As time marches on, our country is no closer to resolving the horrendous HHS mandate which threatens religious liberty as never before.   To review, a year ago, the Obama administration announced its mandate which would force churches and employers to provide sterilizations and FDA-approved drugs and devices which include contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs, even if it violates the conscience of the church or employer.   The authority for the mandate is a provision in the ObamaCare law which gives the Secretary of the Department of HHS broad authority to decide what constitutes “preventive” services which must be funded.

The choices for churches and employers under this unprecedented mandate are ominous and unacceptable:

• Violate the conscience of the Church  or employer by complying with the mandate, knowing full well that further mandates such as coverage for surgical abortions are likely in the future.
  
• Stop providing health insurance for employees.
  
• For churches, provide services and religiously-based education to denomination members only.
  
• Close the doors of all religious hospitals, service organizations and universities that serve people of other denominations.
  
• Defy the federal government and face severe monetary penalties of $100 per day per employee and other penalties.

The only means to rid the country of this mandate is for the President to reverse the mandate, for Congress to act to reverse the mandate, or for the courts to overturn the mandate.   President Obama is adamant that the mandate will stay.  Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, chair of the U.S. Catholic bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities, has urged Congress to take action which everyone knows that President Obama will veto. Numbers of court cases challenging the mandate have been filed which will take years of litigation.  Ominous, indeed, and a frightening time for our country.

Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., a privately held retail chain with more than 500 arts and crafts stores in 41 states, filed a lawsuit today against the Obama administration over its HHS mandate.

The company says it would face $1.3 million in fines on a daily basis starting in January if it fails to comply with the mandate, which requires religious employers to pay for or refer women for abortion-cause drugs that violate their conscience or religious beliefs.

The lawsuit was filed in the US District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma and the business says it is opposing the Health and Human Services “preventive services” mandate, which it says forces the Christian-owned-and-operated business to provide, without co-pay, the “morning after pill” and “week after pill” in their health insurance plan, or face crippling fines up to 1.3 million dollars per day.

“By being required to make a choice between sacrificing our faith or paying millions of dollars in fines, we essentially must choose which poison pill to swallow,” said David Green, Hobby Lobby CEO and founder. “We simply cannot abandon our religious beliefs to comply with this mandate.”

Hobby Lobby is the largest and only non-Catholic-owned business to file a lawsuit against the HHS mandate, focusing sharp criticism on the administration’s regulation that forces all companies, regardless of religious conviction, to cover abortion-inducing drugs.

“Washington politicians cannot force families to abandon their faith just to earn a living,” said Lori Windham, Senior Counsel, Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which is handling the lawsuit for Hobby Lobby. “Every American, including family business owners like the Greens, should be free to live and do business according to their religious beliefs.”

Founded in an Oklahoma City garage in 1972, the Green family has grown Hobby Lobby from one 300-square-foot retail space into more than 500 stores in 41 states.

“It is by God’s grace and provision that Hobby Lobby has endured,” said Green.  “Therefore we seek to honor God by operating the company in a manner consistent with Biblical principles. The conflict for me is that our family is being forced to choose between following the laws of the country that we love or maintaining the religious beliefs that have made our business successful and have supported our family and thousands of our employees and their families.”

The business’s lawsuit acts to preserve its right to carry out its mission free from government coercion.

by Steven Ertelt, LifeNews.com

When last we saw Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), he was delivering a powerfully pro-life speech that culminated the Democratic National Convention. It was a “teachable moment,” which is why so many pro-abortion bloggers ripped the Cardinal for his tour de force.

By and large he was already talking to the choir—Planned Parenthood’s choir, Barack Obama’s choir—but he soldered on nonetheless. In a benediction of less than five minutes, he affirmed core pro-life principles which are wildly at odds with the overwhelming emphasis on the right to kill unborn babies which permeated many convention speeches.

On Monday Cardinal Dolan was in much friendlier company—The John Carroll Society (“an organization of Catholic professionals united in their desire for an ever deepening and enriching knowledge of their Faith and in service to the Archbishop of Washington”). In a powerfully eloquent speech—“Let Freedom Ring”– he traced the history of freedom of religion in our nation which he described as the “first line in the defense of and protection of human rights.”

His argument was a familiar one: that people of faith have been instrumental in every major reform movement in our nation’s history. Equally familiar, but far more chilling, was Cardinal Dolan’s warning of what he called a “second omen”—the “direct intrusion of the government into the very definition of a church’s minister, ministries, message, and meaning,” otherwise known as the Obama mandate and its crimped definition of who is exempt.

Cardinal Dolan quoted Cardinal Wuerl who noted, “The mandates’ definition of a religious organization contradicts decades of precedent and practice. Republicans and Democrats alike have long agreed that the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious liberty includes not only what goes on within the four walls of a church, but also the religiously motivated acts of service that fulfill the mission of that church. Only now . . . has the government said that we must leave our conscience behind when we step into the public square.”

Cardinal Dolan did not use this occasion to talk about other direct assaults on religious liberties from the Obama Administration that include filing a brief with the Supreme Court arguing that churches had no special protection in the hiring and firing of their pastors (the Court unanimously disagreed), and denying a grant to the well-regarded bishops’ conference program to help the victims of human trafficking.

According to Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), author of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops was unlawfully disqualified “because they refuse to refer women and unborn children to abortionists.” Smith added. “The USCCB wasn’t chosen for its religion and should not be excluded for it either.”

Cardinal Dolan reminded his audience of what the debate is not about. It is not about a “war on women.” And “the defense of religious freedom is not some evangelical Christian polemic, or wily strategy of discredited Catholic bishops, but the quintessential American cause, the first line in the defense of and protection of human rights.”

He concluded, “So, my proposition is that, in ‘letting freedom ring,’ we citizens of any and all faiths, or none at all, are not just paranoid and self-serving in defending what we hoard as ‘ours,’ but we are, in fact, protecting America. We act not as sectarians, but as responsible citizens. We act on behalf of the truth about the human person.”

by Dave Andrusko, National Right to Life News

 

 

Compare Mitt Romney with Barack Obama and Tommy Tompson with Tammy Baldwin