Easter IS legal

I cannot help but think that we have become afraid to believe anything.   Kudos to the ADF for publishing this.

Constitutional Rights of Students, Teachers, and Public Schools to Seasonal Religious Expression  Easter 2012

http://www.alliancedefensefund.org/Content/pdf/2012_Easter_Memo.pdf

Also listen to this radio interview of Matt Sharp of the ADF.

Matt Sharp on the Bob Dutko Show: Can children in public schools talk about the meaning of Easter?

http://www.alliancealert.org/2012/04/03/matt-sharp-on-the-bob-dutko-can-children-in-public-schools-talk-about-the-meaning-of-easter/

http://www.alliancealert.org/2012/20120403.mp3

Why Fight Same-Sex Marriage? Here’s why

This is a religious argument in summary but it’s substantial and convincing.
The author says:

Why fight same-sex marriage? Even in America, where the outcome is not yet decided, there appear to be good reasons not to.

then:

Can it really be worth fighting then?

The answer is yes, for reasons that become clear…

Read the whole article at: http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=25-01-024-f

Obama-Care Mandates Employers Cover Sterilization, Contraception and Abortion as “Healthcare”

An included religious exemption clause is so narrow as to not allow most organizations that reasonable people would call “religious” to follow their conscience.

Catholic Bishops in the US call Obamacare regulation an “Unprecedented Attack on Religious Liberty”

In an “urgent” call to action distributed as a bulletin insert at Catholic churches across the country on Sunday, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said that a new federal regulation proposed under President Barack Obama’s health-care law “poses an unprecedented threat to individual and institutional religious freedom.”

The proposed regulation would require all private health-care plans to cover sterilizations and “all FDA-approved contraceptives”–which include “emergency” contraceptives such as ulipristal (or “Ella”) that can cause an abortion both before and after an embryo implants in the mother’s womb.

The bulletin insert asked Catholics to visit a page on the website of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (U.S.C.C.B.) from which they could send an email message to the Department of Health and Human Services protesting the proposed regulation.

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/catholic-bishops-obamacare-reg-unprecedented-attack-religious-liberty-even-jesus

Organizations like Catholic Universities and individual private business owners will not be permitted to opt out of paying for insurance that covers these morally objectionably procedures.

Indeed this article notes that a “layperson” as defined by the regulation doesn’t qualify for the Exemption.  Jesus was an non-ordained itinerant preacher; he would not have qualified for the religious exemption.

You can see the NATIONWIDE BULLETIN INSERT here
Conscience Rights Violated by Sweeping HHS Contraceptive Mandate
http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/religious-liberty/conscience-protection/upload/hhs-mandate-bulletin-insert.pdf

From this article of August 30, 2009, the President argued that the Administration’s Healthcare plan does not fund Abortion.  Cardinal Justin Regali said it would. President Obama is ‘Fabricating’—Not Cardinal Rigali and the Catholic Bishops—About Abortion Funding in Health Care Plan.  Turns out the Cardinal was right.
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/president-obama-fabricating-not-cardinal-rigali-and-catholic-bishops-about-abortion

We’ve mentioned this previously here, here, here, here and here.

It’s too late to formally respond to the proposed HHS regulations.  I may write directly to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius (herself a lapsed-Catholic.)  I have written congress via the Catholic Bishops’ site which is in turn a link to the NCHLA the National Committee for a Human Life Amendment.  http://www.nchla.org/actiondisplay.asp?ID=292

Abortion as Healthcare?!

When does the majority (or in this case a very vocal minority) get to oppress and infringe on the rights of conscience of others?  Listen to the good sister (“s’ter!”) and she will define the problem.

The entire article is at the Washington Post’s Guest Voices page.

Posted at 03:21 PM ET, 07/20/2011

Where’s the religious freedom in birth control mandate?

By Sr. Mary Ann Walsh

In this undated handout photo provided by Warner Chilcott, Femcon Fe, the first chewable birth-control method, is shown. (Anonymous - ASSOCIATED PRESS)

The hallucinogenic drug peyote is not for me, though I respect the right of Native Americans to use it in their religious rituals. Blood transfusions are not verboten to me, but I respect Christian Scientists’ right to refuse them. Health insurance programs fit into my lifestyle, yet I respect the rights of the Amish to work out non-insurance medical care programs with the hospitals they use.

Abortion, however, is horrifying to me and I shudder to think that money I pay for health insurance should fund abortion in any way at all. I shudder even more to think that the U.S. government would force me to subsidize abortion and other services in order to get health insurance from a private company. This is Big Brother at his worst and I cringe at the thought that anyone, including a church organization, might be told by government to fund a procedure through private insurance plans for their own employees. Having government decide such questions is a clear violation of conscience.

Some contraceptives, such as the morning-after pills, can cause abortions. The church objects to them because they involve taking an innocent life, however tiny it is. Some ridicule the church’s stance on contraception but the spiritual truth is that contraception deliberately deprives human sexual intimacy of an essential part of its depth and meaning. A man and woman through their sexual union express total commitment and openness to each other, including openness to conceive and nurture a new human person.

The church’s position can be supported even from a secular point of view. It is hard to deny that broad promotion of contraceptives and sterilization has made sexuality more “casual” and less meaningful for millions, or that hormonal contraceptives have had serious and sometimes life-threatening effects on some women. Others don’t have to understand or agree with this perspective; but until now, the federal government has generally been careful to allow individuals and religious organizations to purchase and provide health care without being forced to violate it.

Respect for freedom of conscience and religious liberty has a long history. Thomas Jefferson, who was not especially religious himself, said it best in 1809, when he declared that “No provision in our Constitution ought to be dearer to man than that which protects the rights of conscience against the enterprises of civil authority.”

That position is under threat as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) prepares to list “preventive services for women” that must be included in most private health plans under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as the Healthcare Reform Act. HHS called on the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to list such services that should be mandated in private health plans (PPACA). IOM said July 20 that everybody’s health plan should cover contraception, sterilization and patient education and counseling promoting these for all women with reproductive capacity. IOM offers no talk of religious exemption for those with moral or religious objections to some of these practices, including those that effectively abort tiny children.

The Institute of Medicine (IOM) defines itself on its Web site as an independent, nonprofit organization that works outside of government to provide unbiased and authoritative advice to decision makers and the public. As it claims independence, one can ask “independent of what? Constitutional history? American government? Basic human rights?”

Fortunately, two members of Congress, Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE) and Dan Boren (D-OK), saw it coming, and introduced the Respect for Rights of Conscience Act 2011. They and the bill co-sponsors recognize that it is wrong for government to force institutions and persons to provide procedures and drugs that violate their conscience. That includes drugs that can take innocent lives under the guise of “treating” what IOM apparently sees as a disease, i.e. pregnancy. The Fortenberry and Boren bill would prevent new mandates under PPACA from being used to discriminate against persons and institutions for acting according to their conscience on these matters – as it already respects the consciences of the Amish, Christian Scientists and adherents of Native American beliefs.

Rights are important, and citizens need to be wary of threats against them. The freedom to follow one’s conscience and to practice one’s religion is under assault today and concerned people need to push back. St. Thomas More, who was heralded in the play “A Man for All Seasons,” faced a conscience problem when England’s Henry VIII demanded an oath of allegiance to him as a self-declared head of the church. Thomas More, the king’s lord chancellor and a brilliant lawyer, refused to sign. He squared off against his government, albeit reluctantly. Before his execution at the chopping block for such treachery the husband and father voiced his allegiance to his king, but with one caveat: “The King’s good servant,” More declared himself, “but God’s first.”

It was more than 400 years ago when More said the government had gone beyond what his conscience could bear. The right to follow one’s conscience trumps other obligations, even rights claimed by the government. The message still stands today.

Sr. Mary Ann Walsh is spokeswoman for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Euthanasia for Fun and Profit

 I found this in my email this morning under the clearly Orwellian header of  “Health Care”

Report: Organs harvested from euthanized patients

Triangle Business Journal

Date: Wednesday, June 15, 2011, 6:36am EDT

A morbid story which however is important for all of us to know. Doctors are harvesting lungs from patients in Belgium who have been euthanized because the organs are in much better condition than those from someone who has died in an accident, that’s according to FoxNews.com which cited a study in releasing the information. 

It says:

Read More at  MyFoxPhilly.com

 So I did:

…Once you accept that physicians are going to kill patients, it seems logical that they would harvest those organs for transplantation.

 

At least this writer understands the malice present.  This is bad folks.  It’s really really bad.

Marx’ philosophy on display

Eulogy to Karl Marx

by E. Christian Brugger, Ph.D., Senior Fellow in Ethics

In his eulogy for Karl Marx deceased on March 14, 1883, his friend and fellow revolutionary Friederich Engels wishfully prophesized that Marx’s name “will endure through the ages, and so also will his work.”  Hardly could he have imagined that his friend’s social vision would suffuse common political dynamics in the United States a little over a century later; that the eminent Speaker of the House would play his handmaid and the powerful President his dupe.  The disaster that played out last weekend set the high water mark of Marx’s influence on our great country.  If we don’t see this we won’t understand recent events.  His name wasn’t mentioned and his rhetoric wasn’t explicit.  But his vision was alive: a reckless mendacity in the pursuit of goals; an almost savage disregard for democracy; a savioristic reliance on politics to transform the social order; and a forceful use of naked power as the principle of social change.

We witnessed the demonization of a class of people, the bourgeois in Marx’s scheme, the U.S. middle class, who from last summer have shouted a crescendoing “NO!” to a government health care revolution.  They were called Nazis, bigots, obstacles to progress; they were bullied by thugs, characterized as stupid, and censored by the liberal media.  Their reasons for opposing the revolution didn’t matter.  The mere fact of it placed them on the wrong side in the dialectic of history, so they needed to be opposed.  ‘What our fathers and our fathers’ fathers couldn’t do, we’ve accomplished against all odds.’  The ‘odds,’ of course, were the majority of honest Americans who naively still believed that their voices meant something in the political process.  They weren’t opposed to the end of securing decent health care for all.  They questioned the means that Liberal Democrats were proposing for achieving that end: an enormous extension of federal authority into a most delicate area of social concern, a massive surreptitious expansion of abortion liberties, fears of conscience violations, unjust rationing, the depersonalization of health care, offensive values from Washington D.C. filtering into Main Street America: “we’re just not sure we trust you, Government, with our health care; whatever you touch turns to gold—for you; but it complicates and disorders our lives.”  Over their heads the Democrats shouted: “the people deserve healthcare, and you’re trying to prevent it!”  In the Manifesto Marx writes: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles, oppressor and oppressed, in constant opposition to one another.”  Marx’s simplistic ‘class struggle’ paradigm was the operative model for the healthcare debate.  The only reality is political; the only relevant question is who possesses and exercises power.  The proletariat, the marginalized, are the voiceless uninsured, oppressed by intolerant, religious, self-satisfied Americans.  Progressive change is necessary; neutrality in its regard is impossible.  This polarization was nowhere more clear than at the President’s so-called “health care summit” on February 25: ‘side with the Democrats and so with the poor, or with the Republicans against the poor.  Make your choice.  Get on board, or we’re leaving without you.’

No amount of deception was too great.  How many times in the past eight months did Speaker Pelosi, Senator Reid, Secretary Sebelius and President Obama look straight into the camera and proclaim: “The Hyde Amendment forbids federal funding for abortion.  That status won’t change under our bill”?  They knew the statement was false; how couldn’t they, after all, they were the bill’s authors?  But they counted on the credulity of their audience stemming from ignorance as to the bill’s actual content.  The sharpest screw was twisted last weekend with the fraudulent executive order meant to make people believe that Stupak’s pro-life demands had finally been conceded.  Again, smoke and mirrors, but no substance.  Kathleen Parker writes in today’s Washington Post: “The executive order … is utterly useless, and everybody knows it. First, the president can revoke it as quickly as he signs it.  Second, an order cannot confer jurisdiction in the courts or establish any grounds for suing anybody in court… The order is therefore judicially unenforceable.  Finally, an executive order cannot trump or change a federal statute.”  Don’t ever doubt the utility of the Nietzchian will to power operationalized in the Marxist schema.  It gets results.  But it also sows resentment.  Peace doesn’t follow.  People only get mad.  And people presently are very mad.

So what now?  As in the wake of Roe, we must begin a rear guard offensive.  After the President signed the bill into law on Tuesday, fourteen States attorneys general filed suit over the constitutionality of the legislation.  Find out if your State is one of them and support the effort.  Learn the provisions of the new law.  You will be forced to purchase insurance.  But at least one insurance carrier in each State exchange is required not to provide abortion coverage, which means the majority of carriers will.  Do your homework; find that carrier and support it.  Next, when your representatives come home for Spring break, tell them what’s on your mind.  Finally, polish your pointing finger for the November elections.

quoted in full from: http://culture-of-life.org//content/view/628/1/

If you’re not mad you’re not paying attention.

Why rational faithful people can oppose ObamaCare

Call To Action

March 24, 2010Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ: As you know, the National Health Care Reform Act has been signed into law by President Barack Obama. With the possibility of federal funding for abortion remaining in the act and in light of a few other deficient areas, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) opposed its passage. It was a difficult decision and came after decades of support for health care reform by the Bishops’ Conference. So that you may understand exactly why the bishops chose not to support the health care reform act we direct you to a statement released by the USCCB. Click here to read the statement. We would like to thank the thousands of Catholic Voice North Carolina participants who took the time to contact to their legislators in support of Catholic values in this bill. Please be assured of our continued vigilance on this matter as health care reform is enacted in the coming days and months. Sincerely, The Most Reverend Peter J. Jugis Bishop of Charlotte The Most Reverend Michael F. Burbidge Bishop of Raleigh

Executive Order

We can only hope Mr Obama is as good as his word.

Text of Obama’s Planned Executive Order on Abortion

Here is the official text of the White House announcement and the planned executive order from President Barack Obama aimed at assuring antiabortion Democrats that federal money won’t be used to fund abortion under the health-care overhaul legislation.

THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of the Press Secretary

_____________________________________________________________________________

For Immediate Release                           March 21, 2010

STATEMENT FROM COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR DAN PFEIFFER

Today, the President announced that he will be issuing an executive order after the passage of the health insurance reform law that will reaffirm its consistency with longstanding restrictions on the use of federal funds for abortion.

While the legislation as written maintains current law, the executive order provides additional safeguards to ensure that the status quo is upheld and enforced, and that the health care legislation’s restrictions against the public funding of abortions cannot be circumvented.

The President has said from the start that this health insurance reform should not be the forum to upset longstanding precedent.  The health care legislation and this executive order are consistent with this principle.

The President is grateful for the tireless efforts of leaders on both sides of this issue to craft a consensus approach that allows the bill to move forward.

A text of the pending executive order follows:

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2010/03/21/text-of-obamas-planned-executive-order-on-abortion/

Though some folks are certain the Executive Order will not help prevent Federal Dollars from paying for abortions:

William Saunders: Democrats’ EO offer shows Obamacare does fund abortion

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/OpEd-Contributor/William-Saunders-Democrats-EO-offer-shows-Obamacare-does-fund-abortion–88766547.html#ixzz0is3LZEUe

House Bill

Can Nancy Pelosi Get the Votes?

The Senate bill’s abortion language is not the House Speaker’s only problem.

By MICHAEL BARONE

Are there enough votes in the House to pass the Senate’s health-care bill? As of today, it’s clear there aren’t. House Democratic leaders have brushed aside White House calls to bring the bill forward by March 18, when President Barack Obama heads to Asia. Nevertheless, analysts close to the Democratic leadership tell me they’re confident the leadership will find some way to squeeze out the 216 votes needed for a majority.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has indeed shown mastery at amassing majorities. But it’s hard to see how she’ll do so on this one. The arithmetic as I see it doesn’t add up.

Complete article is at:  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703701004575113292688090292.html?mod=WSJ_newsreel_opinion

House actions on HC

Dems keep pressure on Stupak over healthcare bill and abortion concerns

By Jordy Yager – 03/07/10 12:34 PM ET

Abortion continued to loom Sunday as the thorny issue that could paralyze the momentum of healthcare reform efforts in the home stretch.
Across the Sunday morning shows, lawmakers took sides over whether the final healthcare bill contains language that would allow people receiving government subsidized healthcare to obtain an abortion, and a White House official accused abortion opponent Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) of being “misinformed” about the Senate bill.

But I don’t see where the article clearly explains this “pressure.”

Please everyone here write your congressman – your Representative but also your Senators.
The FRC contact website is good. http://www.frc.org/contact-elected-officials. 
See this post for where we’ve said why https://deliberateengagement.wordpress.com/action-what-you-can-do/
and this post where we show you how https://deliberateengagement.wordpress.com/2009/01/05/write-your-representatives/

The entire The Hill story is at: http://thehill.com/homenews/house/85333-dems-keep-pressure-on-stupak-over-healthcare-bill-and-abortion

One of the comments to the posted story is a great read. I think it gets its own post. To read it before I get it posted see: http://www.nrlc.org/AHC/AbortionPolicyhCRBackgrounder.html