But the Obama administration has ended that truce.  The administration made a decision to require all employers to provide contraception, abortion-inducing drugs and sterilization.  The administration offers no religious exemption for people who have the audacity to believe that pregnancy is not an illness that needs to be always and everywhere prevented.

In effect, we have a new state religion, a new Established Church of the United States of America, with Barack Obama as its head. It is the religion of Secular Hedonism, the worldview that sex is a sterile recreational activity, with babies thrown in as an afterthought, an optional extra, for people with quirky life-style preferences.  The contraceptive mandate uses the full might of the US government to scrub the public square clean of any competing religious voices that dissent from the new orthodoxy.

But because this worldview is fundamentally irrational, it cannot stand on its own two feet. Some sexual activity does result in babies.  Not everyone wants their government acting as if the highest goal is that pleasure is to be sought.  Not everyone believes that the purpose of the government is to allow people to indulge themselves sexually, without a live baby ever resulting.

The Catholic Church for instance, famously opposes every precept of Secular Hedonism.  As a matter of fact, so did all of the Christian churches, right up until five minutes ago. The ancient Christian teaching is that marriage is the proper context for sexual activity and for child-bearing, for the good of children, women, and men alike, as well as society as a whole.

The government believes that this dissenting voice cannot be tolerated. It must be crushed. And, of course, from their point of view, they are perfectly correct. They have an established religion that says that every sexual act is intrinsically meaningless except for the meaning we might happen to assign it. They simply can’t allow someone to go around saying that each and every sexual act is sacred, and endowed by our Creator with inalienable significance.  From the point of view of Secular Hedonism, Catholicism must be crushed.

And of course, anyone else who dissents from the new orthodoxy must be crushed as well. That is why so many other faith traditions have joined in criticizing the Obama administration’s usurpation of power from civil society. The National Association of Evangelicals, the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, Orthodox Christians and Orthodox Jews have all criticized the administration’s attack on religious liberty. These religious bodies know that their religious liberties are at stake as well.

The religious truce is officially over. The Established Church of Secular Hedonism has declared war on the rest of us, enlisting the might of the United States government on their side. We will respond using nothing but peaceful means.

We used to refrain from making religious arguments in the public square. We thought it was our duty. We thought it was good strategy.  The Ruth Institute has specialized in defending the ancient Christian teachings, using non-religious arguments.  This no longer makes sense. The arguments are still good arguments.  But there is no longer any reason to hold back from proclaiming our faith. Our position deserves respect, not simply because it is our “deeply held religious belief”.  Our position deserves respect because it is grounded in reason and evidence, and in a far deeper understanding of the human person, and the human good.  The ancient Christian teachings on marriage, family and human sexuality are superior to the teachings of the Established Church of Secular Hedonism.

If we don’t respond firmly, the Obama Administration will assume they can get away with ending religious liberty. This website, StopHHS.org will become a clearing house of info about the insurance mandate. Go sign their petition.

Realizing that his popularity may decline as the price of gasoline rises, President Obama is barnstorming the country, emphatically insisting that drilling for more oil isn’t the cure for high gas prices and that wind and solar energy represent our energy future.

Do these people know who they’re messing with?

Her point, of course, was that the Church has spent nearly two millennia crushing attempts by secular rulers to dictate the way it carries out its charitable ministries. Commanding Catholic hospitals to fund sterilizations, contraceptives, and abortifacients isn’t like twisting the arm of some roundheel congressman. It’s going to take more than the usual Chitown chicanery to cow a venerable and well-funded organization that has brought more than one emperor to his knees.

The Church’s charitable work has been seen as a threat to the power of the state as far back as the reign of Julian the Apostate. Julian was the Roman Emperor who tried to drag his subjects back to the crumbling altars of the old state gods a half a century after his uncle, Constantine I, had legitimized Christianity by converting to the new faith. Julian’s project didn’t go well, and he complained in a letter to one of his high priests that the effort was failing because “the impious Galileans support not only their own poor but ours as well.” What’s an Emperor to do with opponents whose tactics include such dirty tricks as lending aid and comfort to all who need it, including people with religious and political views that differ from their own?

Julian tried to counter the effect of such “impious” tactics by restructuring the imperial administration in such a way that it could compete with the “Galileans” in good works and thereby erode the connection in the public consciousness between charity and the Church. In a move that eerily echoes the progressive vernacular of our own age, Julian issued the Tolerance Edict of 362. The purpose of this decree, like calls for tolerance from modern liberals, was precisely the opposite of its ostensible intent. It re-privileged the old pagan cults, rescinded religious freedoms recognized by Constantine and attempted to sow dissention among Christian ranks by reigniting long-resolved doctrinal controversies.

The Tolerance Edict and a variety of similar edicts flopped. And, after Julian’s short reign ended, his successors gave up his pagan revival project as a bad job. But the meaning of Julian’s failure has been lost on many subsequent rulers, and Barack Obama is among the slow learners who refuse to heed the lessons of history. The president, like Julian, wishes to “transform” his country into a place in which every aspect of the citizen’s life is connected to and controlled by the state. He wants the federal government to be seen as the ultimate arbiter and provider of the electorate’s needs. Obviously, however, this can’t be managed while large and influential institutions like the Catholic Church and its charitable ministries remain in place.

And, where health care is concerned, Catholic institutions are definitely a force to be reckoned with. For example, they provide care to one in six patients treated in the United States every year. During 2010, America’s more than 600 Catholic facilities treated well over 100 million patients, including 19 million emergency patients, and 5.5 million inpatients. And much of the care received by these patients was provided at a loss. Of the 5.5 million in-patients treated by these hospitals during 2010, 3.3 million were covered by Medicare or Medicaid, both of which pay less than the amount it costs to provide treatment. Of the 19 million emergency patients treated at Catholic hospitals, a large percentage paid nothing at all.

So, what happens if the Catholic hospitals simply refuse to abandon their principles and decide to get out of the health care business? This possibility is not as remote as some may believe. Don’t forget what happened in Massachusetts when Catholic charities faced a similar choice relating to adoption. Rather than abandoning their principles they simply stopped offering adoption services. If they take the same course in health care, the effect on our medical delivery system will be disastrous. Not all of the Church’s 600 hospitals would disappear, of course. Some would be bought by large for-profit chains, like HCA. Others would be picked up by big not-for-profit systems. But at least a third would probably go out of business.

And that third will consist mostly of rural and inner city hospitals that treat the nation’s most vulnerable patients. These institutions will never show a positive bottom line because most of their patients are covered by government insurance or none at all. They are only open at present due to the good graces of the Catholic Church and its members. Once those good graces are withdrawn, there will be no buyers and these hospitals will be forced to shut their doors. Where will their patients go for care? The rural patients will have to travel for hours, in some cases, to access care. And many will die on the way. The inner city patients will go to hopelessly overcrowded safety net hospitals where patients already die in the waiting rooms.

Would the Church really withdraw from U.S. health care? In a recent letter to all the Catholic bishops of the United States, Cardinal Timothy Dolan wrote, “We have made it clear in no uncertain terms to the government that we are not at peace with its invasive attempt to curtail the religious freedom we cherish as Catholics and Americans. We did not ask for this fight, but we will not run from it.” In the same letter, Cardinal Dolan quotes supportive words from the Pope: “We recall the words of our Holy Father Benedict XVI to our brother bishops on their recent ad limina visit: ‘Of particular concern are certain attempts being made to limit that most cherished of American freedoms, the freedom of religion.’”

I, like my friend, am not a Catholic. And I am certainly no expert on Church politics. But the Cardinal’s letter to the bishops does not read like a bluff. It is true, of course, that the Church is no longer as powerful as it was in Julian’s day or 700 years later when the Holy Roman Emperor was forced to walk across the Alps and stand barefoot in the snow begging for an audience with Pope Gregory VII. But it is by no means without influence in the modern era, as the conspicuous absence of the Soviet Union attests. If Cardinal Dolan is not Gregory VII, neither is he Bart Stupak. When he writes, “As our ancestors did with previous threats, we will tirelessly defend the timeless and enduring truth of religious freedom,” I think he means it.

Nonetheless, it isn’t at all clear that Obama, his cadre of Chicago sycophants, and their accomplices in the media do understand “who they’re messing with.” If they think the absurd Sandra Fluke and their phony crusade against a fictional “war on women” will make the very real issue of religious liberty go away, they are even dumber than their policies suggest. In fact, it could mean they are so clueless that it may indeed be possible to beat them in November — even with Mitt Romney as the GOP presidential nominee.

David Catron is a health care finance professional who has spent more than twenty years working for and advising hospitals and medical practices. He blogs at Health Care BS.

These things are, actually, fairly predictable. We know that the economy may be improving but still won’t be in good shape by November, and we’re very familiar with Obama’s challengers.

But all of this could be pushed aside by a single variable that rarely enters into the election calculus: Iran. Iran’s nuclear quest and what Obama does about it will likely impact the election in ways that could negate other issues. Iran could scramble the deck completely.

Let’s look at a few possibilities:

1. Israel attacks Iran’s Nuclear Program: Political Disaster for Obama

This is the worst possible outcome for Obama politically. If this happens, he hasn’t involved the United States, but the United States now must get involved, and isn’t in control of events. Once the retaliation begins, the United States will certainly be targeted for revenge. Obama will also have to come to Israel’s aid, even its rescue. If the Israeli strike is unsuccessful, the U.S. may be dragged in further.

Questions will be raised about why the United States didn’t just do the job itself, since we can take care of Iran much more effectively. Obama will fail to get the “rally around the president” effect of a leader in wartime, but he will get war anyway.

2. The United States attacks Iran’s Nukes: A Likely Positive for Obama

If Obama prepares the country and explains his rationale for the attack, it will have a positive effect on his fortunes, despite the retaliation and the rise in gas prices.

Americans can understand the need to prevent a nuclear Iran. Obama will look strong and decisive. He will be able to point to the Iran attack as the reason for high gas prices, reducing the blame he is getting.

And he will get a general rallying around the president during a time of war that could last for weeks or months. If he hits Iran in August or later, the support could carry well through Election Day, though he might also be open to charges the attack was politically motivated.

3. Nothing Happens: A negative for Obama

If Obama doesn’t take out Iran’s nukes and he prevents Israel from pulling the trigger, the sense Americans already have that the the country and the world are spinning out of control under Obama will increase.

Iran will clearly be on the march toward a nuclear weapon, and debate will rage about whether it’s too late to stop it. Many will question whether Obama is presiding over the rise of a threat that could destroy Israel. As Afghanistan continues to worsen as well, Obama will look like a weak leader, facing a Republican opponent who is sure to promise decisive action.

Sanctions should be given more time. But it does not appear feasible, given the pace and mystery of Iran’s program, to give sanctions the rest of the year to work. Obama wants this problem to go away until after Election Day, but it won’t. If he does not decide Iran’s fate, Iran will decide his fate.

So clarifies the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty in their feature ‘The Truth Should Not Be A Secret’. It aims to debunk the top myths that quickly circulated out of spin control centers from the administration and their complicit media partners.

I’ve heard every one of them and have had to counter them with facts, time and again, so this post by Becket Fund helps center and ground the debate.

Take this one, for instance:

Myth #5: The federal mandate actually protects women’s health because it increases access to free birth control.

Truth: Access isn’t the issue. 9 out of 10 employer-based insurance plans already cover these services. There is no need for the government to force religious groups to provide these services against their religious convictions.

One could launch a whole debate just on component parts of that sentence in Myth #5.

And then a whopper:

Myth #6: In a recent poll, 98% of Catholic women said they already used artificial birth control anyhow. So what’s the big deal?

The ‘lie repeated often enough’ that is not only addressed succinctly here but nailed perfectly by Michael Cook here.

The government would just prefer that we focus on Catholics and their beliefs about birth control. Because that deflects attention from the far less winnable battle for the Obama administration over denying fundamental religious liberty in America for individuals and institutions.

But that’s what the controversial HHS mandate is about. Which is why so many religious leaders and scholars are speaking out.

Like Dr. Timothy George and Chuck Colson.

The Catholic bishops in America have responded quickly, decrying the Administration’s decision for what it is—an egregious, dangerous violation of religious liberty—and mobilizing a vast grassroots movement to persuade the Administration to reverse its decision.

We evangelicals must stand unequivocally with our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters. Because when the government violates the religious liberty of one group, it threatens the religious liberty of all.

And Rev. Dr. Matthew Harrison, President of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, who testified by a House Committee on the mandate.

While we are opposed in principle, not to all forms of birth control, but only abortion-causing drugs, we stand with our friends in the Catholic Church and all others, Christians and non-Christians, under the free exercise and conscience provisions of the U.S. Constitution.

“Religious people determine what violates their consciences, not the federal government. The conscience is a sacred thing. Our church exists because overzealous governments in northern Europe made decisions which trampled the religious convictions of our forebearers.

They’re facing off with an overzealous government in the US with either a short memory or deliberate defiance of fundamental founding principles or both. And, as President Harrison told me at the end of the week, opponents of this mandate are not going away. There’s too much at stake.

Ave Maria President Jim Towey, former head of the Bush administration’s Office of Faith-Based & Community Initiatives, said, “As an American Catholic, I am in disbelief that I have to choose between being a good Catholic and a good citizen. I will not, and the University will not, accept this false choice.”

Towey said that the university will not allow any President “to force conformance to his or her religious or secular orthodoxy through executive action.”

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty filed the suit in federal court in Florida.

“The federal mandate puts Ave Maria in a terrible bind,” said Kyle Duncan, General Counsel for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which filed suit this morning on behalf of the University.  “Either it betrays its faith and covers the drugs, or else it ends employee health benefits and pays hundreds of thousands in annual fines.”

Towey said, he is prepared to discontinue the university’s health plan and pay the $2,000 per employee, per year fine rather than comply with an “unjust, immoral” mandate.

You can read President Towey’s entire statement by clicking here.

“The Obama administration seems to have calculated that, since contraceptives are popular and the Catholic Church is not, the outcry would be isolated,” Gerson wrote.

Leaving aside whether the administration actually thought that, as well as the element of exaggeration in the formulation, there’s a core element of truth here that serious Catholics need to face. In some quarters at least, the Church really is unpopular. The question isn’t whether but why.

A comprehensive answer would far exceed the space available. Countless individuals and groups have countless quarrels with the Church over countless grievances, real or imaginary. Let me speak of just one group—America’s secular establishment—which is of particular relevance in the present context.

By “secular establishment,” I mean the cluster of people who dominate America’s secular culture and its institutions—the great universities, the national media, the big foundations and think tanks, and now of course the White House.

It’s fair to say these people for the most part subscribe to a world view in which traditional religion does not play a large role. They are not just “secular” but secularists—secular ideologues—for whom a certain coolness (I use as neutral a word as possible) toward the Catholic Church comes naturally.

They also share a particular approach to resolving ethical questions. Pope Benedict famously spoke of the “dictatorship of relativism,” and that is one way to express it. Another way, highlighting the sources of antipathy to the Church, is along the following lines.

The Catholic Church adheres to an ethic of substantive human purposes—things like life, truth, and justice—that establish the parameters of ethically acceptable choices and behavior. To do the right thing is to act within these boundaries; to do what is wrong is to act outside them.

The secularist mindset, by contrast, favors a libertarian ethic of process and procedure—values like democracy, equal opportunity, and that epitome of the process ethic, the “right to choose.” To be sure, most people rightly live by a mix of values of both kinds—partly substantive, partly procedural—but the differences in emphasis are real and often extremely important.

According to the process ethic, there is in principle no such thing as absolute right and wrong—no substantive good that can’t be violated in a pinch if violating it furthers the exercise of choice by a sufficient number of persons.

So what if making religious institutions part of a system for providing contraceptives, sterilizations, and abortifacients (this is what Obama’s February “accommodation” would do) violates the consciences of people with traditional views on matters of substantive right and wrong? The overriding procedural imperative of the secular culture requires permitting, even subsidizing, the choices of those who want these things.

A Washington Post columnist called President Obama’s purported concession to of the bishops’ objections to the contraception-sterilization-abortifacient mandate (a proposal hailed even by some Catholic individuals and groups) “a dodge—a quite clever and positive one.” So it was—a skillful procedural sleight-of-hand aimed not at upholding some strongly held standard of right and wrong but doing a deal.

Meanwhile the Catholic Church stands as the principal obstacle to realization of the secularists’ procedural paradise of all-but unconditional choice. However the current controversy ends, this larger conflict will continue.

The Father of our Country, whose birthday we just celebrated, penned those words because he saw a clear connection between the nation’s freedom and the virtue of its individual citizens.

I could fill the entire column with similar quotations from all the Founding Fathers, from conservative and pious John Adams to liberal and secular Thomas Jefferson.

Whatever their private religious views, the men who put their lives, fortunes and sacred honor at stake to found the freest nation in history believed to a man that liberty would not last long in a people without a robust sense of conscience.

Government is necessary, but it isn’t benign. It operates by coercion (the powers to tax and to punish) and has an inherent tendency to try to accrue more power to itself.

It was to restrain the evil effects of that propensity that our forefathers split the three functions of government into separate bodies and set up a series of checks and balances to prevent the concentration of power.

Just to make sure no one missed the point, they passed the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution, guaranteeing the free exercise of religion among many other rights, limiting the police power of the state, and guaranteeing all powers not enumerated in the Constitution to the states.

They counted religion as liberty’s natural ally, since a serious commitment to pleasing God makes people not only law abiding, but also concerned for their fellow citizens, and therefore committed to the common good, rather than mere self-interest.

Pope Benedict XVI repeatedly makes the same point. Religion does not threaten secular government, it elevates and purifies it, because it helps us think beyond our passions and private interests.

In Martin Luther King, Jr., we have a recent example of how a conscience forged in Church can advance freedom and justice for all citizens.

No wise or just government should deliberately force citizens to choose between obeying God and obeying the law because liberty is always the ultimate loser.

If the citizens choose to obey God, they learn contempt for the law. Thus is sown cynicism, and the petty corruption of banana republics, where no one feels obedience to the law as a moral obligation, but merely a series of hoops to jump.

If on the other hand they submit their consciences to the state, they gradually become sheep, docile to state power and passive even in the face of manifest evil.

The right to free exercise of religion is not absolute. Sometimes private rights must give way to a manifest and overwhelming public good.

Quakers and other pacifists are taxed to support the military, for example, because the main purpose of a federal government is national defense, and there is no practical way to maintain an army if anyone can claim to be a pacifist to evade paying the tax.

The Supreme Court ruled that pacifists are not exempt from supporting the military with their taxes, yet the government still goes out of its way to accommodate conscientious objectors to actual war. It is understood that conscience is precious.

Where there is no manifest and overwhelming public good involved, the state must yield to the rights of conscience so as not to create a dangerous wedge between its people and respect for law.

In the case of the Obama administration’s abortion drug and sterilization mandate, no necessary public good has been asserted. There is no population crisis in the US, and this is not China, where the state controls family size.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that the sole purpose of the mandate is to show all the little people who stand against the Planned Parenthood culture who is boss.

If the nation yields on this point and the HHS rule is perpetuated, it is not difficult to see that a year or two from now we will be protesting an abortion mandate, but to no avail, as our souls will already have been sold.

This caused an uproar in the mainstream media.  Among many other expressions of disgust, The Daily Beast published a follow up, “10 Outrageous Things Rick Santorum Has Said,” some of which were, in fact, common Catholic views.  To The Daily Beast these statements were so beyond the pale that they required no counter-arguments; they provided a laugh and showed Santorum to be a non-electable fanatic.

Wolf Blitzer on CNN spent all Wednesday afternoon before the CNN Republican debate sputtering over the trouble a candidate must be in if he had to defend his views of Satan.  Donna Brazile, pretending to reach out to the church crowd, spoke of how Santorum was preaching to the choir when he should be addressing the congregation.  The congregation included people of various faiths or none.  Santorum should self-censor any talk of worldviews or phony theologies, she implied, and certainly, Satan.

Political discourse in America has long been defined narrowly as to religious language.  Our nation was founded by Deists and Christians, and the Deists, who believed God never intervened in human affairs, were the dominant rhetoricians.  An unspoken compact evolved in American political affairs that God could be invoked on many occasions, but then discussions of policy should be pursued as if God did not exist—or at least matter much.  The exception to this came with wars and other tragic events where providence came into play.  At times political figures truly did see beyond the merely mortal by the light of faith.  The most profound instance of this came in Lincoln’s second inaugural where he saw the hand of God directing the nation despite the shortcomings of both the North and South.

Still, at the beginning of the nation, and especially with the Second (or Lesser) Awakening as  the 19^th century got underway, a broad Christian consensus prevailed in America.  No one in politics wanted to get into the weeds of the Calvinist-Arminian controversy,  but talk of the Devil  having designs on America would have been understood by all and not taken as a laughing matter.

What’s revealing about the Santorum dust-up is the open-mouthed lack of reasoned response to the candidate’s reference to Satan—as if no response to such statements need be attempted because they are simply irrational nonsense.  Wolf Blitzer modeled this in citing the reference with stunned disbelief.  That’s a wonderful means of mockery if you can get away with it, because it immediately threatens any dissenters with shame.

The deepest power the media have is to define in advance how we are going to talk about a subject.  If I can frame political questions as I wish and even dictate the very words that are allowed in political discourse, I will win the argument every single time.  The answer resides in the premises.

For example, are we going to talk about abortion as the taking of life or a woman’s right to control her own body?  Are we going to talk about homosexuality as an “inherently disordered condition,” as the Church teaches or a civil rights issue?  Are we going to talk about the family as an institution instituted by God or a contract that can be canceled by either party at any time for any reason?  If I’m willing to grant the frame of women’s rights, civil rights, and contract law, then I have no argument.

It was a religious duty they were observing, but the Pope chose to speak to them not of prayer or sacraments, but about threats to religious liberty, the proper relations between Church and State and the role of the Catholic citizen in a secular nation.

His appeal to all Catholics to defend religious liberty could not have been more timely, as the very next day the Obama Administration announced new regulations denying any conscience exemption whatever from the requirement that private institutions, including religious ones, pay for abortifacient drugs and elective sterilizations in their health care plans.

The new rule so crudely and obviously violates the First Amendment, which guarantees the right to free exercise of religion as the first of our civil liberties, that Catholics of all stripes have risen as one against it. There aren’t many documents the president of the USCCB and Sr. Carol Keehan of the Catholic Health Association (who famously bucked the bishops to promote Obamacare) could sign jointly, but there they are in the press release, united in fierce objection to an unjust regulation.**

Why would anyone distort the Bill of Rights to compel private institutions built by private citizens to buy and distribute products that poison conscience?

It’s because increasingly “freedom of religion” is coming to be understood as a shriveled “freedom of worship.” You may attend any house of worship you like, and you may believe as you wish: in private. The right to live in accordance with your beliefs is something else again.

The Holy See is familiar with this contraction of civil liberties, since it champions the rights of Christians all over the world, particularly in Islamic nations, which claim to honor religious liberty, even while compelling Christians to observe Islamic law and making it a crime to speak openly of their faith.

This is why the First Amendment guarantees free exercise of religion, not merely freedom of religion.

A wholesome separation of Church and state does not mean, “Shut up.” The Pope sees this clearly.

“The legitimate separation of Church and State cannot be taken to mean that the Church must be silent on certain issues, nor that the State may choose not to engage, or be engaged by, the voices of committed believers in determining the values which will shape the future of the nation.”

He’s clear also that the Church has no right to impose its faith on others. To the extent ideas flowing from or undergirded by faith are embodied in the law, it has to be because they are true by nature of the dignity of each human person or because religious citizens have persuaded their fellows that they are sound.

“The Church’s witness . . . is of its nature public: she seeks to convince by proposing rational arguments in the public square.”

The Constitution of itself is insufficient to defend civil rights, however. Noble as it is, it is merely a tool which can be put to the service of wildly differing notions of liberty. What gives it its content—or used to—is the Declaration of Independence.

As Benedict notes, “At the heart of every culture, whether perceived or not, is a consensus about the nature of reality and the moral good, and thus about the conditions for human flourishing.”

Praising our nation’s founding, he goes on to say, “In America, that consensus, as enshrined in your nation’s founding documents, was grounded in a worldview shaped not only by faith but a commitment to certain ethical principles deriving from nature and nature’s God.”

Echoing Proverbs 25:11, Lincoln once described the Declaration as an apple of gold within a picture of silver (the Constitution). “The picture was made not to conceal or destroy the apple, but to adorn and preserve it. The picture was made for the apple — not the apple for the picture.”

For Lincoln and the Founders, the Constitution serves and secures the inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness bestowed on each of us by nature’s God.

Benedict notes that the moral consensus embodied by the Declaration is eroding. The political battles for the right to life, the defense of marriage and the free exercise of religion are the body politic asking ourselves whether we are still committed to the moral principles of the Declaration or will now put the Constitution at the service of a radically different conception of the human person.

** Editor’s Note: Since this column was penned, Sr. Carol Keehan has accepted a “compromise” that the bishops reject, putting them once again at odds. You can read the bishops’ reason for rejecting the compromise here.

This article was first published at Catholic News Agency