When it comes to protecting religious liberty from the encroachments of an increasingly anti-Christian government, author George Weigel makes it crystal clear that there’s no refuge available in some unreal non-partisan“middle”:
The HHS mandate did not come from nowhere. It came from an administration that (as the bishops also point out) had signaled a shrinkage in its understanding of “religious freedom” as applied to international human rights policy. It came from an administration that . . . has persistently and willfully ignored the expressed concerns of thoughtful citizens about the coercive path it was treading.
Would that we had two political parties that honored religious freedom in full. But we don’t. And this argument will not be resolved at some mythical 50-yard line where all of us learn to just get along. Someone is going to win this debate over the future of civil society, and someone is going to lose it. And while the HHS mandate will most likely be struck down by the federal judiciary on [Religious Freedom Restoration Act] grounds, the larger argument over Leviathan vs. civil society will be determined politically. To suggest otherwise is either disingenuous or naïve.
As for the Commonweal editors’ worries about the complexities of religious-freedom issues that require “the careful weighing of competing moral claims,” enough is enough: Sandra Fluke has no “competing moral claim” to have her readily available contraceptives subsidized and provided by fellow citizens, and it is a degradation of both moral argument and political theory to suggest that she does. (“Framing the Religious-Liberty Issue").
Read Weigel’s complete article here.
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