War on Religion?

There's no war on religion, just a concerted effort to attack it on multiple fronts. Case in point: a woman does something which the Church teaches is gravely immoral. Her pastor then tells her that she has committed a gravely immoral sin. She is dismissed from her position at a Catholic school because she might cause scandal by her example; whether I agree or not with how the Catholic school acted (was this just? was this prudent?) aside, I do know first-hand that people are dismissed from Catholic schools for far more frivolous reasons. The difference is that because these are truly frivolous reasons, they cannot be used as a sort of poster-child for such blatantly anti-Catholic publications as the Huffington Post. To be fair, this particular article is reasonably balanced for a HuffPo piece, though my AOL reader (which is affiliated with them) gives me this [1] as the link to it:

Here it is presented as "TEACHER FIRED FOR MEDICAL PROCEDURE," so that the sympathetic reader feels all sorry for the woman and wonders just what medical reasons could get a person fired. Note that the bias is already towards IVF as just another medical procedure, so that moral opposition to it is treated as on a par with, say, opposition to getting teeth drilled, or perhaps to a blood transfusion (there are denominations which treat this procedure as immoral).

The result is that we have a sticky situation in which the Church tells the woman that what she has done is immoral and sinful--and gravely so--because she has done something which the Church teaches is immoral and sinful (and gravely so). Hardly news-worthy, and I would be inclined to ignore it if it existed in a moral and philosophical vacuum. Such a vacuum does not exist.

This is, after all, coming on the heels of the Obama Administration's relatively recent defeat at the hands of the Supreme Court. The administration attempted to define who did and did not count as a minister in a church, rather than keeping the government's nose out of church affairs as the separation between church and state which many self-styled "progressives" demand. Prior to the ruling, there was some speculation that the Obama Administration was gearing up to make a bigger move against the ministerial exception, perhaps that it was hoping that said exception would be struck down and thus that the next step would be, for example, a legal requirement that the Church ordain women. The Supreme Court fortunately went unanimously against the Obama Administration, so I suppose that these speculations will not be answered. The HuffPo piece is pointing at yet another possible challenge to this exception from a different angle; if at first you don't succeed...

Nor is this the only possible front across which religion (and in particular the Church) is being attacked. I am thinking of the ongoing closures of Catholic Charities in various states, because they will not place children with same-sex couples, nevermind that there are plenty of other organizations which will [2]. I am thinking of the ordinance being discussed in Hutchinson, Kansas which would require Churches to host same-sex weddings, which is itself a certain step closer to making them perform said weddings. I am thinking of the Obama Administration's singling out of Catholic organizations to no longer be included in anti human-trafficking efforts (presumably because they will not refer their charges for abortions or sterilizations).

And I am thinking especially of the Obama Administration's tyrannical HHS mandate which would force faithful Catholic employers to violate their consciences in providing their employees insurance which would pay for contraception, sterilization, and yes in some cases abortion (via abortifacent contraceptives) [3], actions which are against the Church's moral teachings because of their intrinsic immorality. The cover-girl for this particular attack has been, of course, Miss Sandra Fluke, who tells us that she spent $1,000/year for contraception while attending one of the best law schools in the country, that at the Catholic Georgetown University. That contraception actually costs about $9/month and is easily and readily available was all overlooked in this particular debate. Also overlooked were the expensive vacations which Miss Fluke was taking to Europe with her boyfriend during this time (perhaps this is why she didn't know that Walmart sells contraception for $9/month).

Equally overlooked (or conveniently forgotten) was the Call to Renewal Keynote Address which then Senator Obama gave during his election bid against Mr Alan Keyes. This was the speech which originally put him on the political radar, for those whose memory is that long; it is the one for which he was widely lauded by all the right people (progressives, the main-stream media, the Chicago Machine Democratic Party's leadership), the speech about religion and politics. In that very speech he said that

"what I am suggesting is this – secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryant, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King – indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history – were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. To say that men and women should not inject their "personal morality" into public policy debates is a practical absurdity; our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition."

Bit by bit, the Obama Administration and its allies have been doing just this, and more. His rhetoric about "freedom of worship" (as opposed to freedom of religion) is precisely a clarion call against allowing religion into the public square. But he is not content to remove religion from the public square. He wishes for the government to step in and dictate what freedoms people have in the privacy of their own homes or houses of worship. That what we are seeing doesn't look quite like the wars against (Christian) religion waged by previous (or current, non-Western) states does not change the fact that there is a war against religion nor that it is being actively waged along multiple fronts by the Obama Administration.


--Footnotes--
[1] Note the second story is about the confession of a former priest. It's actually a fairly innocuous-sounding story about a man who left the priesthood after amassing a huge amount of credit-debt. Problem is that it treats the priesthood as just another career (it's not, it's a vocation) which can and should be picked up or dropped for any old reason (e.g. that the priest in question wanted some advancement).

[2] Overlooked here are all of the children who will no longer be placed for adoption, period, since the Catholic Charities was especially good at finding homes for the "difficult" cases.

[3] Not to mention the mandatory monthly abortion surcharge, so that now people who have insurance (which is mandatory) will be forced to fund abortions directly.