We cannot – we will not comply with this unjust law (http://www.catholicvote.org/discuss/index.php?p=25613&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter). People of faith cannot be made second-class citizens. We are already joined by our brothers and sisters of all faiths and many others of good will in this important effort to regain our religious freedom. Our parents and grandparents did not come to these shores to help build America’s cities and towns, its infrastructure and institutions, its enterprise and culture, only to have their prosperity stripped of their God given rights. In generations past, the Church has always been able to count on the faithful to stand up and protect her sacred rights and duties. I hope she can trust on this generation of Catholics to do the same. Our children and grandchildren deserve nothing less.
They'll carve out an exception and the rest of the evil monstrosity will march merrily on...
That's just my prediction though...
They'll carve out an exception and the rest of the evil monstrosity will march merrily on...
That's just my prediction though...
Or the State will seize the assets and try to run them without the Catholic Church.
The Church should have theatened to simply close down the facilities in total.
They can carve out an exception, but it will be hard to deny others in court.
We cannot and will not ....
Damn right.
Nancy Pelosi vows to stand with Barack Obama against the Catholic Church and religious freedom.
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2012/02/pelosi-vows-to-stand-with-obama-against-catholic-church-religious-freedom/ (http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2012/02/pelosi-vows-to-stand-with-obama-against-catholic-church-religious-freedom/)
This twit is a Catholic, right? The Church could regain much of its credibility if it called a press conference and excommunicated this evil woman!
“...... dare I say it, maybe even in the streets,” Donohue said.
“...... dare I say it, maybe even in the streets,” Donohue said.
Are we there yet?
His Ø'ness just lost a minimum of 15% of the moderate vote.
To the tune of ::dancinginthestreets::
I think it's time for the Pope to pay a visit to his highness and fix it in public once and for all.!!
It's what happens when one allows THE LEFT in; there's nothing "liberal" about them and they pervert everything they touch.
On that same sinister theme...
The Great One, El Rushbo -
“The Constitution doesn’t matter to the [Obama] regime. The regime is simply saying,’To hell with the Constitution. We’re gonna implement this regardless what the Constitution says!‘
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2012/02/rush-limbaugh-the-real-target-of-obamas-hhs-birth-control-mandate-is-the-constitution-video/ (http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2012/02/rush-limbaugh-the-real-target-of-obamas-hhs-birth-control-mandate-is-the-constitution-video/)
Yup!
We are at war with the sinister, and Obama is the ringleader!
Yup!
We are at war with the sinister, and Obama is the ringleader!
This isn’t about women. It’s not about contraception. This is about a president of the United States who has no respect for the Constitution, no respect for the First Amendment, and also has no respect for people of faith – and I’m not trying to be controversial, but there’s no balancing involved here.
I didn’t know we were having a problem getting contraceptives in this country. I mean they fund Planned Parenthood who hands out this stuff like candy. So there’s really no problem in this country with access. What he’s trying to do is break down that line between church and state in reverse and it’s contemptible!
::laserkill::
Now there's some dumbass Black congresswoman out there proclaiming that pregnancy is a horrible risk to women's health and to their families.
She obviously is unaware that pregnancy is what MAKES FAMILIES, but nevermind that.
A certain segment of these pro-abort lunatics have been declaiming pregnancy as a treatable disease for decades. Guess what the treatment is.
Now there's some dumbass Black congresswoman out there proclaiming that pregnancy is a horrible risk to women's health and to their families.
She obviously is unaware that pregnancy is what MAKES FAMILIES, but nevermind that.
A certain segment of these pro-abort lunatics have been declaiming pregnancy as a treatable disease for decades. Guess what the treatment is.
::cussing:: evil!
They got Obongo on the radio, playing that stupid clip about him saying the mandate for coverage is now on insurers', not the organization! What a load of sh*t! Who PAYS the bills fothermucker Obama?! The people you are forcing to accept this encroachment! Eff them all, keep fighting these jackasses!
From Jake Tapper at ABC News, Obama to Announce Contraception Rule ‘Accommodation’ for Religious Organizations:
With the White House under fire for its new rule requiring employers including religious organizations to offer health insurance that fully covers birth control coverage, at 12:15 p.m. ET, President Obama will announce an attempt to accommodate these religious groups.
The move, based on state models, will almost certainly not satisfy bishops and other religious leaders since it will preserve the goal of women employees having their birth control fully covered by health insurance.
Sources say it will be respectful of religious beliefs but will not back off from that goal, which many religious leaders oppose since birth control is in violation of their religious beliefs.
One source familiar with the decision described the accommodation as “Hawaii-plus,” insisting that it’s better than the Hawaii plan — for both sides.
If memory serves, the Obama team were advised to use the Hawaii plan as some sort of model by which to exempt the churches ‘way back in October of last year. It was rejected, then.
Glenn Reynolds, noting the headline, writes:
My advice to the bishops: He’s on the run — don’t settle for his opening bid.
I agree with “don’t settle for the opening bid” but am not sure I agree that he is on the run.
Take no first offers, and I’m not sure about second offers, either. The thing is, no matter what Obama says, he has proved himself to be untrustworthy where the rights of the churches are concerned.
The fact that this episode ever developed at all, when it absolutely did not need to, and the fact of Hosanna-Tabor, suggests to me that this administration will continue to assault the rights of churches to be who and what they are, and to freely exercise their religion beyond the doors of the church. Freedom of Religion does not limit us to the confines of the church, but Obama’s stated commitment to “Freedom of Worship” absolutely does; “Freedom of Worship” is a mischaracterization of what the constitution says.
I expect President Obama will come out and say something that sounds wonderful and conciliatory and that seems reasonable to people who are eager to reconcile with the president and give themselves permission to vote for him again in November. I also expect that beyond the words, what the President offers will be too little — the government miserly granting to us pieces of freedom we are utterly entitled to own outright — but it will be “enough” for some.
And with that, Obama will have done the thing he needs to do, here, which is re-divide the Catholics who have apparently surprised him with their nearly unanimous condemnation of his HHS Mandate.
Re-divide and conquer. If he can get the Catholics who have loved and trusted him until now back under his wing, the bishops and the rest of the Catholics go back to being “reactionary neanderthals” who are simply too stubborn to give in to his benevolence.
If that’s what happens — if Obama comes out and throws a sop to the Catholics he has recently stabbed in the back, and they jump at the chance to reboard his ship — then everything immediately gets much, much uglier, everywhere.
But the thing to remember is this: Obama has now demonstrated that he cannot be trusted to deal in good faith with the churches. Even if he gives a “full exemption”, one needs to worry whether he can be trusted if he wins re-election, and is no longer constrained by the need to please anyone.
Then, I suspect Brad Miner’s Facebrook remarks from yesterday will be proved right. He wrote:
I expect the president to back down — to offer full exemptions to religious organizations. Then, if he wins reelection, we will get a screwing the like of which Catholicism hasn’t seen since the 16th century.
Remember Lucy and the football
UPDATED: My friend Thomas L. McDonald, on Facebook with the WH Fact Sheet:
I just got the WH press briefing. Money line:
“The policy also ensures that if a woman works for religious employers with objections to providing contraceptive services as part of its health plan, the religious employer will not be required to provide contraception coverage, but her insurance company will be required to offer contraceptive care free of charge.”
Meaningless.
Well, Ed Morrissey spells that out:
“. . .so the administration response will be tell insurers for religious organizations to take on the costs themselves without passing it along to the religious organizations that pay for the policies? I’m not sure that even Chris Matthews will buy that as a “compromise.” Religious organizations whose doctrines oppose birth control are not going to buy insurance policies that cover it — nor should the government be forcing them to do so.
This is not a “direct” co-operation with evil, but an “indirect” one, and now we’ll have to go to Aquinas (I think? I need to brush up) but I’m pretty sure it was Aquinas who reasoned that an “indirect” co-operation with evil was sometimes unavoidable in the world.
I expect it will be “enough” for those whose worldview was shaken over the past week and who want and need to be back on Obama’s side, where it all makes sense again. Their concerns having been “accommodated”, they’ll start offering much deeper theological musing than I can between direct and indirect co-operation with evil, and for most things will become very muddled, and everyone else will go back to watching American Idol.
Missing in their musings, I fear, will be the basic, fundamental truth that — “accommodated” in this way or not — the government does not give us our rights, piecemeal; they come from God.
An “accommodation” that puts us in “indirect” co-operation with evil when our rights say we ought not be forced into any co-operation, direct or not, is a game. It’s the football; it is the willful division.
UPDATE II: And yes, as I suspected, the Catholic Health Association is “very pleased” and back on board the bus, after having been so deftly thrown under it. As he did during the Obamacare debate, the Obama team is once again using a sister to soften the breakers and give the progressive imprimatur:
The Catholic Health Association is very pleased with the White House announcement that a resolution has been reached that protects the religious liberty and conscience rights of Catholic institutions. The framework developed has responded to the issues we identified that needed to be fixed.
We are pleased and grateful that the religious liberty and conscience protection needs of so many ministries that serve our country were appreciated enough that an early resolution of this issue was accomplished. The unity of Catholic organizations in addressing this concern was a sign of its importance.
Planned Parenthood, by the way is also very pleased.
That really tells me what this “accommodation” is worth.
And the narrative now becomes: “look at what a great conciliator Obama is, and how obnoxious these church-hardliners are.”
People get played, every day. No one is asking, “why did this president have to make this “accommodation” at all? If he was committed to religious liberty, this controversy would never have occurred at all.
Still waiting for the response of the Bishops, who are now finding themselves squeezed between the bus and the press.
UPDATE III:
Kathryn Jean Lopez: The folks who gave us Obamacare are back
The Obama administration strategy is consistently to confuse people. That is how the bill we had to pass to find out what was in it came to be law.
[...]
There will be a lot of confusion. But don’t be confused, and don’t let people around you be confused. These last days have been instructive [. . .] This new mandate moves us closer to what Pope Benedict XVI warned against in his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est (“God is Love”): “The state which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself . . [is]. a state which regulates and controls everything.”
Religious liberty is not an “accommodation.” This fight is not over today. It has only just begun.
"My advice to the bishops: He’s on the run — don’t settle for his opening bid."
This is when you stomp the living sh*t out of him! No compromise, no surrender, full steam ahead!!!
"My advice to the bishops: He’s on the run — don’t settle for his opening bid."
This is when you stomp the living sh*t out of him! No compromise, no surrender, full steam ahead!!!
Wouldn't I love to see it, but I suspect they're going to cave. And I suspect that because absolutely no one will stand up to this guy, nevermind stomp him.
You just know there was a large contingency within the Catholic church that was dying for some justification to enter back into the Leftist fold after King Barack's proclamation. For those, this "accommodation" was a godsend.
It would not surprise me in the least to learn that the hardline proclamation was just part of an overall strategy to make the proclamation, deal with the agitation over it, and then offer this "accommodation" to make it all better, thereby getting exactly what they want: religious institutions paying for contraception against the doctrine of the church, while those same institutions fawn over how "reasonable" the administration is.
"See how reasonable our Leftist masters are? They only try to do what they think is best for their subjects, but when the subjects don't like it, they will make accommodations." That's the story moving forward.
Oklahoma Republican Sen. Tom Coburn — a stalwart against government overreach — disagrees with the Obama administration’s mandate that even religiously-affiliated employers provide employees with insurance that covers contraception, but he doesn’t think it represents a particularly drastic departure from the president’s other policies.
“This is blown out of proportion,” he said. “It is an important point in terms of religious liberty, but it’s a consequence of having too big of a government.”
Coburn acknowledged that the program has “professed benefits,” but said “in the long run we all lose when the government is that involved in our life.”
“There’s nothing wrong with their motivation — they’re well-meaning people,” he said. “But the consequence is that we lose liberty.”
Perhaps he has a point; after all, it’s not as though this were the first indication we’ve had that the president wants to prescribe what constitutes “health care.” As Daniel Henninger writes in The Wall Street Journal, inflexibility has long been a hallmark of those who seek to transform the nation for the public good:
Older Americans have sought for years to drop out of Medicare and contract for their own health insurance. They cannot without forfeiting their Social Security payments. They effectively are locked in. Nor can the poor escape Medicaid, even as the care it gives them degrades. Farmers, ranchers and loggers struggled for years to protect their livelihoods beneath uncompromising interpretations of federal environmental laws. They, too, had to comply. University athletic programs were ground up by the U.S. Education Department’s rote, forced gender balancing of every sport offered.
With the transformers, it never stops. In September, the Obama Labor Department proposed rules to govern what work children can do on farms. After an outcry from rural communities over the realities of farm traditions, the department is now reconsidering a “parental exemption.” Good luck to the farmers.
The Catholic Church has stumbled into the central battle of the 2012 presidential campaign: What are the limits to Barack Obama’s transformative presidency? The Catholic left has just learned one answer: When Mr. Obama says, “Everyone plays by the same set of rules,” it means they conform to his rules. What else could it mean?
If Coburn had meant that objectors to the mandate are overly dramatic to link it to religious liberty, then I would have vehemently disagreed with him. In that sense, the debate is not “overblown.” But if what he means is that we should have woken up before now — and that this doesn’t fundamentally change the fight we’re waging, which is to repeal Obamacare entirely — then he’s right. An exclusive focus on the Obama administration’s overreach in the case of the contraception mandate just isn’t quite broad enough: We still need complete repeal.
He's wrong about that -- THEY ARE NOT WELL-MEANING PEOPLE.
QuoteHe's wrong about that -- THEY ARE NOT WELL-MEANING PEOPLE.
He's from the g'mnt and he means well.
If Stymiecare is Federal Law how can the administration make these tweaks without congress writing the exceptions and voting on them ... or is that yet to come ?
If Stymiecare is Federal Law how can the administration make these tweaks without congress writing the exceptions and voting on them ... or is that yet to come ?
If Stymiecare is Federal Law how can the administration make these tweaks without congress writing the exceptions and voting on them ... or is that yet to come ?
They are lawless, that's how. Look at what they did yesterday with "No Child left Behind". An abomination of a law, yes, but it IS the law of the land, passed by both chambers of congress and signed by the exective - you know, the old fashioned way.
But the Obama regime hands out "waivers" to 10 states? Lawless.
Everybody has to stand up, Soup, Catholics, all other Christians sects, Jews, all other believers and non-believers, to defend the Constitution.
If Stymiecare is Federal Law how can the administration make these tweaks without congress writing the exceptions and voting on them ... or is that yet to come ?
They are lawless, that's how. Look at what they did yesterday with "No Child left Behind". An abomination of a law, yes, but it IS the law of the land, passed by both chambers of congress and signed by the exective - you know, the old fashioned way.
But the Obama regime hands out "waivers" to 10 states? Lawless.
You don't know the half of it ....
http://itsaboutliberty.com/index.php/topic,4798.new.html#new (http://itsaboutliberty.com/index.php/topic,4798.new.html#new)
Everybody has to stand up, Soup, Catholics, all other Christians sects, Jews, all other believers and non-believers, to defend the Constitution.
And, of course, we have Mrs. Holy Roman Catholic adding her two cents:
Pelosi: Republicans Want 'to Use the Excuse of Religious Freedom' to Harm 'Women's Health' (http://cnsnews.com/news/article/pelosi-republicans-want-use-excuse-religious-freedom-harm-womens-health)
"The excuse". The woman is detestable; beneath contempt.
And since when do women have a right to free contraceptives?
And, of course, we have Mrs. Holy Roman Catholic adding her two cents:
Pelosi: Republicans Want 'to Use the Excuse of Religious Freedom' to Harm 'Women's Health' (http://cnsnews.com/news/article/pelosi-republicans-want-use-excuse-religious-freedom-harm-womens-health)
"The excuse". The woman is detestable; beneath contempt.
And since when do women have a right to free contraceptives?
For over 2,000 years the Catholic Church has had the same position and for some reason there are still women left among us. You would think that by now we(Catholics) would have killed them all off.
Of course, all of us have now heard that contraception is a very, very important part of Women’s Health™ (can someone help me register that as a trademark because I think that would be kind of funny if I owned it?).A bit more at the link. Be sure to check out the pictures with their amusing captions.
We’ve had this fact pounded into our skulls by the current administration and their media minions.
Women’s Health™ (yes, I’m going to keep writing it like that and in fact, every time you read it I want you to go “Ahhh” in your head in a kind of a sing-songy way like a chorus of angels would if the clouds had just parted and a powerful beam of sunlight was shining down upon the word) is different from regular health.
And it’s actually much more important.
We have been told repeatedly by our esteemed Commander in Health that it is so important that EVERY insurance program should cover it. No matter what.
Not only should they cover it, but they should cover it WITHOUT a co-pay.
Because, you know, asking women to pay $20 for a prescription is evil and horrible and mean and most likely, (cringe) Republican.
Now, say your child has an ear infection or pneumonia, you can pay $20 for that because it’s not a Women’s Health™ issue it’s just a plain-old, regular health issue.
If a young mother has a heart condition and needs medication, well she can pay $20 for that too because it is not a matter of Women’s Health™ (“Ahhh…”). It’s just a matter of regular health.
If that same young mother wants to have sex without having a baby, well she damn well better not have to pay $20 for that! Because as well know, that is a matter of Women’s Health™.
So, it seems like Women’s Health™ is all the parts of healthcare that have to do with uteruses (or is it uteri?) and sex and pregnancy and not-getting pregnant and taking pills that might kill babies.
Pretty clear, right?
Oh wait, but there is one big exception: Women’s Health™ does not cover pregnancy or childbirth or any care related to either one.
Nope. Not one bit.
(http://www.catholicvote.org/discuss/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/womens-health-300x257.jpg)
Google thinks balancing yogurt and strawberries are an important part of Women's Health.
LOL. Reminds me of this Onion article (http://www.theonion.com/articles/women-now-empowered-by-everything-a-woman-does,1398/).(http://media.theonion.com/images/articles/article/1398/Women-Now-Empowered_jpg_250x1000_q85.jpg)
San Diego women empower themselves by eating dinner unaccompanied by men.
Klein said that clothes-shopping, once considered a mundane act with few sociopolitical implications, is now a bold feminist statement.::laughonfloor::
"Shopping for shoes has emerged as a powerful means by which women assert their autonomy," Klein said. "Owning and wearing dozens of pairs of shoes is a compelling way for a woman to announce that she is strong and independent, and can shoe herself without the help of a man. She's saying, 'Look out, male-dominated world, here comes me and my shoes.'"