Brethren, Peace and Good to all in Jesus’ Name.
Columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote this in the WaPo and was republished at the Catholic Education and Resource Center’s website. It is a good analysis of the Obama Administration’s strategy of “dividing and conquer” that has been enabling them to violate our freedom of conscience. Here’s an excerpt:
Give him points for cleverness. President Obama’s birth control “accommodation” was as politically successful as it was morally meaningless.
It was nothing but an accounting trick that still forces Catholic (and other religious) institutions to provide medical insurance that guarantees free birth control, tubal ligation and morning-after abortifacients — all of which violate church doctrine on the sanctity of life.
The trick is that these birth control/abortion services will supposedly be provided independently and free of charge by the religious institution's insurance company. But this changes none of the moral calculus. Holy Cross Hospital, for example, is still required by law to engage an insurance company that is required by law to provide these doctrinally proscribed services to all Holy Cross employees.
Nonetheless, the accounting device worked politically. It took only a handful of compliant Catholic groups — Obamacare cheerleaders dying to return to the fold — to hail the alleged compromise and hand Obama a major political victory.
Before, Obama's coalition had been split. His birth control mandate was fiercely opposed by such stalwart friends as former Virginia governor Tim Kaine and pastor Rick Warren (Obama's choice to give the invocation at his inauguration), who declared he would rather go to jail than abide by the regulation. After the "accommodation," it was the (mostly) Catholic opposition that fractured. The mainstream media then bought the compromise as substantive, and the issue was defused.
Please continue reading here.
Furthermore, EWTN’s Raymond Arroyo’s reporting on this issue, broadcasted last Thursday on his World Over newscast is a must see, if you wish to understand the issue from a true Catholic perspective:
There’s a lot of misleading anti-Catholic propaganda out there on this issue, and many dissenting Catholics-in-name-only are lending themselves as useful tools for advancing the Obama Administration’s conscience-violating provisions. Don’t be mislead!
The issue here is not the right of Catholic dissenters to disregard the Church’s moral stance, but the right of faithful Catholics to live according to their consciences without the government’s forcing them to violate their consciences. The state has no such right, just as it also lacks the power to legalize abortion, or same-sex “marriage.” Caesar is not enthroned in our altars, Jesus is. We will not obey, and we will not comply with Caesar’s decree: we will not burn incense for him.