Beginning for two weeks, up to Independence Day, the Bishops are having a Fortnight For Freedom:
We here at The American Catholic are participating in the Fortnight For Freedom with special blog posts on each day. This is the twelfth of these blog posts.
The fight over the HHS Mandate essentially boils down to a fight to uphold religious liberty. Such struggles for liberty in our nation’s history are very important because they go to the very core of our nation. Abraham Lincoln understood this, and in a speech he gave in Edwardsville, Illinois on September 11, 1858, got to the heart of the matter:
The use of the power of the State to compel Americans to act against their conscience is the very essence of what the First Amendment seeks to guard against. Those who cheer today over the use of such power because they hate the Catholic Church, or because of blind partisan allegiance, are helping to forge a sword which will be turned against their liberties sooner or later.
When the PERSON of God was banned from the public square by the Supreme Court, the atheist said: “Take your religion and yourself from the public square and pray in the privacy of your home”, codifying the words of Jesus: “Go into the privacy of your room, close the door and pray to our Father in heaven.” That “private room” that Jesus exhorts us to enter to pray, that “private room” that the state orders us to enter into to pray is our CONSCIENCE. That “private room”, that conscience, that God has created in man to know, to love, and to serve HIM is being violated, is being intruded upon by the HHS mandate. That “private room”, that conscience, that God has created in man to constitute the state for His greater glory is being violently besieged by the HHS mandate and other atheists around the world. Desecration of the soul of man and his conscience; deconstruction of our founding principles and introduction of atheism is establishment of religion by government; the boot on the neck of man’s rational, immortal soul and his sacred conscience by the state.
First the state says: “Go into your room to pray.” Then, the state takes the privacy, the freedom of our room from us. The progressives’ move to annihilate FREEDOM. VIVA CRISTO REY