Obama Administration at War With Catholics
Posted on | January 27, 2012 by Stefano Gennarini, J.D. |
The Obama administration is at war with the Catholic Church. It has opened yet another front against the Catholic Church on health insurance coverage by religious employers.
Since last August a guideline in Obama’s health care reform has been in place that will force religious employers to offer their employees health coverage that includes sterilization, abortion-inducing drugs, and contraception. The law goes into effect in August this year. Only churches are exempt from this requirement. This means that schools, hospitals, and other nonprofits are not exempt.
Catholics are the single largest group that will be affected by this order because the Catholic Church holds that contraception, abortion and sterilization are grave moral offenses.
Last week Kathleen Sibelius, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, told other religious employers that they will have one year to comply with the guidelines, even as the Catholic Church hoped the guideline would be altered.
This latest attack follows last December’s decision by the Obama administration to deny funding to Catholic Charities because they do not provide abortion and contraceptive services to victims of human trafficking.
The administration is carrying out this campaign even in the face of indications from the Supreme Court that it is not constitutional. Just this month the Court decided Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in which it upheld by a unanimous vote that religious employers are not subject to the same requirements as all other employers.
Benedict XVI has taken note of what is going on on this side of the Atlantic. Last week he told the US bishops on visit to Rome: “it is imperative that the entire Catholic community in the United States come to realize the grave threats to the Church’s public moral witness presented by a radical secularism which finds increasing expression in the political and cultural spheres. The seriousness of these threats needs to be appreciated at every level of ecclesial life.”
In line with these directives the USCCB has set up a website to decry the Obama Administration’s anti-Catholicism and invite the faithful to action.
Some bishops are already mentioning civil disobedience. Just yesterday Archbishop John J. Myers of Newark issued a letter to his flock urging all the the Catholics in his care to not comply with the health insurance requirement in so far as contraception, sterilization and abortion inducing drugs are concerned.
In the letter Archbishop Myers writes:
We cannot—we will not—comply with this unjust law. People of faith cannot be made second-class citizens. We are already joined by our brothers and sisters of all faiths and many others of good will in this important effort to regain our religious freedom. Our parents and grandparents did not come to these shores to help build America’s cities and towns, its infrastructure and institutions, its enterprise and culture, only to have their posterity stripped of their God given rights. In generations past, the Church has always been able to count on the faithful to stand up and protect her sacred rights and duties. I hope and trust she can count on this generation of Catholics to do the same. Our children and grandchildren deserve nothing less.
Catholics constitute close to one quarter of the US population and are by far the single largest Christian Church in the US. Catholic schools and hospitals have millions of employees. They are a very important part of the electorate. Obama may be only putting himself in a corner by reneging on his promises of strong conscience protections to the Catholics that elected him.
