Freedom of Religion or Freedom from Religion?

Okay, okay. I know it has been a while since I last contributed a fresh column. Some of the papers that carry this have rerun previous pieces; the Christmas season and January busyness made it easier for me to put it aside.

But I have only put it aside temporarily. It is now time to resume. So let’s resume with a controversial bang.

David Zubik is the Roman Catholic Bishop of Pittsburgh. It was he who wrote a pastoral letter entitled, “To hell with you!” It may not surprise you to hear the average person say something like that, but a Bishop in the Catholic Church?

What provoked Bishop Zubik was the recent mandate of President Obama’s administration that church and other privately run institutions must provide abortion-inducing drugs through its insurance plans to employees. This was not a mandate discussed in a congressional committee and then debated and voted on by your representatives in Washington. And now for my opinion (this is an opinion column). It was a direct attack upon the morality of traditional Christianity and specifically an attack upon the sanctity of life. The Roman Catholic Church and a host of other Christian bodies consider the practice of abortion as birth control to be a horrendous and evil practice. It is the taking of a human life because the arrival of an infant is inconvenient (“unwanted” is an empty argument, considering the thousands of couples who would willingly adopt).

And here I am - silly old me – I thought freedom of religion was guaranteed in the Constitution. Wait a minute! It is guaranteed, in the First Amendment. So where is the guardianship of the Constitution by the man who swore “…to the best of my ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”?
That guardianship and that guarantee were discarded when the guidelines mandated by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) issued by the Department of Health and Human Services stated that all – as in a-l-l, all – health insurance plans must cover any and all FDA-approved contraception, sterilization procedures, and drugs, even those drugs that produce death of a human fetus. This includes plans paid for by church and private institutions that find abortion to be unconscionable.

Of course, appeals were made to the President and Health and Human Services Director Kathleen Sebelius. In reply to these appeals, as Bishop Zubik put it not so eloquently, the President and Sibelius said, “To hell with you.” Here is more of what the Bishop wrote, and this is what I really want you to read, “This is government by fiat that attacks the rights of everyone…At no other time in memory or history has there been such a governmental intrusion on freedom …It undermines the whole concept and hope for healthcare reform by inextricably linking it to the zealotry of pro-abortion bureaucrats. The mandate would require the Catholic Church as an employer to violate its fundamental beliefs concerning human life and human dignity…It is really hard to believe that it happened.”

Just hold on to your seatbelt, Bishop Zubik. Even though the President made a small backstep on this issue, it is apparent that his strategy is to soon require all Americans to pay for the abortifacients now available and eventually to pay for abortion procedures. It is not too difficult to predict that mandates will come requiring euthanizing of seniors who no longer possess “quality of life” (to be defined by the Department of HHS, probably).

It is hard to know from whom the President is receiving his mind numbing advice on this matter, but it is obviously not from people of Biblical values or conscience. “The fool says in his heart, ‘no God” (Psalm 14:1, a literal translation). No God for me – I don’t want anything to do with God. Their ruin is assured and history so attests the ruin of the secular state.

These are not people interested in freedom of religion, as were our Founding Fathers; these are people who are interested in freedom from religion. It is the secular state they desire – and it will be our ruin as “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”