozens of lawsuits from over 200 plaintiffs arguing that it forces them to violate their deeply-held religious convictions. While houses of worship and their affiliated organizations are not required to provide the coverage, other religious non-profits are subject to a modified version of the regulation, and for-profit companies run by religious individuals receive no protection at all.
Dr. Marguerite Duane, a family practitioner in Washington, D.C., told CNA that “women should not bear the burden” of the medical side effects of contraceptives and abortion, stressing that “it takes two to plan a family.”
Under the mandate, she argued, “childbearing is seen as a curse instead of as a gift to society,” and this attitude “does not help women, it harms women.”
“The HHS mandate is completely unjust: it goes against women, it goes against good healthcare, and most importantly, it goes against the right to religious freedom.”
Editor’s note: What passes for “feminism” in today’s world is nothing more than the radical agenda of a relatively small number of politically connected, self-loathing women.
The Catholic hospitals’ group, led by Sister Carol Keehan, joined other prominent Catholics in defying the bishops to support passage of the health law at a critical stage of the congressional debate.
The Government claimed that once a business owner chooses to enter into the marketplace or incorporate his business, he surrenders his right to exercise his religious beliefs.
However, Judge Kovachevich’s 37-page decision which mentioned Thomas R. Beckwith’s unique family history—Beckwith’s ancestors arrived on the shores of America in 1626 to escape religious persecution from England — ended with a powerful statement on religious freedom:
“The First Amendment, and its statutory corollary the RFRA, endow upon the citizens of the United States the unalienable right to exercise religion, and that right is not relinquished by efforts to engage in free enterprise under the corporate form. No legislative, executive, or judicial officer shall corrupt the Framers’ initial expression, through their enactment of laws, enforcement of those laws, or more importantly, their interpretation of those laws. And any action that debases, or cheapens, the intrinsic value of the tenet of religious tolerance that is entrenched in the Constitution cannot stand.” (Emphasis added)
The high court, as it has been for many years, is narrowly split along ideological lines, with Justice Anthony Kennedy the powerful swing vote, lately found mostly in the conservative camp. Six of the court’s members are Catholics: Chief Justice John Roberts, Kennedy, Sotomayor — who was appointed by Obama in 2009 as the first-ever Hispanic Supreme Court justice — and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
But none of her fellow Catholic justices have ever made public the kind of bitterness toward the institutional Church found in Sotomayor’s just-published New York Times No. 1 bestseller “My Beloved World.” According to The New York Times, Sotomayor says she modeled the book “after President Obama’s ‘Dreams From My Father,’” another bestseller.
The main source of the hostility is that as a child, her local Irish priest, a Father Dolan, failed to pay a visit to her grief-stricken Puerto Rican mother after the death of Sotomayor’s alcoholic father. “His refusal,” Sotomayor writes, “enraged me, all the more so because of the reason: my mother didn’t go to church on Sunday.”
Editor’s note: If Sotomayor wrote this about a Jewish rabbi she would instantly be labeled an anti-Semite. Sounds like a simple case of anti-Irish, Puerto Rican racism to me. Based on the admissions contained in her book, Sotomayor should recuse herself from all HHS Mandate deliberations. But she won’t.
The Obama Administration has really pulled a fast one. In its proposed rule to supposedly provide greater protections to non house of worship religious organizations opposed to contraception, it actually ensures that contraception coverage will be provided to all religious employees–whether house of worship, convent, or school. In other words, the proposed rule expands the government’s intrusion into religious affairs, rather than reduce it.
First, here is what the new proposed rules did NOT change:
So what changed?
Some religious nonprofits (schools, hospitals, and charities) are being told they can now “opt out” of the exemption – but in name only. The proposal will allow some of our Catholic colleges, hospitals, and charities to provide coverage that exempts these immoral medicines – BUT – the same insurance company will step in and provide the objectionable services to their employees for free.
By raising a religious objection, some faith-based institutions can now avoid directly paying the insurance company for objectionable medicines and procedures – yet the premiums they pay will go straight to an insurance company that will create a separate policy that will cover the very things these religious employers believe are wrong.
Likewise, self-insured plans like those used by many dioceses and large faith-based groups will be forced to cover their eyes while their plan “Administrator” does the same thing.
The Little Sisters of the Poor take care of elderly patients in 31 countries, but on Dec. 16 a representative told the congregation of Saint Raymond of Peñafort Church in Springfield, Va., that her order could conceivably be forced to pull out of the United States if paying fines and penalties is the only alternative to compromising on the doctrines of their religion.
Submitted by Ed
by Doug Lawrence
OK. Artificial contraception is always morally wrong. So says the Catholic Church and so says the Creator God. Case closed!
Unfortunately, none of that is stopping the U.S. Government from supplying free contraceptives … many of them to be paid for by the Catholic Church … to anyone who wants them.
So … go ahead and make contraceptives cheaply available, over the counter, for anyone of legal age who chooses to use them. The onerous HHS mandate will be eliminated, those who choose to follow God’s law will be able to freely do so … and those who do not … will be free to deal with the (eternal) consequences.
Jindal’s plan is the best we’re likely to see, anytime soon.
Obama, Dolan, Boehner, and McConnell and Reid should jump on this … get it done … and use this compromise as a springboard for successful fiscal cliff negotiations, to come!
We’re Christians, and we run our business on Christian principles. I’ve always said that the first two goals of our business are (1) to run our business in harmony with God’s laws, and (2) to focus on people more than money. And that’s what we’ve tried to do. We close early so our employees can see their families at night. We keep our stores closed on Sundays, one of the week’s biggest shopping days, so that our workers and their families can enjoy a day of rest. We believe that it is by God’s grace that Hobby Lobby has endured, and he has blessed us and our employees. We’ve not only added jobs in a weak economy, we’ve raised wages for the past four years in a row. Our full-time employees start at 80% above minimum wage.
But now, our government threatens to change all of that.
Barack Obama and his pals yucking things up
at the allegedly Catholic University of Notre Dame.
Among white Catholics, Romney has jumped to a 14-point lead (54-40) after being tied with Obama in September in the poll.
To understand just how significant that is, consider that in 2008, Obama won Catholics by 9 percent (54 to 45) and lost white Catholics by just 5 percent (47 to 52). In 2004, the Catholic vote went narrowly to Bush overall (more widely among white Catholics), and in 2000 it went narrowly to Gore (and narrowly to Bush among white Catholics).
The 14-point lead Romney currently enjoys among white Catholics is almost without precedent.
Catholic voters are abandoning Obama for the same reason many other voters are: the sluggish economy, Romney’s strong performance in the presidential debates, Obama’s dishonesty and failure in Benghazi.
Yet Catholic voters have reason to feel particularly aggrieved, given the Obama administration’s battle with the Catholic church over the mandate in Obamacare that employers cover abortion drugs and contraceptives.
Those grievances came to the fore particularly sharply in mid-October, after the Vice Presidential debate between incumbent Democrat Joe Biden and Republican challenger Paul Ryan (both Catholics). Ryan brought up the conflict between the administration and the church over Obamacare: “They’re infringing upon our first freedom, the freedom of religion, by infringing on Catholic charities, Catholic churches, Catholic hospitals.”
In a world where the government believes that the First Amendment’s religious freedoms don’t apply to churches, religious organizations, non-profit and for-profit businesses, health-care providers, and anyone outside the four walls of a church building, we are all at risk.
Against a back-drop of scenes of the homeless and inner-city shelters, a new hard-hitting TV spot narrated by actress Cheryl Rhoads points out that Catholic Charities of Chicago is “one of the largest charities that serves the poor, but their services to the poor could be at risk with the $5 million fine that President Obama’s new mandate would force them to pay.”
Doug Lawrence's Catholic Site 