Video: Religious Liberty: Obamacare’s First Casualty

The Foundry reports:

To date, seven lawsuits have been filed in response to this mandate, and those legal actions are but the tip of the iceberg of opposition to the Administration’s despotic directive.

The controversy began last August when the White House announced the anti-conscience policy as an interim final rule. Individuals and leaders from various faith backgrounds, including Roman Catholic, Jewish, evangelical, and Protestant traditions spoke out, prompting President Obama to announce an “accommodation” in response. But the proposal announced at a February 10 press conference would have done nothing to resolve the moral problem at the heart of the matter. In fact, more than 300 leaders to signed a letter deeming the gesture “unacceptable.”

The latest Rasmussen national telephone survey found that 38 percent of likely voters think health insurance companies should be required by law to cover the morning after pill without co-payments or other charges to the patient.  50 percent of Americans disagree and oppose this requirement, and 13 percent are undecided.

LifeNews reports:

…more than a dozen state attorneys general have signed onto a joint letter Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning started coordinating  against the controversial Obama mandate requiring religious employers to cover birth control and drugs that can cause abortions

Bruning has contacted each of his colleagues in 49 states and has already been joined by a dozen, including South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson and Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott. Together, the three lawmakers have co-signed a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis over the Obama mandate.

Also, the largest Catholic pro-life group and Catholic television station have filed suit against the new Obama mandate that forces religious employers like them to pay for birth control and abortion-causing drugs in employee health insurance. The EWTN Global Catholic Network filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Birmingham, Alabama against the Department of Health & Human Services, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, and other government agencies seeking to stop the imposition of the anti-conscience mandate as well as asking the court for a declaratory judgment that the mandate is unconstitutional.

Priests for Life, a New York based international pro-life organization of Catholic clergy and laity, filed a lawsuit against the Obama Administration in an effort to seek injunctive relief from impending regulations that would require the organization to pay for employee health insurance that covers abortion-inducing drugs, contraception, and sterilization.

***

…the Republican presidential candidates had been taking verbal swings at Obama for imposing the original mandate on religious employers, which is not popular in the latest public opinion poll and which even some Democrats oppose.

Congressman Steve Scalise has led a bipartisan letter with 154 co-signers calling on the Obama Administration to reverse its mandate forcing religious organizations to include drugs that can cause abortion and birth control in the health care plans of their employees.

The original mandate was so egregious that even the normally reliably liberal and pro-abortion USA Today condemned it in an editorial titled, “Contraception mandate violates religious freedom.”

Meanwhile, Catholic clergy need to learn how to frame this debate because so far, too many are getting it totally WRONG, as Richard Viguerie and Mark Fitzgibbons  at The American Thinker point out:

In response to the Obama administration mandate requiring Catholic institutions to pay for insurance covering contraception, U.S. Catholic bishops announced that they will not “obey” that “law.”

The bishops have gotten it wrong and backwards, and in doing so have yielded the moral high ground that is rightfully theirs.

Catholic clerics and even lay leaders are allowing the left to bait and switch this issue into a debate about women’s health and their right to use contraception – not what this is about, at all.

Obama’s transformation of America is based entirely in what some have described as lawlessness.  That, however, is an inapt term.  One may be lawless without causing harm to others.  What President Obama is doing is violating our paramount law and, in doing so, causing harm to our individual, religious, and economic liberties.

When someone violates the law in ways that cause harm to others or the rights of others, that person is a lawbreaker susceptible to society’s punishment.  The law is intended to prohibit one person from harming others, and to punish those who violate this basic precept of civil society.

Obama is a lawbreaker unparalleled in American history not merely by the number of times he has broken the law, but by the number of victims of his lawbreaking.  While violations of our paramount law, the Constitution, do not come with the penalties of punishment like violations of other laws, that does not diminish the lawbreaking nature of Obama’s actions.

Catholic leaders have failed to approach the situation the right way.  Oh, sure, many have said that the contraception mandate is a violation of religious liberty.  But by saying they will not “obey” the contraceptive mandate “law,” they have acknowledged a false premise.  The mandate is not law.  It is a violation of law.  You cannot disobey a violation of the law.

This is not a situation of “render unto Caesar.”  Caesar was the law.  In the United States, we have the Constitution.  From that paramount law, all other laws to be obeyed flow.  But the Constitution is unlike all other laws governing the people.  The Constitution was written to govern government itself.

Once we begin to approach all situations from that perspective, our outlook and our responses change.

Catholic leaders assuredly want to follow the law and the dictates of their faith and consciences.  Many Catholic leaders are by nature non-confrontational.  However, history has been unkind to Catholic leaders who failed to confront wrongdoing and address it in appropriately moral but tactically aggressive ways.

Ann Barnhardt makes the same point and is a bit  more blunt about it:

People, you don’t ask the President of the United States OR ANYONE ELSE to “let” you practice your faith. Obama has NO POWER whatsoever to keep you from practicing your faith, or doing anything else, for that matter. Listen up you whipped sheep:

NO ONE CAN MAKE YOU DO ANYTHING.

Nope. Obama has NO POWER to force Catholics, or Catholic hospitals, or anyone else to do ANYTHING against their will – and if you don’t get this through your sheep skulls, we’re dead. You fools are playing right into their hands by going on defense and thinking that they have power over you that simply does not exist. I hear Dolan, and the bishops, and everyone else talking about Obama “forcing us to violate our consciences” and “forcing us to do this” and “forcing us to do that”. Speak for yourself, sheep. THE ONLY PERSON WHO CAN VIOLATE YOUR CONSCIENCE IS YOU!!!! And make no mistake, you WILL be held to account if you capitulate to this evil. You will answer personally for your stupidity, your cowardice and your faithlessness at your Particular Judgment if you don’t stand and fight this obvious satanic evil. It isn’t as if you don’t have the example of not just the Christian martyrs, but also the men who died for freedom in secular wars and campaigns. How any person, most especially an American, could not understand this is absolutely ENRAGING to me.

There can be no “compromise” between the Catholic Church and Obama administration on this one. One side wins – one side retreats. If it turns out to be the Catholic side doing the retreating, well – it’s pretty much over for the American Catholic Church, which, of course is the goal of the militant secularists running the show, right now.

SEE ALSO:

NRO: ‘Done Compromising’: Obama’s Government by Fiat:

In the eyes of the White House, the sham compromise on insurance payments was a sop to the serfs, granted by the magnanimity of the president, but in no way designed to derail the ideological objective of the policy. If we let this stand, if we buckle before such bureaucratic capriciousness, then we will have taken another significant step toward the imposition of government rule by fiat, and not by the will of the people. And once that victory has been secured, then the small steps will become larger and come faster and will not cease until liberty is defined solely by government officials. Or until they are opposed by a will just as strong and unyielding.