Back when Hillary Clinton was still blaming the internet for the Benghazi terrorist attack, she made this odd statement, "Our commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation." There was no religious tolerance at the beginning of our nation when we were English, French and Spanish colonies, nor is it a Biblical value or ethic. True, Catholics and Protestants weren't slaughtering each other like they did in Europe, but those who came here for religious freedom really didn't want other groups, or the STATE, telling them how to worship or act.
One of the geniuses of our Bill of Rights is that our Founders were able to get all these disparate groups to actually agree that religious freedom was primary to all other freedoms. The Northwest Ordinance (1787) preceded the Bill of Rights, and also enshrined the idea the state couldn't decide your religious beliefs and behavior.
And now with 70% of the world without religious freedom, and even outright religious oppression and terrorism, our current President wants to diminish what centuries of Christians and Jews died for--not tolerance, not non-judgementalism, not political correctness--but religious freedom. The HHS Mandate is the camel's nose in the tent.
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2 comments:
I guess that I have a different view of religious freedom. Many people regard contraception as a moral/religious matter. The HHS Mandate is often interpreted as the federal government forcing religiously affiliated hospitals, universities, agencies etc to provide free birth control to their employees. But it is really a conflict between employer and employee over whether the employee has freedom of choice or the employer has veto power over birth control. Somebody's religious freedom is going to be bent out of shape. I would prefer that the employee have freedom of choice.
There are many things in any insurance policy that are not covered. Why single out birth control as the moral high road? It won't stop with this Bruce. Abortion will be the next--our church had a policy required by the synod, which covered abortion for any reason, even sex selection. I'm guessing not a single person in the church supported that. Fortunately, we left that synod (although not for that reason).
No company can afford to insure every possible treatment, pill, condition. And in this case, the 1st Amendment draws the line between what the state can impose on the church. You know what your view is, but what matters is what is the Roman Catholic view.
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