"Pelosi, who regularly and loudly declares herself a faithful Catholic, last week belittled Catholic hospitals: 'They have this conscience thing,' she sneered about the hospitals that want to be free not to abort unborn babies," writes Examiner columnist Timothy P. Carney.
With Advent underway, get ready for the annual debate over whether stores should say "Merry Christmas" (offensive to non-Christians, critics say) or "Season's greetings" (a capitulation to political correctness, many Christians say).
This is a silly flap (I say let the hypercommercialized, secularized holiday take on its own name, like "Holiday Sale," and use "Christmas" when celebrating our savior's birth). More importantly, the argument over nomenclature distracts from a far more serious threat: the U.S. government's war on the freedom of conscience.
Social liberals claim they promote tolerance, preventing oppressive Christian conservatives from "imposing their morality" on everyone. But the state of the culture war in America today is almost exactly the opposite: The secular Left is using the might of government to make it harder for religious people to live their own lives according to their faith.
Nancy Pelosi, who regularly and loudly declares herself a faithful Catholic, last week belittled Catholic hospitals: "They have this conscience thing," she sneered about the hospitals that want to be free not to abort unborn babies. How ironic that Pelosi and like-minded liberals call themselves "pro-choice."
Newt Gingrich put it well in the recent Thanksgiving Family Forum in Iowa: "If you look at the history from the mid-1960s, we've gone from a request for toleration to an imposition of intolerance. We've gone from a quest to understand others to a determination to close down those who hold traditional values."
Obamacare gives us the latest case study. The bill gave the secretary of Health & Human Services unprecedented power to regulate insurance plans, while also forcing individuals and employers to buy health insurance. Department Secretary Kathleen Sebelius issued a rule outlawing any new insurance plan that doesn't fully cover the cost of all contraception, including "morning-after" pills that can also cause abortions.
The rule included a conscience exemption for "religious employers," but it defined "religious" so narrowly that it applies to virtually no one. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote that "not even the ministry of Jesus and the early Christian Church would qualify as 'religious'" because they served and preached to non-Christians.
Belmont Abbey College is a Catholic college in North Carolina that was founded by Benedictine monks. In all likelihood, the "religious employer" exemption won't protect Belmont Abbey, and the school will be forced to buy contraceptives for its students, in violation of the Church's teaching.
College President Bill Thierfelder wrote in a memo, "As a college, we find our center in Jesus Christ. Not only in our teaching, but also in our actions. Our policies must mirror our beliefs -- we simply cannot do what we believe is morally wrong."
He added, "We are not imposing our beliefs upon anyone else. We respect the constitutional right of all faiths to freely exercise their religion. We simply want that constitutional right given to us as well."
The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty has come to the aid of Belmont Abbey, filing a complaint seeking to strike down the free-pills mandate.
In a legal complaint in the District's federal court, the college contends that Sebelius's free-pills-for-all mandate is simple persecution:
"Had Belmont Abbey College's religious beliefs been obscure or unknown, the government's actions might have been an accident," the complaint allows. "But because the government acted with full knowledge of those beliefs, and because it allows plans not to cover these services for a wide range of reasons other than religion, the Mandate can be interpreted as nothing other than a deliberate attack by the government on the religious beliefs of Belmont Abbey College and millions of other Americans."
The Obama administration is deliberately making it illegal for Catholics to live as Catholics. This is standard fare from today's Left.
A wedding photographer in New Mexico, whose business was just herself, her husband and her camera, was fined for refusing to photograph a lesbian commitment ceremony. In many states, a homeowner breaks the law if he refuses to rent his basement one-bedroom apartment to unmarried couples.
The government has driven the Catholic Church out of adoptions and out of aiding the victims of human trafficking because the Church wants to conduct its activities according to its teachings on marriage and abortion.
Yet the American Left pretends it's still fighting the Scopes Monkey Trial, warning absurdly of "theocracy" and "dominionism."
Yesterday's liberal culture warriors argued that adults should be free to live their lives as they want, right or wrong. For today's liberal culture warriors, however, "tolerance" means telling you how to run your own affairs.
Timothy P.Carney, The Examiner's senior political columnist, can be contacted at tcarney@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears Monday and Thursday, and his stories and blog posts appear on ExaminerPolitics.com.
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