When Donald Trump spoke to the Catholic Bishops

I missed this story in April 2020. As you'll recall, the white liberal church threw itself into the George Floyd tragedy a month later, eager to move the blame to Trump and all white people for the failings of the Minneapolis Democrat run city and police department. To do this, Democrats/liberals/progressives/socialists had to lionize an ex-con who really hadn't contributed in a positive way to black culture until BLM took up the banner. Anyway, President Donald Trump identified himself as the “best [president] in the history of the Catholic Church” in a conference call for Catholic leaders and educators in late April 2020 where he warned that issues at stake in the upcoming presidential election, particularly on abortion and religious liberty, “have never been more important for the Church.” 

Catholic liberals were spitting fire, and conservative Evangelical Christians were probably shocked and chagrined to see a Protestant president say something good about Catholicism (in an indirect way he was pointing out that Catholics have always had the weakest, poorest, and "least of these" close to the heart of the church).

Looking at the fury from the left since the first leak and then the final decision on Dobbs, we have to say, once again, President Trump was/is right. He's the best President ever in terms of life, religious liberty, and was a gift to the poor and minorities in their climb out of despair and poverty.

We don't even have to wait for history to confirm the President's call (although it was far more shocking than the one they impeached him for). Just go back and read recent government archives, research, documents, newspapers and websites. Just look how quickly the green-goes, border-free advocates, racialist rioters and fossil fuel furies are working to destroy our nation. Listen to them demonize patriots, people of success and merit, love for country and respect for the constitution. It's all there.

You were right again, Mr. President.

The accomplishments of President Trump that Galli ignores in his impeachment for Evangelicals Christianity Today article

1. The appointment of two Supreme Court justices, 50 judges to federal circuit courts of appeal, and 133 federal district court judges (plus two other judges to specialized courts). All of them are committed to interpreting the Constitution and the laws according to the original meaning of the words and not according to their personal policy preferences. This is a good result of immeasurable benefit to the future of the country, for it guarantees that laws must be made by elected legislators who are accountable to the people, not by judges who are appointed for life and have no effective accountability to the people as a whole. Many of these judges will serve for decades to come.

2. Significant tax cuts that have resulted in remarkable growth in jobs and wages. The good results are already seen in the paychecks of millions of workers, with the highest percentage growth occurring in low income jobs, the lowest unemployment rate in 50 years, and the lowest black and Hispanic unemployment rates ever recorded.

3. Massive elimination of wasteful government regulations, giving a strong boost to business and job growth.

4.  Strengthening our military with passage of the largest defense budget in our history.

5. Standing up to China and firmly opposing their long-time theft of our intellectual property, including much copyrighted and patented information.

6. Moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and in general being a strong friend of Israel.

7. Supporting laws and actions that protect the unborn child’s right to life, including permitting states to defund Planned Parenthood, reinstating and expanding the Reagan administration’s Mexico City Policy which halts funding to groups that promote abortion overseas, strengthening conscience protections for individuals and organizations that have sincerely held religious beliefs about the sanctity of human life, and requiring insurance companies to disclose to customers if their plans cover abortions.

8. Building as much of a truly effective border wall as could be built in the face of intransigent opposition by Democrats.

9. Withdrawing from the misguided Paris Climate Accord, which would have significantly increased energy prices in the U.S.

10. Issuing executive orders that protect religious freedom, such as rescinding the Obamacare HHS mandate that forced groups such as Little Sisters of the Poor to provide access to abortifacients through their health care plans or face massive fines, finalizing new rules that protect the rights of conscience for pro-life medical professionals, and the Department of Justice issuing 20 principles of religious liberty to guide the Administration’s litigation strategy and protect religious freedom.

11. Revoking the Waterways of the U.S. regulation, which wrongly took control of millions of acres of people’s private property

12. Gaining approval for the Keystone pipeline, the Dakota access pipeline, and oil exploration in a tiny section of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

13. Finally retaining energy independence for the United States (we now produce more energy than we consume)

14. Rescinding Obama-era regulations that required schools to allow biological boys to enter girls’ restrooms and locker rooms in high schools

15. Driving ISIS out of large areas that it had controlled in Iran and Syria

17. Supplying Ukraine with needed weapons to defend itself against Russia

18. Persuading several NATO allies to increase their defense spending

19. Protecting freedom of speech on public university campuses by denying federal funding to institutions that do not protect student speech.

20. Promoting more ability for parents to be able to choose their children’s schools by appointing Betsy DeVos, a veteran school-choice advocate, as Secretary of Education.

https://townhall.com/columnists/waynegrudem/2019/12/30/trump-should-not-be-removed-from-office-a-response-to-mark-galli-and-christianity-today-n2558657?

Religious organizations were shut out of child care by Obama; reversed by Trump

The Obama administration was anti-Christian from the start, early 2009 (when he undid the Bush executive order not to expand the embryonic cell experimentation) to the finish in early 2017 refusing children good care because the agency had the audacity to believe in real marriage.

Now Trump is reversing that last minute anti-child order.

“In the closing days of the Obama administration, the federal government handed down a regulation that effectively barred from federal child-welfare programs organizations that believe marriage is between a man and woman. This affected many Roman Catholic and evangelical Protestant organizations. This misguided policy was rushed into effect right before President Trump’s inauguration."

"Communities of faith have a lot to offer to children in foster care. Barna research shows that practicing Christians may be more than twice as likely to adopt compared with the general population—with Catholics three times as likely and evangelicals five times as likely. That’s because Christians are eager to open their hearts and homes for children in foster care. They are commanded by the Bible to care for widows and orphans in their distress (James 1:20). One need not agree with these beliefs to see that it is self-defeating for government to bar the participation of thousands of religious Americans from serving children in need because of their theological convictions."

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-reverses-obamas-anti-christian-decree-11572813718?

The Trump administration I hope will look out for what's best for the children, not what's best for a political sexual agenda.

Our country’s religious foundation is crumbling

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other,” said John Adams in 1798. Some things don’t change, even after 221 years, and Attorney General William Barr quoted Adams to say so in a stellar speech at Notre Dame about American politics and our crumbling moral foundation.

Barr, a devout Catholic, made the case that modern Americans have replaced dependency on God with dependency on government. He also argued that modern secularists are not merely non-religious; they are outright hostile to religion.

“The campaign to destroy the traditional moral order has coincided [with] — and I believe has brought with it — immense suffering and misery,” Barr asserted. “And yet the forces of secularism, ignoring these tragic results, press on with even greater militancy.”

He wondered, “Among the militant secularists are many so-called progressives. But where is the progress?” Worse, he implied regression: “The secular project has itself become a religion, pursued with religious fervor. It is taking on all the trappings of religion, including inquisitions and excommunication. Those who defy the creed risk a figurative burning at the stake — social, educational, and professional ostracism and exclusion waged through lawsuits and savage social-media campaigns.”

In any case, says Barr, the government is a poor substitute for true religion. “Today, in the face of all the increasing pathologies, instead of addressing the underlying cause, we have cast the state in the role of the Alleviator of Bad Consequences,” he said. “We call on the state to mitigate the social costs of personal misconduct and irresponsibility.”

“So, the reaction to growing illegitimacy is not sexual responsibility, but abortion. The reaction to drug addiction is safe injection sites. The solution to the breakdown of the family is for the state to set itself up as an ersatz husband for the single mother and an ersatz father for the children. The call comes for more and more social programs to deal with this wreckage. And while we think we’re solving problems, we are underwriting them. We start with an untrammeled freedom and we end up as dependents of a coercive state on whom we depend.”

Wow.  The Leftists are sure try to impeach Barr now.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/66120?

President addresses UN on religious freedom; a first

“The President will call on the international community to take concrete steps to prevent attacks against people on the basis of their religion or beliefs and to ensure the sanctity of houses of worship and all public spaces for all faiths.” https://www.christianpost.com/news/trump-to-give-historic-religious-freedom-speech-at-united-nations-evangelical-leaders-invited.html.   80% of the world lives under religious oppression.

His address concerns all religions, but this is the worst time in history for Christians. "In 2017 Pew released a report showing that the number of countries where Christians fell victim to government restrictions and social hostilities grew from 108 in 2014 to 128 the following year. In its World Watch Monitor Report, covering 2016, Open Doors, an organization supporting persecuted Christians, found that: “More than 200 million Christians in the 50 countries where it is most difficult to be a Christian experience persecution because of their faith.” Other sources claimed that the true figure for 2016 may be as high as 600 million.. https://www.churchinneed.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/persecution-1-1.pdf

https://www.newsweek.com/christian-persecution-genocide-worse-ever-770462

As thousands gathered last week to protest a climate model that has been proven false or inadequate for decades, real people were being tortured, turned into refugees and killed for their faith.

You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows

Justice Alito warns Catholics and other Christians about the coming storm. Speaking to a group of Catholic lawyers and judges who promote church social teaching, Alito used his own words from his dissent in the Supreme Court's landmark same-sex marriage case, telling the gathering he had predicted opposition to the decision would be used to "vilify those who disagree, and treat them as bigots."

"In a roughly 45-minute speech that mentioned the Founding Fathers and 19th-century French writer Alexis De Tocqueville as well as Dylan and the 1960s TV sitcom "The Flying Nun," Alito discussed the hostility faced by Catholics in the U.S. over the centuries, and of his own joy as a youth staying up until the wee hours of the morning to witness John F. Kennedy elected the first Roman Catholic president in 1960.
"I felt it had lifted me up from the status of second-class American," he said.

While religious freedom has been recognized in Congress and in the courts, Alito said, attitudes are slower to change. He recounted a Democratic lawmaker who opposed his nomination in 2005 because Alito would make "too many Catholics on the court."

Alito said reactions to Supreme Court decisions such as the Hobby Lobby case, in which a company balked at being required to cover certain forms of contraception in its employee health plan, should spur action.

"We are likely to see pitched battles in courts and Congress, state legislatures and town halls," he said. "But the most important fight is for the hearts and minds of our fellow Americans. It is up to all of us to evangelize our fellow Americans about the issue of religious freedom." " http://www.nj.com/politics/index.ssf/2017/03/uss_dedication_to_religious_liberty_being_tested.html

http://www.ncregister.com/blog/joan-desmond/justice-alito-warns-religious-believers-of-hostile-wind-ahead

https://dailyinfo.co/justice-alito-religious-liberty-is-in-danger-in-america/

 http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/06/28/religious-liberty-justice-alito-supreme-court/

Justice Scalia on Obergefell (same sex marriage): "Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court. The opinion in these cases is the furthest extension in fact—and the furthest extension one can even imagine—of the Court’s claimed power to create “liberties” that the Constitution and its Amendments neglect to mention. This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves."

Set the sex slaves free

 Unless you're Catholic. Unless Catholics are willing to provide contraceptives and abortions, no government funding to free women. It just sounds so right and just when the ACLU explains it in PC language: "routinely denies reproductive health services to its clients because of its religious beliefs that prohibit abortion or emergency contraception." Kill the child, or else lose the money to free the slaves. Social agendas of progressives in government also removed Catholics from child adoption services because the goal of the government isn't doing what's best for children, but a far reaching social goal.

 https://www.aclu.org/news/aclu-sues-federal-records-grant-religious-group-obstructs-trafficking-victims-access

In 1930, Protestant churches began to cave on the contraceptive issue, and it's been down hill for Western society since. Now abortion, harvesting fertilized eggs, embryonic stem cell medical experiments, gay adoptions, easy divorce, law suits against nuns, same sex marriage and intersex bathrooms are all denying freedom of religious teaching.

That said, any church that accepts government funding for a food pantry, a playground for the poor, Section 8 housing, a program for the disabled, an ESL program for Muslims is required to do the government's bidding. President GHW Bush started this slide. It's probably time to cut all those ties (although even the laws will probably prevent that since churches will be forced to comply).

In the 20th century, there were 40 million Christians killed by their governments. Are we honoring their memory?

The assault against Americans' religious freedom continues—on all fronts and this is the best summary I've seen covering the HHS mandate, the public square, academe and public schools. Includes quotes from SCOTUS decisions and founding fathers.  http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2012/10/religious-liberty-and-expression-under-attack-restoring-americas-first-freedoms

Losing our religious freedom

When we warned about loss of religious freedom they just shouted us down. In the U.S. telling people to shoot white police is protected speech; telling people that marriage is for a man and woman is not going to be protected speech or freedom of religion.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/04/29/obama-admin-catholic-schoolss-non-profit-status-will-be-an-issue-if-gay-marriage-made-a-right/

As marriage and religious liberty expert at the Heritage Foundation Ryan Anderson observed, when Justice Samuel Alito asked the Obama administration’s Solicitor General Donald Verrilli whether a religious school could lose its tax-exempt status if it affirms marriage as the union between a man and woman, Verrilli responded, “It’s certainly going to be an issue. I don’t deny that. I don’t deny that, Justice Alito. It is it is going to be an issue.”

Anderson related this discussion to Justice Antonin Scalia’s concern about the effects of a Supreme Court-created constitutional right to same-sex marriage on religious liberty. Verrilli responded that there have been no violations against religious liberty in states that have redefined marriage in democratic fashion. Scalia observed, “They are laws. They are not constitutional requirements. That was the whole point of my question. If you let the states do it, you can make an exception. … You can’t do that once it is a constitutional proscription.”

“Not only is there nothing in the Constitution that requires the redefinition of marriage, but a ruling saying that there was could create unimaginable religious liberty violations,” writes Anderson. “These situations are best handled democratically.”

Governors who rule from Democrat glass houses

shouldn’t lob missiles at Indiana.

Connecticut has the same law as Indiana about religious freedom, as do almost 20 states.  Shame on you, Gov. Dan Malloy,  Democrat. There is also federal law—not only the Bill of Rights, but the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act signed by President Clinton. Barack Obama as a state senator in Illinois helped pass Illinois’. . . although perhaps that not a good example since he lied about his beliefs to get elected in 2008. He probably lied then too. The LBGT lobby is very hostile to Christianity. The real aim isn’t bakeries and florists, but churches.

“The first RFRA was a 1993 federal law that was signed into law by Democratic president Bill Clinton. It unanimously passed the House of Representatives, where it was sponsored by then-congressman Chuck Schumer, and sailed through the Senate on a 97-3 vote.

The law reestablished a balancing test for courts to apply in religious liberty cases (a standard had been used by the Supreme Court for decades). RFRA allows a person's free exercise of religion to be "substantially burdened" by a law only if the law furthers a "compelling governmental interest" in the "least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest." “ http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/indianas-religious-freedom-restoration-act-explained_900641.html#!

http://www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/local/Malloy-to-Bar-State-Travel-to-Indiana-Amid-Religious-Freedom-Law-Backlash-298010911.html

http://thefederalist.com/2015/03/30/connecticuts-governor-doesnt-understand-his-own-states-rfra/

No gay person has ever been hurt or discriminated against by the RFRA, whereas many by choice kept their sexuality hidden for decades for fear of their careers and wealth or disappointing their own families.  Being “out” never hurt librarians, hair dressers, or musicians.  Perhaps there was a bigger story?

Our precious freedom of speech and religion

"An idea isn’t a human being. Neither is a sacred cow. And those who confront, dismiss, debunk, sneer at and fear them aren’t necessarily bigots." [David Harsanyi.] Debating marriage isn't homophobia. Examining crime statistics isn't racist. Looking at choices women make about employment isn't sexist. Saving unborn babies by closing unsanitary abortion mills isn't dismantling women's "health care." But the media and the federal and state governments are closing in on free speech, regulating everything we can say and think.

A tenured professor at a Catholic University is not allowed on campus pending firing because he questioned the silencing of a student who wanted to present the case for traditional marriage, i.e., the Catholic teaching. In Ohio a librarian was fired for suggesting in an e-mail discussion group of faculty, a conservative title as a possibility for a reading list. Discussing black crime is not about socio-economic conditions. That doesn’t cause the high murder rate in black communities--that's an insult to all the honest low income, law abiding people. Every abortion mill that is closed is greeted by the death squad as awful and eliminating choice and pro-lifers are villified.

Even 20 years ago, a well known, tenured professor in another state at a top flight school who was helping me with some of my research was forced out of his position because he wouldn't teach 3rd rate feminist drivel in his English classes, which the women's cabal wanted substituted for classic English and American authors. His department denied him grants, teaching assistants and an office since there was no reason to fire him because he defended his right to teach and his students' right to have the best. He eventually found a job in a branch of a university in another state, and has rebuilt his career, but you have no idea the amount of hate and power on the other side. This man prided himself in being a liberal and progressive, a loyal Democrat, but it just wasn't enough for radical feminists. We see the same coming at us in the form of closing small bakeries and florists, and the churches will be next, as they already are in Canada.

The ignorant right

Sometimes I can’t believe the way some conservative talk show hosts, bloggers, on-line news hounds and website owners underrate President Obama. Folks, he’s not dumb, or careless, or naïve.  He would be if he had core American values, but he doesn’t.  Why does the right continue to fall for this, putting out insipid cartoons, wringing their hands, and thus taking their eyes off the November 2014 prize?

It’s no coincidence that we’re having this flurry of gay marriage law suits and gay coming out parties.  Obama was firmly in the traditional marriage camp until he found out the U.S. Catholic Bishops finally got a spine and were going to hold the line on just who created this universe. The Catholics are leading the fight on abortion and the HHS mandate--compulsory contraceptives in insurance forced on religious agencies despite the assurances of the first amendment.  I guess they figured out from closing their adoption agencies that the thugs in government meant business, and they’d better not concede another inch. 

Compulsory abortions and euthanasia in government health plans are not outside the realm of possibility if the social thugs just use the same tactics--a few cute TV shows to soften the brain and conscience, celebrities yukking it up with Bill Maher, ridiculing people on Twitter who want to save mama or the disabled, and then calling anyone a bigot or racist who disagrees.

The Roman Catholic Church is the largest provider of social services in the world, the only organization/entity that can compete with a government—any government. The Protestants, totally fractured and disorganized into thousands of competing groups, are a push over for Obama. He talks and walks their language. Learned it in Chicago.  They’ve already got divorced pastors, gay choir directors and “committed partners” teaching Sunday School.  They are not even worth worrying about in the social/cultural battle.  He will have to take on the only church that still stands for something and has some power—and unfortunately there are enough squabbling, petty Christians around who will help him do it.

As a result of Arab Spring, less religious freedom

“At the onset of the Arab Spring in late 2010 and early 2011, many world leaders, including U.S. President Barack Obama, expressed hope that the political uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa would lead to greater freedoms for the people of the region, including fewer restrictions on religious beliefs and practices. But a new study by the Pew Research Center finds that the region’s already high overall level of restrictions on religion – whether resulting from government policies or from social hostilities – continued to increase in 2011.”

http://www.pewforum.org/2013/06/20/arab-spring-restrictions-on-religion-findings/#_ftn3

Hobby Lobby and the HHS Mandate

Father Maletta’s October 7 sermon on religious liberty

Conservatives are excited. Bump in the polls after the debate. Keep in mind the 6 point bump John McCain got after announcing Sarah Palin as his vice president.  Now is not the time to become complacent.  The lies in the ads here in Ohio (we’re a swing state) are amazing, shameless, and very large. The Chicago Axe  (Axelrod) is doing all he can to destroy Romney’s character.

We still have 30 million Christians not registered to vote. Be sure to listen to Father Maletta's sermon on October 7. It's inspiring.  Because we were created to be in relationship with God, if your candidate is wrong on life and marriage, the other social issues won't matter much.

http://www.stjohnparish.org/homilies.php

Scroll down the page and look for October 7.

What exactly worked?

Increased deficit?
Loss of religious freedom?
Increased health care costs?
Expanded war zones?
More people on food stamps?
Loss of prestige globally?
More radical Muslim governments in power?
Highest unemployment since WWII?
Businesses sitting on their capital rather than investing it?

And somehow only 10% of the people who supported him in 2008 are defecting?

Christians are disappearing from Islamic countries

Megamosques are in the news, but ordinary mosques should raise some questions too. In the past few decades, thousands of mosques have been built in post Christian Europe--France, Germany, England--and in Christian America and Australia. But I wonder how often a Christian church is being built in a Moslem country? I think we'd hear about it. I did hear on the radio the last Christian church was closed in Afghanistan (our ally?). With the Arab Spring, with support from our own President who praised it, Christians have been sent into hiding, have lost jobs, or have had to immigrate. At one time when Jesus first commanded his disciples to "GO" there were Christian cultures in Turkey, Syria, Egypt--in fact, that part of the world was Christian a thousand years before Scandinavia.

We have a President who was raised a Muslim, who converted to Christianity in a church (UCC, Rev. Wright, Chicago) where hatred for whites, Western Civilization and the United States was preached. He says he didn't notice--but maybe he just didn't attend that often. In any case, President Obama says we are not a Christian nation. Being a nation that doesn't demand its citizens attend a Baptist or Presbyterian or Catholic church must be what he means--it's what allows Muslims, Bahai, Jews, and Wiccans to pursue their spiritual needs.

In the past, our Presidents have had a "bully pulpit" for human and religious rights. With his "multicultural" past and his attempts to reduce our own religious freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment, any words of warning to despots and monarchs can be laughed away. "Human rights" and "religious freedom" in Muslim countries are terms defined by Sharia Law, not ours. The July 30 report by Secretary of State Clinton must be viewed with the August 1 HHS Mandate currently being fought by Catholics and many other Christian groups in mind.

Sinclair Community College and Cops stomp on religious freedom at religious freedom rally

In Ohio, home of the Northwest Ordinance, where it states that, “Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall be forever encouraged and established in the Northwest Territory,” a religious gathering at Sinclair Community College in Dayton were told they'd have to put their signs on the ground. This group, "Stand up for Religious Freedom", had all the proper permits, there is no prohibition on signs or posters or banners, but apparently the tax supported school has a right to decide what is freedom of speech AND freedom of religion.

http://www.wnd.com/2012/06/put-your-sign-on-the-ground-and-step-away/

Bryan Kemper, Priests for Life youth outreach director, told WND police officers with the Sinclair Community College Public Safety Department in Dayton, Ohio, informed the organizers of the local Stand Up For Religious Freedom event that no signs of any kind could be held by individual members of the public attending the Sinclair campus rally, which was just getting under way.

All signs were ordered by police to be laid down on the ground.

“As the rally was starting, the campus police informed us that all the signs and banners people were holding must be put on the ground after a complaint from a homosexual advocacy group leader,” Kemper told WND. “The police walked around the crowd telling people to put their signs down, that they could not hold them in their hands.”

According to organizers of the rally, police offered the Sinclair Community College Campus Access Policy as the reason no signs could be held in the hands of citizens, yet the policy can be found online and says nothing about signs.

Religious Liberty Under Attack—Concrete Examples--

A Statement on Religious Liberty

pdf version
to order copies

United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Liberty

Excerpt

Is our most cherished freedom truly under threat? Sadly, it is. This is not a theological or legal dispute without real world consequences. Consider the following:

• HHS mandate for contraception, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs. The mandate of the Department of Health and Human Services has received wide attention and has been met with our vigorous and united opposition. In an unprecedented way, the federal government will both force religious institutions to facilitate and fund a product contrary to their own moral teaching and purport to define which religious institutions are "religious enough" to merit protection of their religious liberty. These features of the "preventive services" mandate amount to an unjust law. As Archbishop-designate William Lori of Baltimore, Chairman of the Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Liberty, testified to Congress: "This is not a matter of whether contraception may be prohibited by the government. This is not even a matter of whether contraception may be supported by the government. Instead, it is a matter of whether religious people and institutions may be forced by the government to provide coverage for contraception or sterilization, even if that violates their religious beliefs."3
  
• State immigration laws.Several states have recently passed laws that forbid what the government deems "harboring" of undocumented immigrants—and what the Church deems Christian charity and pastoral care to those immigrants. Perhaps the most egregious of these is in Alabama, where the Catholic bishops, in cooperation with the Episcopal and Methodist bishops of Alabama, filed suit against the law:

  It is with sadness that we brought this legal action but with a deep sense that we, as people of faith, have no choice but to defend the right to the free exercise of religion granted to us as citizens of Alabama. . . . The law makes illegal the exercise of our Christian religion which we, as citizens of Alabama, have a right to follow. The law prohibits almost everything which would assist an undocumented immigrant or encourage an undocumented immigrant to live in Alabama. This new Alabama law makes it illegal for a Catholic priest to baptize, hear the confession of, celebrate the anointing of the sick with, or preach the word of God to, an undocumented immigrant. Nor can we encourage them to attend Mass or give them a ride to Mass. It is illegal to allow them to attend adult scripture study groups, or attend CCD or Sunday school classes. It is illegal for the clergy to counsel them in times of difficulty or in preparation for marriage. It is illegal for them to come to Alcoholic Anonymous meetings or other recovery groups at our churches.4

• Altering Church structure and governance. In 2009, the Judiciary Committee of the Connecticut Legislature proposed a bill that would have forced Catholic parishes to be restructured according to a congregational model, recalling the trusteeism controversy of the early nineteenth century, and prefiguring the federal government's attempts to redefine for the Church "religious minister" and "religious employer" in the years since.
• Christian students on campus.In its over-100-year history, the University of California Hastings College of Law has denied student organization status to only one group, the Christian Legal Society, because it required its leaders to be Christian and to abstain from sexual activity outside of marriage.
• Catholic foster care and adoption services. Boston, San Francisco, the District of Columbia, and the state of Illinois have driven local Catholic Charities out of the business of providing adoption or foster care services—by revoking their licenses, by ending their government contracts, or both—because those Charities refused to place children with same-sex couples or unmarried opposite-sex couples who cohabit.
• Discrimination against small church congregations. New York City enacted a rule that barred the Bronx Household of Faith and sixty other churches from renting public schools on weekends for worship services even though non-religious groups could rent the same schools for scores of other uses. While this would not frequently affect Catholic parishes, which generally own their own buildings, it would be devastating to many smaller congregations. It is a simple case of discrimination against religious believers.
• Discrimination against Catholic humanitarian services. Notwithstanding years of excellent performance by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' Migration and Refugee Services in administering contract services for victims of human trafficking, the federal government changed its contract specifications to require us to provide or refer for contraceptive and abortion services in violation of Catholic teaching. Religious institutions should not be disqualified from a government contract based on religious belief, and they do not somehow lose their religious identity or liberty upon entering such contracts. And yet a federal court in Massachusetts, turning religious liberty on its head, has since declared that such a disqualification is required by the First Amendment—that the government somehow violates religious liberty by allowing Catholic organizations to participate in contracts in a manner consistent with their beliefs on contraception and abortion

Sandra Fluke and the feminist war against Rush Limbaugh

The rush to bash Rush Limbaugh for his comments about Sandra Fluke is another attempt to get him off the air--the left hates him because he tells the truth about them. They are going after Clear Channel and his sponsors.

This door of insults only swings one direction--to the right. The left was merciless toward Sarah Palin and Obama just laughed--and made fun of special needs children. They ridicule any woman conservative, and call her terrible names. Our Mr. President Obama chuckled when Tea Party members were smeared for doing nothing more than gathering and learning about their rights, which he continues to trample. "Despite President Obama’s repeated claims to change the tone in Washington, the White House had no comment this afternoon after Teamsters Union leader James Hoffa, speaking at an event before President Obama, said of Tea Party activists that, come November, Democrats should “take these sons of bitch..." For Sandra Fluke he gives a phone call and high praise.

But with Rush, there is a different standard. President Obama shreds the first amendment freedom of religion guarantees with the HHS Mandate; Rush Limbaugh calls a 30 year old radical feminist who wants us to pay for her contraceptives which cost $9/mo, a slut. Which is a bigger threat to America? And by the way, Sandra Fluke's demand for us to all pay for sexual reassignment surgeries will cost a bit more than $9/mo. .

Truly, this woman has an agenda, and I think it's a lot bigger than Limbaugh's.

Stand Up for Religious Freedom

On March 23, 2012, concerned citizens in over 50 cities — including Washington D.C., New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco — will gather at federal buildings for a rally with the theme, “Stand Up for Religious Freedom — Stop the HHS Mandate!”

Thousands of Americans of all faiths are expected to participate in these rallies, organized by Citizens for a Pro-Life Society and the Pro-Life Action League, to oppose the new mandate from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that requires all employers to provide free contraceptives, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs through their health plans. Religious leaders and other public figures will speak out against the HHS Mandate.

Stand up for Religious Freedom