The silent war on religious liberty - Bobby Jindal

The Governor of Louisiana sails into American elites trying to circumscribe religious freedom

Bobby Jindal | 21 February 2014

In a recent speech delivered at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library Louisiana, Governor Bobby Jindal made the case for defending religious liberty. He sailed into the “group of like-minded elites”, including the Obama administration, “determined to transform the country from a land sustained by faith — into a land where faith is silenced, privatized, and circumscribed.”
The following excerpts re taken from his prepared notes.

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Tonight I want to give a speech I’ve never given before, about an issue lurking just beneath the surface – that issue is The Silent War on Religious Liberty. I can think of no better place to give this speech than the Ronald Reagan Foundation and Library. President Reagan himself said that, “Freedom is not the sole prerogative of a chosen few, but the universal right of all God’s children.”

When he said this, he was not expressing a strictly personal belief in the nature of man as a created being — as a child of God. He was reaffirming the most basic contention of the American Founding, set forth in the Declaration of Independence, that we are a nation constituted in accordance with the “Laws of Nature and of Nature's God,” and that we are a people “endowed by [our] Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”

The religious foundations of America

Let me make this explicit: the source and justification for the very existence of the United States of America is and always has been contingent upon the understanding of man as a created being, with a Creator conferring his intrinsic rights — “among [them] Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

How we understand and approach that Creator is properly left to the hearts and consciences of every citizen. I am a Catholic Christian. My parents are Hindus. I am blessed to know Baptists, Jews, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and so many more in the rich tapestry of American faiths. And I know men and women who acknowledge no denomination or creed, confess to uncertainty about the Divine, yet look to the richness of nature and the majesty of this world — and wonder, and inwardly seek, the Author of it all.

These days we think this diversity of belief is tolerated under our law and Constitution. But that’s wrong. This diversity of belief is the foundation of our law and Constitution. America does not sustain and create faith. Faith created and sustains America. President John Adams, in 1798, wrote to Massachusetts militiamen to remind them that “… Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

In 1798, this was simple common sense. In 2014, we are forced to confront a question that would have been unthinkable to President Adams…and President Washington, and President Reagan, and every other American throughout history who believed in America’s founding premise: What happens when our government decides it no longer needs a “moral and religious people?”
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Mired in a silent war

Today the American people, whether they know it or not, are mired in a silent war. It threatens the fabric of our communities, the health of our public square, and the endurance of our constitutional governance. It is a war against the propositions in the Declaration of Independence. It is a war against the spirit that motivated abolitionism. It is a war against the faith that motivated the Civil Rights struggle.

It is a war against the soul of countless acts of charity. It is a war against the conscience that drives social change. It is a war against the heart that binds our neighborhoods together. It is a war against America’s best self, at America’s best moments. It is a war — a silent war — against religious liberty.

This war is waged in our courts and in the halls of political power. It is pursued with grim and relentless determination by a group of like-minded elites, determined to transform the country from a land sustained by faith — into a land where faith is silenced, privatized, and circumscribed. Their vision of America is not the vision of the Founding. It’s not even the vision of ten years ago. It’s a vision in which an individual’s devotion to Almighty God is accorded as much respect as a casual hobby — and with about as many rights and protections.

These elites have to this point faced little opposition – a non-profit here, a dedicated attorney there, a small business over there. A handful of principled organizations with the courage to stand up to the crushing weight of a liberal consensus unalterably opposed to their participation in the public square. They are the remnant who have the temerity to believe in America and its promises — and to do something about it.

After all, every person wants to live out his or her values. America’s most fundamental promise is that we can. When we cannot — when we are told that our faiths and our consciences are inimical to good governance and the law — then we are not simply facing a threat to our faiths and consciences. We are facing a threat to the very idea of America.
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Consider three storylines playing out in the states and at the highest courts over the past several years in three different areas, yet all with overlapping effects.
First: the freedom to exercise your religion in the way you run your business, large or small, is under assault.

Hobby Lobby and the free exercise of religion

You have likely heard of the Obama administration’s case against Hobby Lobby, a mega craft store and a family business whose battle against President Obama’s contraception mandate will end up as a Supreme Court decision. The national chain filed suit after being told they would be fined $1.3 million per day if they didn’t pay for abortifacients through their insurance.

Hobby Lobby is nothing less than an all-American success story. The family owned company was launched in Oklahoma in 1970 with nothing more than a $600 loan and a workshop in a garage. Today they have 588 stores in 47 states. They have more than 13,000 full-time employees. They expanded, branching out to create a Christian supply shop to sell Bibles and craft supplies, opening another 35 stores in 7 states, with almost 400 more employees. This is entrepreneurship at its best…

Through it all, Hobby Lobby has retained the guiding principles of their devout founders. Their statement of purpose begins with a Bible verse, and they are closed every Sunday. They’ve committed to honor the Lord by being generous employers, paying well above minimum wage and increasing salaries four years in a row even in the midst of the enduring recession. The family also signed the “Giving Pledge,” committing to donate the majority of their wealth to philanthropy. This is the definition of what a faithful entrepreneur looks like.

None of this matters to the Obama administration. The argument they have advanced, successfully thus far, is that a faithful business owner cannot operate under the assumption that they can use their moral principles to guide the way their place of business spends money. According to the administration's legal arguments, the family that owns Hobby Lobby is not protected by the First Amendment's "free exercise" of religion clause.

That’s the part of the First Amendment which states that "Congress shall make no law ... prohibiting the free exercise" of religion.

The Obama administration and Attorney General Eric Holder argue that because “Hobby Lobby is a for-profit, secular employer, and a secular entity by definition does not exercise religion.” A federal judge agreed: since Hobby Lobby is a “secular” corporation, they have no right to be guided by the religious beliefs of their ownership.

Keep in mind that the Greens weren’t arguing that so-called morning-after pills should be illegal, or banned, or doing anything to prevent their employees from paying the small cost of such pills. They just had a serious moral problem with paying for something they viewed as inherently against their deeply held beliefs.

The Obama administration’s argument ignores these beliefs and treats them as little more than an inconvenience to its ever-expanding regulatory state. The administration’s argument strikes at the core of our understanding of free exercise of religion. This case could have enormous ramifications for religious business owners across the country.
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Hosanna Tabor and freedom of association

And that brings us to the second front in the silent war: the assault on our freedom of association as people of faith, to form organizations where we work alongside others who share our views.

This brings us to the Hosanna-Tabor case, which revolved around the ability of a Lutheran academy in Michigan to fire a teacher. Here, the Obama administration advanced another extreme argument, claiming that job regulations prevented the academy from being able to fire anyone over a difference in beliefs.

The lawyers for the Obama administration went far beyond the issues of the case to instead advance the legally absurd position that there is no general ministerial exception, arguing that religious groups don’t even have the Constitutionally protected right to select their own ministers or rabbis.

Thankfully, here, the administration’s extreme position was rebutted by the Supreme Court in decisive fashion, with a 9-0 decision opposing its perspective. You have to take a pretty extreme position for Elena Kagan to join with Samuel Alito on an opinion.

So for the time being at least, the government doesn’t get to decide who can preach the gospel. But the important thing to note is that the government wanted to make that decision. That is truly offensive and frightening.

The administration advanced that extreme argument because it is consistent with the view of many on the left, particularly elite liberal legal scholars, that the god we must worship first is government, and that our rights are doled out by Washington as they see fit.

This same argument is even now being advanced against Catholic hospitals and adoption service providers, and other organizations that have a deeply held worldview, and simply want all their members and employees to share that worldview. The onslaught of lawsuits based on anti-discrimination law will inevitably lead to conflicts, which damage our society.

Elane Photography and freedom of expression

But those cases are only the beginning – there is a bigger threat, one that brings us to the third front in the silent war: the assault on your freedom of expression in all areas of life.

Consider the many cases against bakers, photographers, caterers and other wedding consultants who have religious beliefs, which prevent them from taking part in a same-sex ceremony. The New Mexico Supreme Court ruled in August that one small business, Elane Photography, had violated the state’s Human Rights Act by declining to photograph a same sex commitment ceremony. In his opinion, the judge informed the Christian photographers being fined that they were “compelled by law to compromise the very religious beliefs that inspire their lives,” because that was “the price of citizenship.”

This assault will only spread in the immediate future. We will see continued pressure brought on anyone who "refuses and refers" to be penalized for their views, denied membership in professional groups or even rejected from licenses.

The effect of redefining marriage

Many states have considered these issues in the light of the ongoing legal battle over marriage laws in the country. But that pressure is not going to stop with photographers and bakers – it’s going to be brought on churches, mosques, and synagogues, too.

Illinois shows us a preview of what this looks like. In legislation they proposed altering the definition of marriage, they would have required churches and other congregations to essentially close their doors to outsiders, stop providing services to the community, and close off their facilities to other non-profits or church groups in order to avoid being required to host same sex ceremonies.

The Illinois legislation would have required an unprecedented degree of government oversight, such as sending government representatives to survey students at Catholic schools to see how many were actually Catholic. They would not allow religious bodies to rent their facilities to non-members for use in weddings. They would drive churches to have to eliminate classes, day schools, counseling, fellowship hall meetings, soup kitchens and more.

In other words, this law and others like it would require believers to essentially choose to break with their deeply held theological beliefs, or give up their daily activity of evangelism, retreat from public life, and sacrifice their property rights. Churches that do not host same sex unions would essentially be barred from participating fully in civil society.

This is the next stage of the assault, and it is only beginning. Today, an overwhelming majority of those who belong to a religious denomination in America – that’s more than half the country – are members of organizations that affirm the traditional definition of marriage. All of those denominations will be targeted in large and small degrees in the coming years.

“Hate speech” and human rights

Will churches in America even be able to remain part of the public square in a time when their views on sin are in direct conflict with the culture, and when expressing those views will be seen as hiding hateful speech behind religious protections?

Just as in Canada, where hate speech laws force courts to discern whether quoting Bible verses amounts to violating “human rights rules,” giving up your rights of religious expression may, as the New Mexico judge put it, be just “the price of citizenship.”

This war on religious liberty – on your freedom to exercise your religion, on your freedom to associate, on your freedom of expression – is only going to continue. It is going to continue because of an idea, a wrongheaded concept, which President Obama apparently believes: that religious freedom means you have the freedom to worship, and that's all.

In this misbegotten and un-American conception of religious liberty, your rights begin and end in the pew.
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[Governor Jindal next reviews protections for religious freedom being enacted by states, and calls for more of them. He also reminds his audience that Christians in some countries are actually paying with their lives for their faith.]

So here, in America, we should be grateful that the laws and principles put in place by the Founders, men like George Mason and James Madison and Patrick Henry who understood the importance of religious liberty, have endured for so long. They are the reason America has come so far, and it is those same principles that should guide us farther still – principles that understand that power is derived from the people, not the government.

Calvin Coolidge understood this, in his own time: “We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren sceptre in our grasp.”

The things of the spirit do come first. We must act, and act now, to protect them. The temptation in some corners is to ask for a truce in these fractious battles – but in practical terms, a truce would only amount to those who value religious liberty laying down their arms. Our religious freedom was won over the course of centuries of persecution and blood, and we should not surrender them without a fight.
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A few final thoughts.

Public opinion

First, let me be clear on something. You may or may not agree with the Catholic Church on contraception, most Americans undoubtedly do not. You may consider yourself to be pro-life or pro-choice, Americans remain fairly divided on that issue. And you may favor protecting traditional marriage between one man and one woman or you may favor making gay marriage legal. If we did a poll on those issues in this room, we would certainly find a variety of views. None of that is relevant in the least to the points I have made in this speech.

Our religious liberty must in no way ever be linked to the ever-changing opinions of the public. To the contrary, we must understand that our freedom of conscience protects all Americans of every persuasion — however those persuasions may evolve.

Targeting Christians

Second, it is unmistakable that most of the Obama Administration’s attacks on religious liberty are aimed at conservative Christians. But the fact is that our religious liberties are designed to protect people of all faiths. And I will note, that while I am best described as an evangelical Catholic, my extended family is quite diverse when it comes to matters of faith. And our liberties in America demand equal protections for all.

Stifling public debate

Third, for those of you who follow pop culture, you may have taken note of the recent flap between The Robertson family of Duck Dynasty fame, and the A&E Network that produces and broadcasts the Duck Dynasty show. And you may have further observed that the one of the loudest and most aggressive defenders of the Robertson family was the Governor of Louisiana.

You may think that I was defending the Robertsons simply because I am the Governor of their home state, the great state of Louisiana. You would be wrong about that. I defended them because they have every right to speak their minds, however indelicately they may choose to do so. Of course, A&E is a for-profit business, and they can choose what they want to put on the air.

But there was something much larger at stake here. There was a time when liberals in this country believed in debate. But that is increasingly not the case for the modern left in America. No, the modern left in America has grown tired of debate. Their new strategy is to simply try to silence their critics. So these leftists immediately mobilized and did all they could not to debate the issues, but rather to attempt to silence the Robertsons.

There was a time when the left preached tolerance. And they are indeed tolerant, unless they disagree with you. To paraphrase William F. Buckley, a liberal is someone who welcomes dissent, and is astonished to find there is any. The modern left in America is completely intolerant of the views of people of faith. They want a completely secular society where people of faith keep their views to themselves.

A pressing matter

Fourth, though this silent war on religious liberty may not seem as urgent a matter as the fact that our national debt is over 17 trillion dollars, it is actually a very pressing matter. Remember this quote from President Reagan: “Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation.”

A truly bizarre speech

Finally, let me finish by mentioning an incredible irony. I’ve been working on this speech for a good while. And last Thursday, exactly one week ago, something truly bizarre occurred.

The person who is at the tip of the spear prosecuting this quiet war on religious liberty spoke at the annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington. The topic he chose to speak about was defending religious liberty.

I was stunned, and I bet the President of Hobby Lobby, who was in the audience, was stunned as well. Yes, President Obama did wax eloquent, as he always does, about the horrors of religious persecution that are occurring beyond our borders. And good for him.

To be clear, churches in America are not being burned to the ground, and Christians are not being slaughtered for their faith. There is really no comparison to the persecution of people of faith inside our borders and outside.

Yet, it is stunning to hear the President talk of protecting religious liberty outside the United States, while at the very same time his Administration challenges and chips away at our religious liberty right here at home. Once again, there is a Grand Canyon sized difference between what this President says and what he does.

Here is what the President said last week, no doubt playing to his audience -- “History shows that nations that uphold the rights of their people — including the freedom of religion — are ultimately more just and more peaceful and more successful.”  Well said Mr. President, I couldn’t agree more.
So I leave you with this -- The President is very concerned about religious liberty…and also, if you like your religion you can keep your religion.

Thank you, and may God Bless these United States.

This article was published by Bobby Jindal and MercatorNet.com and is posted here under their Creative Commons licence. You may republish it or translate it free of charge with attribution for non-commercial purposes following these guidelines. If you teach at a university we ask that your department make a donation to MercatorNet. Commercial media must contact us for permission and fees. Some articles on this site are published under different terms. - See more at: http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/the_silent_war_on_religious_liberty#sthash.tB0XC3ec.dpuf

Freedom of Religion and the Persecution We Face in America - Fr. Michael Orsi

Robert George, Rick Warren, and John DiIulio on Religious Freedom

All men are equal, but some are more equal than others

Michael Kirke | 24 Sep 2012 | 

For more than two centuries the three pillars of western democracy have been Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Enshrined and balanced in the rule of law as we know it, they have been the handmaids of our evolving civilized world.  Crucial to their influence, however, is that word “balance” because if any one of them becomes distorted the house which they support will come tumbling down.

We are now in crisis, because that very act of distortion is being perpetrated before our very eyes – the pillar of Equality is day by day assuming gross characteristics which have already begun to cripple its two siblings, Liberty and Fraternity. Someone else can draw up the catalogue – Obama’s Mandate alone will provide ample illustration. Suffice here to draw on one authoritative source which lists a frightening scenario of injustice which, in the name of Equality, is now threatening any number of citizens in any number of states who treasure their Liberty and their Fraternity.

Britain’s Coalition For Marriage has sought an expert legal opinion on the perceived threats to freedom of conscience in the destruction of marriage now promised by the British Government. Add to that similar threats in the public policies of the USA, France and Ireland – to name just three. If you take away freedom of conscience you destroy, not only Liberty itself but one of the foundations of Fraternity, respect for the individual conscience of my brother.

Concerned that worries about gay marriage and freedom of conscience were too narrowly focused, the C4M commissioned a legal opinion from leading human rights lawyer, Aidan O’Neill QC. Mr O’Neill was asked to give his expert advice on a series of scenarios related to legalising gay marriage which took the focus beyond places of worship and ministers of religion who conduct weddings. They added hypothetical cases which dealt with the impact in the workplace, in schools and in other areas of everyday life which they felt had been been overlooked.

For example, what would be likely happen to a Church of England chaplain working in the state-run National Health Service who, while conducting a wedding service in his parish church, preached that marriage is only for one man and one woman? If his NHS bosses found out about this would he be disciplined for breaching NHS diversity policy?

Mr. O’Neill’s view is that under the Equality Act 2010 the NHS managers would have proper grounds for justifying disciplinary action, even if the chaplain was preaching in his own church outside work time. Furthermore, the situation would be the same for any chaplain employed within the public sector, such as armed forces chaplains or university chaplains.

What about a primary school teacher who is asked to use a storybook about gay marriage called King & King? This book is recommended by local authorities and by gay rights charities. Would a conscientiously Christian teacher who says using the book conflicts with her religious beliefs about marriage be threatened with dismissal unless she backed down?

O’Neill says yes, she certainly would and that the school would be within its legal rights to dismiss her if she refuses to use the material.

What about the case where parents ask for their child to be withdrawn from school lessons on the history of gay marriage, for deeply-held religious reasons? The parents might say that they have a right to withdraw their child under European Convention on Human Rights. But the school might refuse to accept this pleading that it is under a legal duty to promote equality.

O’Neill’s legal opinion on this is that the parents do not ultimately have a right to insist that their child be withdrawn from such history lessons, and that the parents “will have little prospect of success in challenging the school’s insistence that their child attend” the lessons.

How would that scenario play out in schools which are explicitly designated as “faith schools”? 

He said:

“If the school in question were a faith school, or otherwise one with a religious ethos within the State sector in England and Wales, this would make no difference to my answer”

Then there is the case of fostering. Take a couple which applies to be foster carers. They tell social workers they are motivated to care for children because of their Christian faith. On hearing this, the social workers ask them whether they support gay marriage. The couple says they do not, and the social workers halt the application because of equality and discrimination policies. O’Neill confirmed that a local authority fostering agency would have legitimate legal grounds for acting this way.

This opinion can be backed up by a judgement already handed down by a British court. In February, 2011, Eunice and Owen Johns, a Christian couple, married almost 40 years, were deemed by the High Court to be no longer eligible for fostering children aged between five and 10. They were deemed unsuitable, in law, to do so any longer because they were unwilling to promote a homosexual lifestyle to a child. Neither Mr nor Mrs Johns had anything against gay people but they were not in favour of sex before marriage, whatever an individual’s orientation.

Mr. O’Neill was asked about a case where a church hires a council-owned community centre each week for its youth club. The church website states that it will only conduct opposite-sex marriages. Someone complains to the council, and while the church can’t be forced to conduct gay weddings, it is stopped from hiring the community centre. “Yes”,  he says, the council would be within its legal rights to do this.

Then there is the question of state employees in registry offices. At present a local authority can decide to accommodate the religious beliefs of one of its registrars by not designating him or her to be a “civil partnership registrar”. Other registrars within the local authority’s team are sufficient to provide the service to the public.
Mr. O’Neill’s view is that if gay marriage becomes law,

“that kind of adjustment to accommodate a registrar’s particular beliefs would no longer be an option for any employing authority because there would then be only be one system of marriage (rather than, as at present, a distinct civil partnership regime for same sex couples)”.

Going back to schools, the O’Neill opinion also considers the impact of redefining marriage on teaching. It says that the law will require that children learn about gay marriage in sex education lessons. This is because Section 403(1A)(a) of the Education Act 1996 imposes a duty on the Secretary of State “to issue guidance” ensuring that pupils “learn the nature of marriage and its importance for family life and the bringing up of children”. If gay marriage becomes law then “its importance for family life and the bringing up of children” must be taught as part of sex education.

So there you have it. Equality trumps Liberty every time. Goodbye Liberty, and it is quite clear that the Equality which will prevail in this brave new world will be of the Orwellian variety: "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others". 

This article is reproduced here from MercatorNet.  It is published by Michael Kirke and MercatorNet.com under a Creative Commons licence. You may republish it or translate it free of charge with attribution for non-commercial purposes following these guidelines. If you teach at a university we ask that your department make a donation. Commercial media must contact MercatorNet for permission and fees. 

The Battle Over Marriage and Religious Liberty: Why No Compromise Is Possible

Remember all the assurances that same-sex marriage would have minimal effect on the rest of society and even on the institution of marriage?  In this post from Public Discourse, Robert George explains why the notion that a grand bargain could be struck between supporters and opponents of SSM - such that SSM would be legally recognized but its proponents and the law would respect the right of supporters of marriage as traditionally defined to act on their consciences without penalty - was always an illusion.

There is, in George's opinion,

no chance—no chance—of persuading champions of sexual liberation (and it should be clear by now that this is the cause they serve), that they should respect, or permit the law to respect, the conscience rights of those with whom they disagree....

The lesson, it seems to me, for those of us who believe that the conjugal conception of marriage is true and good, and who wish to protect the rights of our faithful and of our institutions to honor that belief in carrying out their vocations and missions, is that there is no alternative to winning the battle in the public square over the legal definition of marriage. 

Marriage, religious liberty, and the “grand bargain”

Robert P. George

July19, 2012

In the name of “marriage equality” and “non-discrimination,” liberty—especially religious liberty and the liberty of conscience—and genuine equality are undermined.

It was only yesterday, was it not, that we were being assured that the redefinition of marriage to include same-sex partnerships would have no impact on persons and institutions that hold to the traditional view of marriage as a conjugal union? Such persons and institutions would simply be untouched by the change. It won’t affect your marriage or your life, we were told, if the law recognizes Henry and Herman or Sally and Sheila as “married.”

Those offering these assurances were also claiming that the redefinition of marriage would have no impact on the public understanding of marriage as a monogamous and sexually exclusive partnership. No one, they insisted, wanted to alter those traditional marital norms. On the contrary, the redefinition of marriage would promote and spread those norms more broadly....

Remember?  

No one, they assured us, would require Catholic or other foster care and adoption services to place children in same-sex headed households. No one, they said, would require religiously affiliated schools and social-service agencies to treat same-sex partners as spouses, or impose penalties or disabilities on those that dissent. No one would be fired from his or her job (or suffer employment discrimination) for voicing support for conjugal marriage or criticizing same-sex sexual conduct and relationships. And no one was proposing to recognize polyamorous relationships or normalize “open marriages,” nor would redefinition undermine the norms of sexual exclusivity and monogamy in theory or practice.

That was then; this is now.

READ THE FULL POST HERE

Hercules shows strength, halts Obama abortion pill mandate

Cost of freedom to Colo. family business could be millions of dollars if Obama administration ultimately prevails
Friday, July 27, 2012

Attorney sound bite:  Matt Bowman

DENVER — A federal court issued an order Friday that halts enforcement of the Obama administration’s abortion pill mandate against a Colorado family-owned business while an Alliance Defending Freedom lawsuit challenging the mandate continues in court. The mandate forces employers, regardless of their religious or moral convictions, to provide insurance coverage for abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization, and contraception under threat of heavy penalties.

Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys obtained the first-ever order against the mandate on behalf of Hercules Industries and the Catholic family that owns it. The administration opposed the order, arguing, contrary to the U.S. Constitution, that people of faith forfeit their religious liberty once they engage in business. The mandate could subject the Newlands to millions of dollars in fines per year if they don’t abide by its requirements.

“Every American, including family business owners, should be free to live and do business according to their faith. For the time being, Hercules Industries will be able to do just that,” said Legal Counsel Matt Bowman. “The cost of freedom for this family could be millions of dollars per year in fines that will cripple their business if the Obama administration ultimately has its way. This lawsuit seeks to ensure that Washington bureaucrats cannot force families to abandon their faith just to earn a living. Americans don’t want politicians and bureaucrats deciding what faith is, who the faithful are, and where and how that faith may be lived out.”

In his order, Senior Judge John L. Kane of the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado said that the government’s arguments “are countered, and indeed outweighed, by the public interest in the free exercise of religion. As the Tenth Circuit has noted, ‘there is a strong public interest in the free exercise of religion even where that interest may conflict with [another statutory scheme]….’ Accordingly, the public interest favors entry of an injunction in this case.” Kane explained that the government’s “harm pales in comparison to the possible infringement upon Plaintiffs’ constitutional and statutory rights.”

According to the brief Alliance Defending Freedom filed along with the motion requesting the injunction, “the mandate disregards religious conscience rights that are enshrined in federal statutory and constitutional law.” It also violates the First Amendment “due to its massive inapplicability and its discrimination among religions,” the brief explains.

Hercules owners William Newland, Paul Newland, James Newland, and Christine Ketterhagen, and its vice-president, Andrew Newland, desire to run their company in a manner that reflects their sincerely held religious beliefs, including their belief that God requires respect for the dignity of human life and sexuality. Their lawsuit, Newland v. Sebelius, was filed April 30 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado.

Alliance Defending Freedom (formerly Alliance Defense Fund) is an alliance-building legal ministry that advocates for the right of people to freely live out their faith.

Fr. Barron: Additional Comments on Religious Liberty and the English Experience

Father Barron provides more candid commentary about religious freedom, politics, iconoclasm, and the intersection of religion and the state within British history. 

Back from England, Fr. Barron Comments on Religious Liberty

Wonderful commentary about religious persecution in the 16th century, how it still haunts England today, and how fundamental religious liberty is to a free society.

A Defining Moment and a Larger Task

Standing Fast on Conscience This Lent

By Chuck Donovan

WEDNESDAY, 14 MARCH 2012

An important meeting of the U.S. Catholic bishops’ administrative committee is underway this week, and the gathering should be an occasion of concerted prayer for all who care about the future of religious liberty, as well as Catholic charity in the United States. Adding one more intention to the Lenten period should not create too large a burden for an issue of such great moment.

Critics of the Church’s strong stance against President Obama’s preventive services mandate have intensified their pressure with bits of semi-personal nastiness, as the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne did here in a column taunting the U.S. hierarchy as fresh recruits to the Tea Party.  

The preventive services mandate and its requirement that Catholic institutions guarantee their employees “free” coverage of abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization, and contraceptives is only the latest item in a logical progression. In 2006, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts drove Catholic Charities out of the adoption field with a new mandate that it offer child placements with homosexual couples. 

Just four years later, the District of Columbia took the same step, while heaping additional burning coals on the Church by threatening to deny it eligibility for public grants for its services to the homeless and others in need, because the Church refused to provide marriage benefits to same-sex couples. 

Rather than acquiesce in the violation of its conscience over the nature of marriage, the Church dropped health benefits for spouses of future employees. Illinois soon chimed in with similar adverse action against Catholic adoption agencies.

Then in 2011 the Obama Administration canceled a national grant to the Church for its work assisting with the rescue of trafficked women. Despite the fact that the Church’s application to continue assisting victims of trafficking scored much higher than those of competing agencies, Kathleen Sebelius’s Department of Health and Human Services imposed a new requirement, not found in the underlying law, that grantees provide trafficked women with “access” to all legal reproductive health services (e.g., abortion and birth control).

With each of these steps, the Obama Administration and its allies executed maneuvers that collapsed the space available to Catholic institutions to “be Catholic,” even outside the arena of government grants and contracts. The terms of state licensure, as in Massachusetts, have been enough for the state, through thesweeping application of sexual orientation non-discrimination laws, to destroy Catholic involvement in the social services field.

           Cardinal Dolan: Who’ll define the faith?

As aggressive as these measures against the Catholic Church’s self-understanding have been, they pale against the violations committed now in the name of the ambiguous clauses of the 2010 health care reform law. Based on a vague “prevention” amendment adopted in committee and neither debated nor voted upon in a 2,500-page bill, Obama and HHS reinvented pregnancy as a disease, created a religious exemption so narrow it has no precedent in American law, and rebuffed all attempts to correct the problem by charging that the Church was now suddenly embarked on a “war on women.”

For all of these reasons, it should be clear by now that the Church’s entire framework of corporal works of mercy is at risk, and that this is no side-effect of new social mores but an intentional by-product of policies and laws that seek hegemony over the very definitions of life, marriage, health care for women, and now even charity. 

Yet another spurious “accommodation” from the Obama Administration, should one be issued (with, no doubt, a post-election completion date), should not mask the fact that, by its very design, the 2010 health reform law is an affront to both the First Amendment and core Catholic social principles.

HHS states that Catholic entities are not actually implicated in subsidizing immoral practices because, after all, contraception saves insurers and insured parties’ money. HHS would have us believe the only issue here is efficiency not constitutional liberty. That brute calculation is offensive to religious sensibilities in its own right, but note how it could be applied as precedent for the next mandateto cover abortion of the disabled, drugs to euthanize the sick, or assisted suicide. 

In these latter instances, after all, real illnesses are involved. Would this or a future administration never insist that Catholic universities, hospitals and soup kitchens underwrite their employees’ abortions or death pills? If that seems incredible, how incredible is it that the Church now faces such scorn from an administration policy establishing the principle that Catholics may not operate their institutions in conformity with their understanding of the moral law?  

The HHS rule, as Cardinal Timothy Dolan noted in his March 2 letter, "seeks to define what constitutes church ministry and how it can be exercised." He who defines, he who funds, controls.

That is why this is a defining moment in the pews as well. We must stand for continued religious freedom on behalf of Catholic institutions as well as each person of faith, regardless of that person's place of employment.  We must also defend the constitutional protection of religious freedom in all matters involving health care decisions, from conception to natural death.  We must press for the reversal of all policies that hamper the Church's capacity for works of service in health care in accord with Catholic social teaching. 

To accomplish these goals is a larger task than merely reversing the preventive services mandate, but that reversal must come. We also must reset our focus to promote future changes in health policy that will achieve the goals of preserving and expanding access to health care and social services while protecting religious freedom and conscience.

Chuck Donovan, a new contributor to The Catholic Thing, is the president of the Charlotte Lozier Institute in Washington, D.C.


Retrieved March 14, 2012 from The Catholic Thing.

© 2012 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org

Robert George's Georgetown Address on Religious Liberty

Religious Freedom: Why Now? Defending an Embattled Human Right (Keynote Address by Robert P. George) from The Berkley Center on Vimeo.

NB: There's a long introduction.  Prof. George's address begins at 9:30 (nine and a half minutes in).

In the deadly sights of an all-controlling state

Separation of Church and State Revisited

By James V. Schall, S.J.

MONDAY, 05 MARCH 2012

“The strangest accusation in this manipulated public discussion has the bishops not respecting the separation between church and state,” Francis Cardinal George of Chicago wrote on February 26 in the Catholic New World. “The bishops would love to have the separation between church and state we thought we enjoyed just a few months ago, when we were free to run Catholic institutions in conformity with the demands of the Catholic faith, when the government couldn’t tell us which of our ministries are Catholic and which not, when the law protected rather than crushed conscience.”

The long history of what is called “separation of church and state” has come full circle. It began over concerns with too much interference by religion in politics, though the opposite was usually the danger. The United States was almost the only country in which bishops could be appointed without government interference and in which Catholics were free to have and run their own institutions.

The Catholic Church has hammered out an incisive understanding of the claims of secular and spiritual power. Both have a proper place. Within the last months, however, the Obama administration actively claims practically full control over most aspects of public life, including religious life. The administration not only seems to have no respect for the Catholic position, but no sympathy for the tradition and Constitution of this country itself. 

The Catholic Church became comfortable with the historic arrangement of practice and principle. Suddenly the Church, with the institutions she has worked many generations to establish, is in the deadly sights of an all-controlling state. Many of the principal actors pushing for this state aggrandizement are Catholics. They, of course, claim a “right” to explain what the Church and the state really are. Optimists expect help from the courts or the electorate, but it’s rash to count on it.

Cardinal George’s analysis is incisive. “This year, the Catholic Church in the United States is being told that she must ‘give up’ her health care institutions, her universities, and many of her social service organizations. This is not a voluntary sacrifice. It is the consequence of the already much discussed Department of Health and Human Services regulations now filed and promulgated for implementation beginning August 1 of this year.” The issue is no longer abstract.

Cardinal George does not speak only for himself. Most other bishops have realized the same threat, as has the Holy Father in recent ad limina visits of U.S. bishops to Rome. Some few bishops, most of the Catholic university world, and much of the laity still cannot or will not believe that it has come to this. But it has. Bishops are being forced to be bishops in a way few ever anticipated, not a bad thing, really.

          Caesar: Render unto me the things that are God’s.

Some Catholics who voted for Obama now feel “betrayed” by this new policy. That is mostly deliberate blindness to far-reaching social policies that were fostered by this administration from the beginning. It is just no longer possible to hide. The agenda of the administration is to change the Church so that it conforms to the corrupting principles motivating these regulations. It looks like the bishops understand that their very theological nature is being put to the test in the public order. 

What will happen? Cardinal George gives four possibilities: 1) The Catholic hospital or university can voluntarily secularize itself to deny any relation to the bishop or Catholic inspiration. Cardinal George calls this “theft.” 2) Huge fines can be levied to avoid paying for insurance that covers abortion and other mandatory ills. 3) The institutions can be sold to non-Catholic groups or local government. 4) Close them all.

The irony is that the issue being fought on both sides is in the unholy name of “social justice.” Many elements of the so-called Catholic left have long striven to make morally legitimate the practices that are being most objected to – abortion, contraception, euthanasia, gay marriage. One side says such things are matters of “social justice.” The other side defines “social justice” in another way.

Accepting what the administration understands as “social justice” would make the Church a bulwark, not an opponent, of this all-caring state. The Church would only have places of worship, as in most totalitarian, Muslim, or socialist states. All the “human” things would be the state’s to define, enforce, and govern.

“Many will recognize. . .a tactic now familiar in our public life,” Cardinal George observes, “those who cannot be co-opted are isolated and then destroyed. The arguments used are both practical and theoretical.”

This nation was once called the “land of the free and the home of the brave.” The brave and the free are now those who fear being “destroyed” by the state that once “separated” the two powers. We are being asked to render to Caesar the things that are God’s.

James V. Schall, S.J., a professor at Georgetown University, is one of the most prolific Catholic writers in America. His most recent book is The Mind That Is Catholic.



© 2012 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org




Retrieved March 5, 2012 from The Catholic Thing

The Pork Precedent

In the second century B.C., the foreign tyrant Antiochus IV Epiphanes decreed that all Jews should be forced to violate their religious consciences by publicly eating pork and food sacrificed to idols. “If any were not willing to eat defiling food, they were to be broken on the wheel and killed” (4 Maccabees 5:3). It was a command of gratuitous forced submission as a sign of Antiochus’s supreme authority to compel obedience by a subject people.

Read the whole story - and its relevance to current events - here: http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/02/4777

Obama’s Contraception Cram-down: The Pork Precedent « Public Discourse

www.thepublicdiscourse.com

“Contraception” is not exactly the right term. The HHS mandate implementing Obamacare requires insurance plans of religious employers to provide not just contraception but also sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs—“morning-after” (and even “week-after”) pills designed to cause the death of a co...

Electoral consequences of the HHS mandate

The electoral damage done to Obama by his "war on religion" is, of course, not the point.  Even if Catholics were a small, deeply unpopular minority - like those Jehovah's Witnesses who, in the midst of WWII, refused to salute the flag - the First Amendment would still protect their right to religious liberty.  As the Supreme Court said in its Barnette ruling, issued on Flag Day, 1943, "If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion."  The issue is not how popular the Church's teaching on contraception and sterilization is, even among Catholics.  It is whether the Federal government has the right to impose its view on religious organizations, so as to force them to act against their consciences and to commit or collude in what they consider to be gravely immoral acts.


Still, it is good that the Obama administration will pay a price for its totalitarian statist leanings, its rejection of institutional pluralism--reducing 'conscience' to the relation of atomized individual to hypertrophied state.  May it cost him the election and serve as a warning for future politicians who are tempted to seek to trample the religious freedom on which the United States was founded.



At the Catholic Thing, George J. Marlin discusses the political cost Obama may have to pay for his secularist, anti-religious overreach:

Our president and his cadre of managers of the nation’s collective life caused a political firestorm in late January. They ignored conscience objections of religious leaders and ordered Catholic schools, hospitals, and charities to amend by August 30, 2013 their healthcare plans to include birth-control services (among them abortion-inducing drugs and sterilization procedures) or be subject to millions of dollars in fines and penalties. This may lead to civil strife for the nation and political disaster in several key battleground states for Mr. Obama. Prominent Catholics from all points on the political spectrum were aghast. Cardinal-elect Timothy Dolan, President of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, said, “In effect, the President is saying we have a year to figure out how to violate our own consciences. . . . Never before has the federal government forced individuals and organizations to go out into the marketplace and buy a product that violates their conscience. This shouldn’t happen in a land where free exercise of religion ranks first in the Bill of Rights.” The nationally syndicated columnist, E.J. Dionne, a baptized Catholic and relentless supporter of the president, denounced Obama for throwing “his progressive Catholic allies under the bus.” Sean Michael Winter, writing in the dissident National Catholic Reporter, accused the president of “dishonoring your own vision by this shameful action” and vowed not to vote for him this fall. Obama’s assumption appears to have been that Catholics who ignore the Church’s teaching on contraception would not be offended – or at least that such offense as they might take will not matter politically. But that calculation appears to be profoundly mistaken. Reports from dioceses all over the nation indicate that most Catholics are appalled that the federal government is attempting to circumvent the First Amendment and restrict freedom of conscience.  I myself witnessed that anger at a Catholic dinner in Manhattan on February 2. Bishop Nicholas DeMarzio, the Ordinary of the Brooklyn Diocese, received a rousing standing ovation from the 750 attendees after he denounced the federal edict. This political blunder will have a price. Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who has introduced legislation to repeal the order, summed it up best when he said, “This is going to hurt [Obama] not only among Catholics and religious voters . . . because it reflects a pattern of overreach.”  In my judgment, it could cost Obama the election. That’s because key-swing states that will determine the 2012 winner – Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida – have large populations of older church-going Catholics who are not happy with Obama’s ideologically driven directive.

READ MORE HERE

An Attack on Rights of Conscience: Bishops' Fact Sheet on HHS Mandate

United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
3211 FOURTH STREET NE  WASHINGTON DC 20017-1194  202-541-3000  FAX 202-541-3166 

The HHS Mandate for Contraception/Sterilization Coverage:

An Attack on Rights of Conscience 

How important is the right of conscience in American tradition?
It has always been of paramount importance: “No provision in our Constitution ought to be dearer to man than that which protects the rights of conscience against the enterprises of the civil authority” (Thomas Jefferson, 1809).


In the past, has the federal government respected conscientious objections to procedures such as sterilization that may violate religious beliefs or moral convictions?
Yes. For example, a law in effect since 1973 says that no individual is required to take part in “any part of a health service program or research activity funded in whole or in part under a program administered by the Secretary of Health and Human Services” if it is “contrary to his religious beliefs or moral convictions” (42 USC 300a-7 (d)). Even the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, which requires most of its health plans to cover contraception, exempts religiously affiliated plans and protects the conscience rights of health professionals in the other plans. Currently no federal law requires anyone to purchase, sell, sponsor, or be covered by a private health plan that violates his or her conscience.


How has the Department of Health and Human Services departed from this policy?
By issuing a mandate for coverage of sterilization and contraceptives (including long-lasting injections and implants, and “morning-after pills” that may cause an early abortion) in virtually all private health plans. In August 2011 HHS included these procedures in a list of “preventive services for women” to be required in health plans issued on or after August 1, 2012. On January 20, 2012, HHS reaffirmed its mandate while deferring enforcement against some religious employers until August 2013.


Is it appropriate to require coverage of these as “preventive services”?
No. The other services on HHS’s list seek to prevent serious disease – breast cancer, lung cancer, AIDS. Pregnancy is not a disease. The Institute of Medicine committee that compiled the “preventive services” list for HHS said in its report that unintended pregnancy is “a condition for which safe and effective prevention and treatment” need to be more widely available – setting the stage for mandated coverage of abortion as the “treatment” when prevention fails. Note that women who suffer from infertility, which really is an illness, were ignored in this mandate.


Didn’t HHS include a religious exemption?
Yes, an incredibly narrow “religious employer” exemption that fails to protect many, perhaps most, religious employers. To be eligible an organization must meet four strict criteria, including the requirement that it both hire and serve primarily people of its own faith. Catholic schools and hospitals would have to eject their non-Catholic employees, students and patients, or purchase health coverage that violates their moral and religious teaching. Jesus and his apostles would not have been “religious enough” for the exemption, since they healed and served people of different faiths. The exemption provides no protection at all to sponsors and providers of health plans for the general public, to pro-life people who own businesses, or to individuals with a moral or religious objection to these procedures.

Isn’t this an aspect of the Administration’s drive for broader access to health care for all?
Whether or not it was intended that way, it has the opposite effect. People will not be free to keep the coverage they have now that respects their convictions. Organizations with many employees will have to violate their consciences or stop offering health benefits altogether. And resources needed to provide basic health care to the uninsured will be used instead to facilitate IUDs and Depo-Provera for those who already had ample coverage. This is a diversion away from universal health care.


But won’t this provide “free birth control” for American women?
That claim is false for two reasons. First, the coverage will be mandatory, not a matter of free choice for any woman. Second, insurance companies will not be able to charge a co-pay or deductible for the coverage, so they will simply add the cost to the standard premium everyone has to pay – and among those being required to pay will be people who oppose it on conscience grounds. That is no victory for freedom.


By objecting to this coverage, is the Catholic Church discriminating against women?
Not at all. The Church’s teaching against early abortion is based on respect for all human life, male and female. Its teaching against contraception and sterilization is based on respect for the power to help generate a new human life, a power held by both men and women – so health plans in accord with Catholic teaching do not cover male or female sterilization. It is the HHS mandate that shows disregard for women, by forcing them to purchase this coverage whether they want it or not.


Do religious employers violate the consciences of women who want birth control, by refusing to cover it in their employee health plans?
No, they simply decline to provide active support for procedures that violate their own consciences. If an employee disagrees, he or she can simply purchase that coverage or those procedures elsewhere.


What solution to this dispute would be acceptable?
Ideally, HHS can leave the law the way it has always been, so those who provide, sponsor and purchase health coverage can make their own decisions about whether to include these procedures without the federal government imposing one answer on everyone. If HHS refuses, it will be especially urgent for Congress to pass the “Respect for Rights of Conscience Act” (HR 1179/S. 1467), to prevent health care reform act from being used to violate insurers’ and purchasers’ moral and religious beliefs.
1/20/12