Defending our religious freedom, The Anchor, February 3, 2012

On Apr. 16, 2008, when he appeared with President George W. Bush on the White House lawn, Pope Benedict XVI extolled America’s role as a beacon of freedom in world history and in the world today. He remembered our nation’s founding fathers, who risked their lives to sign the Declaration of Independence, and how they grasped as a “self-evident truth” that certain rights and freedoms are “inalienable,” given by God not by the state, so that no state has the authority to take them away. He illustrated how this recognition of human rights and the connection between freedom and truth was on display in the struggle against slavery, in the civil rights movement, and in the wars against evil for which so many American soldiers have laid down their lives. He cited the prophetic words not of the first pope but of the first president, George Washington, who in his farewell address expressed the conviction that religion and morality are “indispensable” supports for political and national prosperity. But he added that we must never take our freedom for granted. “Freedom is ever new. It’s a challenge held out to each generation and it must constantly be won over for the cause of good.”

The time for that fight to preserve freedom for the cause of good in our country is now.

In the last four years, much has changed at the White House with regard to respect for and defense of freedom, home and abroad. In terms of foreign policy, the Obama administration’s State Department, led by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, has been actively trying to reduce the promotion of “freedom of religion” to “freedom of worship,” a change that basically means that the United States will still defend the right of people to associate in various houses of worship to pray, but will no longer defend the right of people to live by their faith against government oppression. Secretary Clinton declared in a 2009 speech at Georgetown University that the reason for the change was to defend as a fundamental international human right that people “must be free … to love in the way they choose,” a euphemism that means promoting and protecting a radical gay agenda. Because almost all major organized religions that maintain their vigor oppose the gay agenda’s push to normalize same-sex relations, redefine marriage, and obliterate the significance of sexual differentiation, the Obama administration recognizes that freedom of religion must be eliminated in order to advance the novel “fundamental” right to “love in the way they choose.”

The same radical undercutting of religious freedom in order to advance a secularist libertine agenda is happening here at home, although because of the First Amendment’s explicit protection of freedom of religion, the administration has had to be more surreptitious about it.

On January 20, the Department of Health and Human Services announced its final rule mandating all new private insurance plans to provide free “preventive care” for women, including access to sterilizations, contraception and abortion-causing morning after pills. In a token acknowledgment of constitutional protections of religious freedom, it offered religious groups a conscience exemption, but made it so narrow that it would only cover those non-profit organizations whose purpose is the “inculcation of religious values” and that primarily employ and serve those who share its religious tenets. Most religious institutions — including Catholic hospitals, universities, schools, and social service programs — would not qualify because they do not serve exclusively or primarily those of their faith but all those who are in need. In effect, the Obama administration is compelling all religious institutions with conscientious objections either to violate their consciences and pay for these services, eliminate health care for their employees and pay a $2,000 fine for each uninsured employee, or shut down altogether. Since HHS published a draft of the policy last August, thousands of individuals and religious organizations contacted the agency with objections, but the only concession HHS gave was to give those religious organizations that requested it an extra year to comply with the policy. “In effect, the president is saying we have a year to figure out how to violate our consciences,” Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan of New York, the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, candidly and unappreciately commented.

We see in this narrow HHS restriction the Obama administration’s attempt to limit religious freedom simply to the most tightly-defined activities of worship, things done basically only for and by the adherents of a particular religious group. Charity — or religious faith working through love in hospitals, inner-city schools, food pantries, adoption agencies and more — will no longer be protected. This is clearly unconstitutional, as became obvious on January 11, when Supreme Court decided its most important religious freedom case in decades. It involved whether a religious institution, in this case the Hosanna-Tabor Lutheran Church of Redford, Mich., should be free from government interference when choosing religious leaders or whether it can be forced to follow all government anti-discrimination laws, regardless of whether the person understands or lives by the religious teachings of the group.

The Obama administration argued before the justices that religious groups have no greater right to choose their leaders than labor unions or social clubs; the only exception is when a person’s duties are exclusively ministerial, defined as doing nothing other than teaching the faith. In a 9-0 decision, the Court emphatically rejected the Obama administration’s concept of religious freedom. Even Justice Elena Kagan — who was appointed by President Obama and previously served as his administration’s solicitor general — called the government’s restricted view of the First Amendment “amazing,” in the sense that she couldn’t believe the administration was making the argument. During oral arguments, when Chief Justice John Roberts pressed Leondra Kruger, Obama’s assistant solicitor general, whether the administration believes the Constitution requires special protection for religious organizations, she said that there was no categorical protection for churches or religious schools, something that the decision noted was “remarkable,” “untenable,” and “extreme” in its misunderstanding of the First Amendment. Yet this extreme — and extremely incorrect — understanding of right to religious freedom is what the Obama administration unabashedly applied in its HHS decision, nine days after its argument was totally laughed out of the Supreme Court.

The reaction of Catholic leaders to the trampling of conscience has been swift and strong, not only by Catholic bishops but also by people like Sister Carol Keehan, president of the Catholic Health Association, and Father John Jenkins, president of Notre Dame, both of whom have defended President Obama and his initiatives in the past. Perhaps the most powerful response of all, however, came from Pope Benedict himself in a very strong January 19 address to a group of U.S. bishops making their ad limina visits in Rome.

Just four years after citing President Washington and praising America on the White House Lawn for our country’s promotion and defense of freedom, he lamented that “powerful new cultural currents … opposed to core moral teachings of the Judeo-Christian tradition and increasingly hostile to Christianity as such” were eroding our nation’s respect for liberty. This culture is based on a “radical secularism,” an “extreme individualism” that is seeking to promote “notions of freedom detached from moral truth.” Of particular concern, he declared, are “certain attempts being made to limit that most cherished of American freedoms, the freedom of religion, … to deny the right of conscientious objection on the part of Catholic individuals and institutions with regard to cooperation in intrinsically evil practices, … to reduce religious freedom to mere freedom of worship without guarantees of respect for freedom of conscience.” These are all obvious references to what the Obama administration is seeking to do at home and abroad.

Various efforts are underway in Congress and in the Courts to overturn the HHS policy and the Obama administration’s radically secular and increasingly hostile multipoint attack on the freedom of religious and conscience. All readers of The Anchor are urged to become vocal and actively involved in these efforts. Freedom, Pope Benedict reminded us four years ago, is a challenge held out to each generation that must be won over constantly for the cause of good. Now it’s our generation’s turn.