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Obama is attacking Religious Freedom in America (Just like everything else)
Soul Crusher:
A Matter of Conscience
President McLean’s Letter Regarding the Obama Administration’s Contraceptive Mandate
Note: On January 30, 2012, Thomas Aquinas College President Michael F. McLean mailed the following letter to California’s two U.S. senators, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Sen. Barbara Boxer, and the College’s local congressman, Rep. Elton Gallegly:
I am writing on behalf of Thomas Aquinas College to express the College’s strong disapproval of the Obama Administration’s decision to require that coverage for sterilization, abortifacients, and contraception be included in virtually all health plans.
Voluntary sterilization, abortion, and artificial contraception are all directly contrary to Catholic teaching and cannot, in any way, be supported by individual Catholics or Catholic institutions desiring to live in accordance with the teachings of the Catholic Church.
The administration’s allowance of a one-year delay before religious employers are forced to comply with the HHS mandate does not ameliorate the situation at all; in the words of Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York and President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, “in effect, the president is saying we have a year to figure out how to violate our consciences.”
Archbishop Dolan continued: “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.” Making a similar point, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, chair of the U.S. Bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities, said “this mandate gravely compromises religious liberty.”
Americans hold dear our country’s long tradition of honoring freedom of conscience for its citizens. We at Thomas Aquinas College hope, therefore, that you will join with us and with all who believe in the Constitution and religious liberty to oppose this mandate. I urge you to expend every effort to have it withdrawn.
Sincerely,
Michael F. McLean
President
Thomas Aquinas College
Cc: Barack Obama, President of the United States
Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary, Department of Health and Human Services
Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York Cardinal
Daniel DiNardo, Archbishop of Galveston-Houston
Archbishop José Gomez, Archbishop of Los Angeles
Obama is Damien
tonymctones:
--- Quote from: blacken700 on February 09, 2012, 07:33:40 PM ---it's to bad the church didn't put as much effort when they knew they were raping the little boys :'(
--- End quote ---
yet another reason gays shouldnt be trusted...;)
Soul Crusher:
Debate is about religious freedom, not birth control
First lady Michelle Obama and President Barack Obama say goodbye to Pope Benedict XVI after an audience at the Vatican in 2009. (SAUL LOEB, Getty-AFP photo / July 10, 2009)
John Kass
February 10, 2012
The way President Barack Obama has started a war with Roman Catholics, you might think Obama never set foot in a predominantly Catholic town like Chicago.
Even a lowly alderman would have played it smarter. And Obama is much smarter than some machine alderman. The man spent years at the feet of the machine lords, petitioning for their favor. And they're mostly Catholic. Didn't Obama learn anything?
John Kass
Bio | E-mail | Recent columns
Ads by GoogleOh, he learned about playing the empty vessel to the yearning throngs of journalists and other mythmakers desperate for something secular to believe in. He endorsed the politicians they told him to endorse, he voted absentee rather than challenge authority and he climbed his ambition to power.
But then, recently, he decided to challenge the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. And his new policy to force religious hospitals and schools to offer abortion-inducing drugs and birth control in health care plans for employees is a clear violation of religious freedom guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
It demonstrates to Americans that their government is not only willing but eager to dominate faith, by telling religions how to practice their beliefs. And if they refuse, then the faithful will feel the federal wrath.
So the president's policy is not only mistaken and insensitive and wrong, it is the perfect expression of everything Americans fear about the ever-increasing federal leviathan.
What we fear is a bureaucracy that by nature can consider neither soul nor sin, but only power and politics presented as reason.
Do Americans want access to contraceptives, and do some want abortion-inducing drugs? Of course, some do, and arguments have been made in support of such policy.
But should Catholic hospitals be forced by the federal government to provide such abortion-inducing drugs and other birth control in violation of faith?
Most Americans cringe at such a prospect. We see abusive federal power battering the church and we wonder, rightfully: What's next?
Naturally, Republicans will try to take advantage of this, but the problem is bigger than partisan politics. And the feeding of the federal leviathan isn't particular to Obama, as President George W. Bush and the No Child Left Behind Act proved to educators.
With great will and personal charm, Obama pushed through government-run health care. The problem was never with giving care to the needy. The problem was that this policy increased federal power. And now Americans are learning a terrible fact about what happens to freedom as federal authority grows. A line in a Wall Street Journal editorial makes this clear.
"When politics determines who can or should receive what benefits, and who pays what for it, government will use its force to dictate the outcomes that it wants — either for reasons of cost, or to promote its values, which in this case means that 'women's health' trumps religious conscience."
Obama has sent the spinners and town criers galloping out of the White House to say, incorrectly, that this debate is only about contraception. It is not. It was always about federal power trampling religious freedom, and now the White House is panicking.
That was evident last week at a prayer breakfast in Washington where he stressed how often he prays.
In a column last week titled "Obama see the light: Praise the Lord and pass the taxes," I poked fun at the public holiness of the political man. But that was sarcasm. Today I want to be clear.
Despite the president's proclamation of a few years ago that America is not a Christian nation, even Saul Alinsky would agree that this entire enterprise was founded on Judeo-Christian principles.
And one central principle is that human beings are imperfect sinners (amazingly, even federal bureaucrats are imperfect), which means that the humans among us are in violation most of the time.
You wouldn't believe it from hearing politicians talk, since they're so right about everything, so sure of this policy or that policy, advocates on the political left and the right and the center, all quite certain they're correct.
But most of us aren't certain. I'm not. And I don't think you are either. The one thing we are certain about is that it is inevitable we'll violate the teachings or principles of our faith.
We're human. If we're not made of clay, we sure do act like it. Whatever our faith, we'll either ignore or deny our transgressions, or we'll acknowledge them and start walking on that hard road of repentance and atonement. Often we stray off that road when things get too steep. And most of us do all this in private, and that's where it belongs.
Americans understand this dialogue is between the individual and God, and that there's no room in there for the federal leviathan.
You and I can and do hold widely different views. But one thing we probably can agree on is that when we're in church or another house of worship, we know what we should be doing:
Sitting in the back pew, heads bowed, begging mercy for sins.
That's much better than puffing ourselves up and telling ourselves what's so right about what we did and what's so wrong about what the other fellow did.
But it's a private thing. And it is so very difficult.
So difficult, in fact, just about the last thing Americans need is some politician whispering in our ears, even if it is the president surrounded by a host of lawyers from Health and Human Services singing his praises.
I could be wrong, but I think there are some places even politics and government don't belong.
jskass@tribune.com
Soul Crusher:
United We Stand for Religious Freedom
ObamaCare's contraception mandate stands the First Amendment on its head.
By DONALD WUERL, CHARLES COLSON AND MEIR Y. SOLOVEICHIK
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204136404577211601075404714.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
Stories involving a Catholic, a Protestant and a Jew typically end with a punch line. We wish that were the case here, but what brings us together is no laughing matter: the threat now posed by government policy to that basic human freedom, religious liberty.
Last month the federal Department of Health and Human Services announced that the Affordable Care Act requires employers to pay for insurance coverage for abortion-inducing drugs, sterilizations and contraception. What made the announcement especially troubling is that HHS specifically declined to exempt religious institutions that serve those outside their own faiths, such as hospitals and schools.
Coverage of this story has almost invariably been framed as a conflict between the federal government and the Catholic bishops. Zeroing in on the word "contraception," many commentators have taken delight in pointing to surveys about the use of contraceptives among Catholics, the message being that any infringement of religious freedom involves an idiosyncratic position that doesn't affect that many people.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The Catholic Church's teaching on contraception (not to mention abortion and surgical sterilization) has been clear, consistent and public. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius's decision would force Catholic institutions either to violate the moral teachings of the Catholic Church or abandon the health-care, education and social services they provide the needy. This is intolerable.
And while most evangelicals take a more permissive view of contraception, they share with Catholics the moral conviction that the taking of human life in utero, whether surgically or by abortifacient drugs, violates the basic human right to life. Evangelical nonprofits such as Prison Fellowship would therefore also have to choose between violating their consciences or paying fines that would ultimately destroy their ability to help the people they are committed to helping.
Even worse than the financial impact is the breach of faith represented by Ms. Sebelius's decision. Her notion of an "appropriate balance" between religious freedom and "increasing access" to "important preventive services" stands the First Amendment on its head.
In 1790, George Washington exchanged letters with Moses Seixas, the warden of the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, R.I. Seixas praised the newly formed United States for "affording to All liberty of conscience, and immunities of citizenship." People who knew all too well what it meant to be deprived of the "invaluable rights of free Citizens" held religious liberty and freedom of conscience most dear.
Enlarge Image
CloseAssociated Press
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius
.In reply, Washington wrote that U.S. citizens had a "right to applaud themselves" for setting an example of "an enlarged and liberal policy" that enshrined freedom of conscience. He added that the ability of members of one faith to seek the benefit of all Americans is the foundation of America's civic strength.
We see evidence of that strength all around us: If a working mother's child needs to visit the emergency room, there's a good chance the hospital is a Catholic one. If an ex-offender needs help readjusting to life outside of prison, there's a good chance help will come from a Christian ministry like Prison Fellowship.
Yet instead of encouraging the different faith communities to continue their vital work for the good of all, the Obama administration is forcing them to make a choice: serving God and their neighbors according to the dictates of their respective faiths—or bending the knee to the dictates of the state.
For Jews, George Washington's letter has always been cherished. It embodies the promise extended by America not only to them, but to all citizens. That is why many in the Jewish community are alarmed to see the very religious freedom Washington praised centuries ago endangered by Washington's successor. "May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land," Washington wrote, "continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants."
At this critical moment, Americans of every faith, as guardians of their own freedom, must, in the words of the First Amendment, "petition the government for the redress of grievances." That's why over the past two years more than 500,000 people have signed the "Manhattan Declaration" in defense of religious liberty. They believe, as do we, that under no circumstances should people of faith violate their consciences and discard their most cherished religious beliefs in order to comply with a gravely unjust law.
That's something that this Catholic, this Protestant and this Jew are in perfect agreement about.
Cardinal Wuerl is the archbishop of Washington, D.C. Mr. Colson is the founder of Prison Fellowship and the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Rabbi Soloveichik is director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University and associate rabbi at Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun in Manhattan.
Soul Crusher:
The Gospel according to Obama
By Charles Krauthammer, Published: February 9
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-gospel-according-to-obama/2012/02/09/gIQAngvW2Q_print.html
At the National Prayer Breakfast last week, seeking theological underpinning for his drive to raise taxes on the rich, President Obama invoked the highest possible authority. His policy, he testified “as a Christian,” “coincides with Jesus’s teaching that ‘for unto whom much is given, much shall be required.’ ”
Now, I’m no theologian, but I’m fairly certain that neither Jesus nor his rabbinic forebears, when speaking of giving, meant some obligation to the state. You tithe the priest, not the tax man.
The Judeo-Christian tradition commands personal generosity as represented, for example, by the biblical injunction against retrieving any sheaf left behind while harvesting one’s own field. That is for the gleaners — “the poor and the alien” (Leviticus 19:10). Like Ruth in the field of Boaz. As far as I can tell, that charitable transaction involved no mediation by the IRS.
But no matter. Let’s assume that Obama has biblical authority for hiking the marginal tax rate exactly 4.6 points for couples making more than $250,000 (depending, of course, on the prevailing shekel-to-dollar exchange rate). Let’s stipulate that Obama’s prayer-breakfast invocation of religion as vindicating his politics was not, God forbid, crass, hypocritical, self-serving electioneering, but a sincere expression of a social-gospel Christianity that sees good works as central to the very concept of religiosity.
Fine. But this Gospel according to Obama has a rival — the newly revealed Gospel according to Sebelius, over which has erupted quite a contretemps. By some peculiar logic, it falls to the health and human services secretary to promulgate the definition of “religious” — for the purposes, for example, of exempting religious institutions from certain regulatory dictates.
Such exemptions are granted in grudging recognition that, whereas the rest of civil society may be broken to the will of the state’s regulators, our quaint Constitution grants special autonomy to religious institutions.
Accordingly, it would be a mockery of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment if, for example, the Catholic Church were required by law to freely provide such “health care services” (in secularist parlance) as contraception, sterilization and pharmacological abortion — to which Catholicism is doctrinally opposed as a grave contravention of its teachings about the sanctity of life.
Ah. But there would be no such Free Exercise violation if the institutions so mandated are deemed, by regulatory fiat, not religious.
And thus, the word came forth from Sebelius decreeing the exact criteria required (a) to meet her definition of “religious” and thus (b) to qualify for a modicum of independence from newly enacted state control of American health care, under which the aforementioned Sebelius and her phalanx of experts determine everything — from who is to be covered, to which treatments are to be guaranteed free of charge.
Criterion 1: A “religious institution” must have “the inculcation of religious values as its purpose.” But that’s not the purpose of Catholic charities; it’s to give succor to the poor. That’s not the purpose of Catholic hospitals; it’s to give succor to the sick. Therefore, they don’t qualify as “religious” — and therefore can be required, among other things, to provide free morning-after abortifacients.
Criterion 2: Any exempt institution must be one that “primarily employs” and “primarily serves persons who share its religious tenets.” Catholic soup kitchens do not demand religious IDs from either the hungry they feed or the custodians they employ. Catholic charities and hospitals — even Catholic schools — do not turn away Hindu or Jew.
Their vocation is universal, precisely the kind of universal love-thy-neighbor vocation that is the very definition of religiosity as celebrated by the Gospel of Obama. Yet according to the Gospel of Sebelius, these very same Catholic institutions are not religious at all — under the secularist assumption that religion is what happens on Sunday under some Gothic spire, while good works are “social services” properly rendered up unto Caesar.
This all would be merely the story of contradictory theologies, except for this: Sebelius is Obama’s appointee. She works for him. These regulations were his call. Obama authored both gospels.
Therefore: To flatter his faith-breakfast guests and justify his tax policies, Obama declares good works to be the essence of religiosity. Yet he turns around and, through Sebelius, tells the faithful who engage in good works that what they’re doing is not religion at all. You want to do religion? Get thee to a nunnery. You want shelter from the power of the state? Get out of your soup kitchen and back to your pews. Outside, Leviathan rules.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
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The sheer dishonesty and duplicity of thugbama should be appalling to even his most ardent supporters.
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