There have been a number of quotes worth noting and passing along
regarding the many lawsuits against the HHS mandate. Let's begin with
Timothy Cardinal Dolan, appearing today on "CBS This Morning:
Timothy
Cardinal Dolan told "CBS This Morning" Tuesday that the compromise
reached earlier this year is not sufficient because the exemptions made
for churches are too restrictive.
"They
tell us if you're really going be considered a church, if you're going
to be really exempt from these demands of the government, well, you
have to propagate your Catholic faith and everything you do, you can
serve only Catholics and employ only Catholics," Dolan said.
"We're
like, wait a minute, when did the government get in the business of
defining for us the extent of our ministry," Dolan said. ...
Dolan
also criticized Georgetown University's decision to invite Health and
Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to speak to graduates of its
school of public policy last week because of her role in formulating
the policy.
"Well, I
do think that's a problem. Georgetown is the oldest Catholic
university in the country. Part of Catholic identity is to be in union
with the bishops," Dolan said.
"When
they would invite someone that is so dramatically at odds with one of
the central tenets of the faith, that does bother us," Dolan said.
Next, an excerpt from Mary Ann Glendon's WSJ essay, "Why the Bishops are Suing the U.S. Government":
Like
most Americans, the bishops have long taken for granted the religious
freedom that has enabled this nation's diverse religions to flourish in
relative harmony. But over the past year they have become increasingly
concerned about the erosion of conscience protections for church-related
individuals and institutions. Their top-rated program for assistance to
human trafficking victims was denied funding for refusing to provide
"the full range of reproductive services," including abortion. For a
time, Catholic Relief Services faced a similar threat to its
international relief programs. The bishops fear religious liberty is
becoming a second-class right. ...
More
is at stake here than the mission of all churches, including the
Catholic Church, to provide social services like health care and
education to everyone regardless of creed, and to do so without
compromising their beliefs. At the deepest level, we are witnessing an
attack on the institutions of civil society that are essential to
limited government and are important buffers between the citizen and the
all-powerful state.
If religious providers of education, health
care and social services are closed down or forced to become tools of
administration policy, the government consolidates a monopoly over those
essential services. As Cardinal Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S.
Conference of Catholic Bishops, put it, we are witnessing an effort to
reduce religion to a private activity. "Never before," he said, "have we
faced this kind of challenge to our ability to engage in the public
square as people of faith."
And from George Weigel, writing at NRO yesterday:
This
argument over the meaning of religious freedom was not initiated by the
Catholic Church; it was initiated by an administration that seems to
regard “religious freedom” as merely a privacy right to certain kinds of
recreational activities (like worship). As in its international
human-rights policy (which speaks exclusively of “freedom of worship”),
the administration seems unwilling or unable to grasp an elementary
truth: Religious convictions are community-forming, and those
communities, like the individuals whose conscientious convictions form
them, are the subject of genuine religious freedom.
While Obama
supporters (including some Catholics) will contend that this is partisan
politics, it isn’t — except insofar as the administration has made it
so. It was the administration that refused to countenance Catholic
concerns before and after the mandate was issued. It was the
administration whose apologists (including Secretary Sebelius) bent
every effort to turn what was clearly a religious-freedom issue into a
“War on Women.” It has been the administration and its Senate allies,
like Majority Leader Harry Reid, who have refused to enter into any sort
of serious discussion aimed at mitigating Catholic concerns. It is the
administration that seems willing to drive the Catholic Church out of
health care, education, and social services if that is what is required
to enforce the administration’s notions of “reproductive health” and
“reproductive choice.” If the administration pays a price for this in
November, it will have no one to blame except itself.
Read his entire piece, "The Mandate War". The fourth and final quote is from Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center:
The
evening news broadcasts all but spiked the largest legal action in
history to defend our constitutionally protected religious freedom. The
May 21 editions of ABC’s World News and NBC’s Nightly News refused to
report the fact that 43 Catholic dioceses and organizations filed a
lawsuit on Monday against the Obama administration. CBS Evening News
gave this historic news a mere 19 seconds of air time.
This is the worst bias by omission I have seen in the quarter century
history of the Media Research Center. Every American knows about the
Chinese communists withholding for 20 years the news that the US had
landed on the moon, because it reflected poorly on the government. Our
US media today are no different. They are now withholding news from the
American people if it is harmful to the re-election of Barack Obama. ...
The fact is that the Catholic Church has unleashed legal Armageddon on
the administration, promising ‘we will not comply’ with a health law
that strips Catholics of their religious liberty. If this isn't 'news'
then there's no such thing as news.
His entire post can be read on the News Busters site. I'm not too taken with the use of "Armageddon", but for those who are familiar with the Book of Revelation, it has a certain if strained viability.