* Temporarily renamed in honor of the Nativity Fast, about which Mystagogy has some more information.
Be it noted, please, that I don’t rail on Obama’s economics. I don’t even rail on his support of prenatal feticide – which is exactly what we’ve come to expect since Democrats discovered in 1976 that part of their base loved it: sincere, radical defense of abortion from Democrats; insincere opposition from (most) Republicans.
But I’ve been railing from time to time about Obama’s execrable record on religious liberty in the U.S. After promising respect for religious liberty to the assembled ethic Catholic Democrats at Notre Dame, Obama has betrayed his promise in spades.
Jane Robins and Evan McGroarty at Public Discourse chronicle the erosion of religious liberty over the past 20 years, starting with
Employment Division v. Smith, in which the Court held that the First Amendment does not relieve a citizen of the obligation to comply with a neutral law of general applicability, simply because the law “proscribes (or prescribes) conduct that his religion prescribes (or proscribes).” Applying Smith, lower courts have rejected almost all challenges to laws and government activities that are based on claims of interference with free exercise of religion.
There are complicated federalism issues in application of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed by Congress in response to Employment Division v. Smith, as a result of which RFRA applies, basically, only to activities of the national government. So the states are getting away with things the feds currently could not do.
Two thirds of the Public Discourse article involves developments pre-Obama, but
Progressive to the core, the Obama administration is pursuing even more limitations on religious freedom. One such effort is the proposed mandate of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that health plans cover contraceptives and sterilization, with a religious “exemption” so narrow that (as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has noted) it would not have covered the ministry of Jesus Christ. Another is the Administration’s argument in a case currently before the Supreme Court that the long-established “ministerial exception” to federal employment-discrimination laws be abandoned. This would mean that rather than allow churches to select and control their own ministers, the federal government could dictate results more in keeping with its secular values. Churches have seen this kind of thing before, and it has not ended well.
It’s bad enough that Michael Gerson, nobody’s idea of a loose cannon, unloaded on the Administration Tuesday:
In 2009, the University of Notre Dame set off months of intra-Catholic controversy by inviting a champion of abortion rights to deliver the school’s commencement address. When the day arrived, President Obama skillfully deflated the tension. He extended a “presumption of good faith” to his pro-life opponents. Then he promised Catholics that their pro-life convictions would be respected by his administration. “Let’s honor the conscience of those who disagree with abortion,” he said, “and draft a sensible conscience clause, and make sure that all of our health-care policies are grounded not only in sound science but also in clear ethics, as well as respect for the equality of women.”Catholics, eager for reassurance from a leader whom 54 percent of them had supported, were duly reassured. But Obama’s statement had the awkward subordinate clauses of a contentious speech-writing process. Qualifications and code words produced a pledge that pledged little.
Now the conscience protections of Catholics are under assault, particularly by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). And Obama’s Catholic strategy is in shambles.
The Catholic Bishops have started complaining about the erosion of religiously liberty, which is very wicked and agressive and political, as the Church is not supposed to defend itself when attacked. Thus the New York Times Tuesday broke ranks with less brazenly liberal media, trumpeting “Bishops Open ‘Religious Liberty’ Drive.” It got the attention of GetReligion.
The attacks on religious liberty are only going to get worse with recognition of same-sex marriage. The conflict seemingly is invisible to most people, but lawyers on both sides of the issue know it’s real. Rod Dreher gets it right and cites two of the most convincing witnesses that it’s real: Georgetown Law’s lesbian activist Chai Feldblum and the American Jewish Congress’s Marc Stern, neither a member of the Christian Right. I blogged on it quite a while ago myself.
In some areas, some Catholic charities have shut down. Elsewhere, they’ve reinvented themselves as something other than Catholic, giving in to government pressure.
If Catholics don’t vote solidly to evict Obama, we’ll be reading conservative books like “What’s the Matter with Kansas Rome?“
I am both disgusted and alarmed by the shallowness of the Republican field, but none of them would come close to this kind of statist aggression.
Once you reserve the right to dissent from authoritative Church teaching on anything, you become a de facto Protestant, don’t you?
Rod Dreher on how We are (almost) all Protestants now. In light of that, I’m pretty darned confident that Catholics won’t be voting as a block, since many of them dissent from Church teaching on abortion, contraception, same-sex marriage and other issues that are the nexus between Obama’s “progressive” policies and his disregard of religious freedom.
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Bon appetit!
Having become tedious even to myself, I’m Tweeting more, blogging less. View this in a browser instead of an RSS feeder to see Tweets at upper right.
I also have some succinct standing advice on recurring themes. Maybe if I link to it, I’ll blog less obsessively about it.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 