Tag Archives: religious freedom in the United States

The Next Step In Obamacare

Posted on by

On August 1, business owners must change their health insurance offerings to include abortion-inducing drugs, contraception, and sterilization services.

Heritage.org reports today:

But for many employers, offering the types of services required under the HHS mandate violates their consciences. It conflicts with their deeply held religious beliefs. And the government is telling them that doesn’t matter—what’s more, it’s telling them that their beliefs are inconsequential, and they must pay.

Just last Friday, a judge in Colorado gave one business’s owners the first glimmer of hope that their religious freedom may survive this attack.

On Saturday I reported the story of Hercules Industries (rightwinggranny.com). The owners of the company went to court because the mandate to provide abortion-inducing drugs, contraception, and sterilization services violated their religious beliefs. The court has halted the implementation of that part of Obamacare that would violate the religious beliefs of the company’s owners until the  court case is settled.

The article at Heritage.org reports:

How did it come to this? During the legislative battle over Obamacare, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) famously said that Congress would need to pass the law to see what was in it. She was right about one thing: Obamacare as it passed was not fully formed. The law gave unprecedented new powers to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to fill in countless details, directing the ways Obamacare would affect all Americans. With this law, Congress handed over immeasurable authority to HHS. And Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has been hard at work trying to convince Americans that this is all in their best interest.

There is no reason to believe it will end here, which is why it is vital to halt this attack on religious freedom as quickly as possible. As Ludvigson explains, this first HHS mandate “raises significant questions about what more Obamacare will require on other matters of deeply personal religious and moral significance, such as prenatal care, end-of-life issues, and parental authority for minors’ health decisions.”

More than 50 plaintiffs—for-profit and non-profit alike—have gone to court against the HHS mandate. In winning an injunction that prevents the mandate’s enforcement on its business while the case goes to trial, Hercules has demonstrated the strength of the religious liberty challenge to Obamacare.

If we value our religious freedom as Americans, we need to vote for people in November who will repeal Obamacare.

Enhanced by Zemanta

America No Longer Supports Religious Freedom Around The World

Posted on by

Yesterday Investors.com posted an article stating that the United States State Department is no longer including religious freedom in its annual Human Rights Report. The stated reason for this change is that they want to avoid duplicating another document, the annual Report on International Religious Freedom.

The article points out:

The Pew Research Center has produced two studies showing that 70% of the world’s population lives in countries where religious freedom is severely restricted, either by governments or by hostile groups allowed to run amok by indifferent or hostile leaders.

Religious liberty was considered so important by our Founders that it was written into the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in a country populated by those fleeing the religious oppression of governments.

We considered religious liberty a bedrock of freedom and democracy and, as stated in our Declaration of Independence, we believed we were endowed with Unalienable rights by our Creator, not by men or governments.

The U.S. in recent years has grown increasingly indifferent to the lack of religious tolerance around the world as it has taken an increasingly violent turn.

America used to be the lighthouse of the world. I am afraid that lighthouse has gone dark.

The article concludes:

Here at home we find a different kind of war on religious liberty, not violent but insidious, conducted by a government intent on imposing its beliefs regarding access to contraceptives and mandating that religious institutions violate their beliefs and consciences in the name of government health care edicts.

Here we see an unprecedented attempt by the Obama administration through ObamaCare to define what a church and religious institution is — the notion that you’re a church if the government, in Soviet-style fashion, says you’re a church.

Religious institutions see the universities, hospitals, charities and other social services they perform as part and extensions of their faith.

The government believes they are impediments to its growing power over every facet of our lives. As a result, these religious institutions and the freedom on which they are founded, are in serious jeopardy.

We need to keep the focus on religious persecution — both abroad and here at home.

Limiting Religious Freedom In The United States

Posted on by

On Sunday the Daily Caller posted an article about The Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio. This 60-year old Roman Catholic College of over 2,400 students is being required by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius dispense abortion-producing drugs and pay for sterilizations, both of which are strictly proscribed by the Catholic faith. Unfortunately, this is not the only incidence of this sort of behavior on the part of the Obama Administration.

The article reports:

Writer Charlotte Allen wrote of the “Persecution of Belmont Abbey” by the Obama administration in 2009. There, too, liberal zealots were demanding that the Catholic school, founded in 1876, provide contraception, abortifacients and sterilizations or face federal sanctions. This, according to the institution’s president, could lead to closing down the historic little college.

The article further reports:

Chai Feldblum is a tenured professor at Georgetown University’s law school. Georgetown is the oldest Catholic university in the country. Ironically, Feldblum is also a homosexual legal activist. She was Barack Obama’s choice for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. She told a panel at Family Research Council that if it came to a clash between what she calls gay rights and religious liberty, religious liberty must give way. In other words: “Be Amish, or be quiet.”

Why are we having this discussions now? Simple. America was founded on Judeo-Christian principles. There was, up until about the 1960’s, a moral consensus in this country. We have lost that moral consensus. Now before you decide that I am anti-gay or whatever else, let me explain. I don’t care what anyone does in the privacy of their own home. I don’t care what rules anyone chooses to govern their life. I do care when their rules overflow on to my rights. Just as medical clinics have the right to prescribe whatever medical treatments they choose, a religious medical clinic also has the right to refuse procedures that are against its religious beliefs. Just because Chai Feldblum has the right to be gay (which she does), does not mean that she has the right to override the religious freedom of others. When gay marriage became legal in Massachusetts, the Catholic adoption agencies were driven from the state because it was against their religion to adopt children out to gay couples. Their rights were infringed on in the name of granting other people rights. We need to be careful in granting various groups rights that we don’t infringe on the rights of people in groups whose rights are also protected by our constitution.

Enhanced by Zemanta