Religious Freedom Daily

Encourage me to actually make this feature daily if it is of use to you. We should be highlighting clarifying items to family and friends throughout the day.

It’s only our first freedom and all.

Did you read Mark Rienzi, Catholic U professor and Becket Fund lawyer on the Catholic lawsuits yet? You can read him here. It is an important corrective to a lot of ridiculously inaccurate reporting.

Speaking of: Credit to the Times for at least publishing Baltimore Archbishop William Lori’s letter to the editor in response to its misleading editorial? Archbishop Lori writes:

“The Politics of Religion” (editorial, May 28) tries to turn a severe breach of the separation of church and state by the Department of Health and Human Services into a breach by the Roman Catholic Church. It plays down government coercion by describing the department as merely “including contraceptives in basic health care coverage,” omitting that the coverage is included by force, even over religious and moral objection.

Church entities are described as trying to “impose their dogma on society through the law,” but the Supreme Court decided long ago that laws cannot prohibit the sale or use of contraception. These suits do not challenge that, but instead whether church entities can be forced to facilitate and finance the exercise of that freedom.

You claim that forcing insurers, rather than employers directly, means “no employer involvement,” but self-insuring employers are the insurer, and for the rest, the employer still provides the plan that becomes the conduit for the coverage and pays the premiums.

If you haven’t already, do take a look at what Archbishop Lori had to say recently about this fight, at an Ethics and Public Policy Center dinner. I wrote about it here.

Speaking of things I write, my syndicated column this week is on religious liberty and human dignity and that sex-selection abortion ban that failed (!) last week in the House of Representatives. You can read it here. (More on that in a bit … )

Salena Zito writes:

Worry about eroding religious freedom could sway Roman Catholic voters further away from President Obama, and the Catholic voting bloc typically predicts the winner in presidential elections, experts say.

But Dems are not going to let Catholic Obama voters go without a fight, she explains.

This is much bigger than Ds vs. Rs this time around, I hope everyone realizes.