Catholic Ping
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Posted on 07/25/2012 10:18:13 AM PDT by Kaslin
William, Paul and James Newland and their sister, Christine Ketterhagen, who together own Hercules Industries, have no right to conduct their family business in a manner that comports with their Catholic faith.
The federal government can and will compel them to either surrender their business or to engage in activities the Catholic faith teaches are intrinsically immoral.
This is exactly what President Barack Obama's Justice Department told a U.S. district court in a formal filing last week.
Never before has an administration taken such a bold step to strip Americans of the freedom of conscience -- a right for which, over the centuries, many Christian martyrs have laid down their lives, and which our Founding Fathers took great care to protect in a First Amendment that expressly guarantees the free exercise of religion.
As the Founders understood, no government has legitimate authority to take this right away, because it does not come from government. It comes from God. The very purpose of government is to protect this right. A government that seeks to strip it away from the people is by that very process stripping away its own legitimacy.
What we are seeing from the Obama administration today -- in its attack on religious liberty -- is simply evil. When government seeks to compel individuals to act against their consciences and to engage in activities that, if willfully done, would imperil their immortal souls, there is no other word for it.
The Newland family owns and operates Hercules Industries, a Colorado-based corporation that manufactures heating, ventilation and air-conditioning equipment. Through their hard work and dedication, and through their willingness to reinvest their own money in building their family business, they have managed to create jobs for 265 people while exerting a positive influence on the communities they serve.
The Newlands believe the morality the Catholic faith teaches them must animate their lives not only within the walls of the churches they attend, but literally everywhere else, as well -- in the way they deal with their families, their neighbors and, yes, their business.
The Newlands sued to protect their free exercise of religion in this regard because Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius issued a regulation, under the Obamacare law, that requires virtually all health care plans to cover -- without cost-sharing -- sterilizations, artificial contraception and abortifacients.
Under Obamacare, businesses that employ more than 50 people must provide their employees with insurance or pay a penalty, and the required insurance must include the mandated cost-sharing-free coverage for sterilizations, artificial contraception and abortifacients.
At Hercules Industries, the Newlands provide a generous self-insured health-care plan to their employees. It does not cover sterilization, artificial contraception or abortifacients.
"The Catholic Church teaches that abortifacient drugs, contraception and sterilization are intrinsic evils," says the Newlands' lawsuit.
"Consequently, the Newlands believe that it would be immoral and sinful for them to intentionally participate in, pay for, facilitate or otherwise support abortifacient drugs, contraception, sterilization, and related education and counseling as would be required by the Mandate, through their inclusion in health insurance coverage they offer at Hercules," says the suit.
The Catholic Bishops of the United States endorse this view. At a meeting in Atlanta last month, they unanimously adopted a resolution calling the HHS regulation an "unjust and illegal mandate" and a "violation of personal civil rights." They declared that the regulation created a class of Americans "with no conscience protection at all: individuals who, in their daily lives, strive constantly to act in accordance with their faith and moral values.
"They, too," said the bishops, "face a government mandate to aid in providing 'services' contrary to those values -- whether in their sponsoring of, and payment for, insurance as employers; their payment of insurance premiums as employees; or as insurers themselves -- without even the semblance of an exemption."
In a letter read during Sunday Mass in most dioceses around the country earlier this year, many of the nation's bishops flatly said: "We cannot -- we will not -- comply with this unjust law."
In response to the Newlands' complaint that ordering them to violate the teachings of the Catholic Church in the way they run their business is a violation of their First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion, the Obama administration told the federal court that a private business has no protection under the First Amendment's free exercise clause -- especially if the business is incorporated.
"The First Amendment Complaint does not allege that the company is affiliated with a formally religious entity such as a church," said the Justice Department. "Nor does it allege that the company employs persons of a particular faith. In short, Hercules Industries is plainly a for-profit, secular employer."
"By definition," said the Justice Department, "a secular employer does not engage in any 'exercise of religion.'"
"It is well established that a corporation and its owners are wholly separate entities, and the Court should not permit the Newlands to eliminate that legal separation to impose their personal religious beliefs on the corporate entity or its employees," said the Justice Department.
This is just as if the Justice Department were to tell a family owned newspaper that it must publish editorials calling for a confiscatory estate tax, basing its coercion of the newspaper on the supposition (which lawyers for the Alliance Defending Freedom argue DOJ is by analogy making) that as a for-profit secular and incorporated employer, the paper has no First Amendment right to freedom of speech.
Catholic Ping
Please freepmail me if you want on/off this list
So, really, it's a bitch when the Church's worst enemy is the Church.
The Catholics can’t run a business? Yet the Cathy family can run Chick-fil A
And you have proof of this?
I am Catholic and I never voted for the rat party and their candidates, and never will
I am Catholic and I never voted for the rat party and their candidates, and never will
Good; you have my support -- even/especially if others will ridicule you for it.
The contraception mandate remains a gross violation of their right to practice religion no matter how they respond to it.
Not arguing that point, only suggesting how a business can survive in face of such an attack.
I understand that for some businesses keeping each unit count under 50 might be the only option.
But consider that, first, this puts a limit on how big they can grow, because beyond 5-10 units the business as a whole becomes ungovernable. Some businesses want to grow big to attract large customers, secure large loans, etc. They will have to foreclose on these opportunities by breaking up.
Second, that may expose them to other charges, for example, that the breakup is only for the purposes of evading the law. Obamacare is not the only law with small business exemptions; there are various regulatory obligations that kick in beyond 50 employees. They get a huge legal exposure if they break up without creating truly independent units.
Finally, if this law passes legal scrutiny in principle, the matter to adjust the employee limit downward becomes trivial. Soon, they will have to break up again.
Their real morally acceptable options are fight, sell or liquidate.
As am I. I did my part. Fought long and hard for the conservatives to defeat Mitt Romney.
That has been the issue all along. For the same reason that it is unjust to make a Catholic hospital facilitate selling contraception, it is unjust t make anyone Catholic to facilitate selling contraception.
The same, mutatis mutandis, applies to a Jehova's Witness being forced to facilitate blood transfusions, or a Jew being forced to sell ham sandwiches, or a Baptist to serve a bar.
"The First Amendment Complaint does not allege that the company is affiliated with a formally religious entity such as a church," said the Justice Department. "Nor does it allege that the company employs persons of a particular faith. In short, Hercules Industries is plainly a for-profit, secular employer."
"By definition," said the Justice Department, "a secular employer does not engage in any 'exercise of religion.'"
"It is well established that a corporation and its owners are wholly separate entities, and the Court should not permit the Newlands to eliminate that legal separation to impose their personal religious beliefs on the corporate entity or its employees," said the Justice Department.
I believe the recent SCOTUS decision pertaining to corporate entities expressing their first amendment rights, including freedom of religious speech, via campaign contributions established precedence and certainly entitles them to express their first amendment rights within the corporation.
Good church/bad church.
By their logic the moment a human being steps over the threshold of a secular, for-profit business, he stops being what he is and becomes instead a secular for-profit person, with a different, secular and for-profit, conscience.
Hitler, with his Nuremberg laws that excluded Jews from certain professions had better respect for the human integrity that the Obama ghouls.
This is one of the approaches to trying to minimize religious influence to the benefit of the state. Another is the idea of safeguarding "freedom of worship" as opposed to freedom of religion. Yet another is the long-standing practice of creating entitlements that establish dependency on government at the cost of private charity. You can throw same sex marriage, legal adoption by gays, government support of embryonic stem cell research, etc. into the mix also.
The entire process is aimed at restricting religious influence to Sunday mornings in Church if, and only if, the right things are said at the pulpit.
This is indeed a war on religion by the state and a society bent on reducing the moral influence of the Church.
Properly seen, this is a spiritual struggle between evil and good.
This is simply a war on the people. The Newlands, for example, are not "religion", they are human beings attacked by Obama's oppression machine.
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