Posted on 02/08/2012 3:39:58 PM PST by Morgana
NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE, February 8, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) – One of the most influential evangelical leaders in the United States says Christians should go to jail rather than comply with the Obama administration’s mandate to provide all contraception, including abortion-inducing drugs, in their health care plans.
Dr. Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), told LifeSiteNews.com “we will not comply” with the Dept. of Health and Human Services’ mandate requiring religious institutions to cover abortifacient products such as Plan B, Ella, and the IUD.
“We want the law changed, or else we’re going to write our letters from the Nashville jail, just like Dr. King wrote his from the Birmingham jail,” Dr. Land said.
Dr. Land wrote an op-ed on Tuesday with Barrett Duke, vice president for public policy and research at ERLC, calling his fellow Southern Baptists and evangelical Christians throughout America to oppose any infringement on the First Amendment.
“The Obama administration has declared war on religion and freedom of conscience,” they wrote. “We consider this callous requirement by the Obama administration to be a clear violation of our nation’s commitment to liberty of conscience and a flagrant violation of our constitutional protection to freedom of religion.”
Dr. Land told LifeSiteNews he hopes Baptist ministers will “preach from the pulpit just how serious and dangerous this initiative by the Obama administration is,” and “encourage their parishioners to contact their congressmen and their senators and the president and let them know how deeply unhappy they are with this decision, and they want…legislation guaranteeing that it won’t happen again.”
“It is now in the providence of God,” Dr. Land said. “Our responsibility is to stand and say, ‘We will not comply with this. We want the law changed, or else we’re going to write our letters from the Nashville jail, just like Dr. King wrote his from the Birmingham jail.’ We will not comply.”
Dr. Land, who earned a Doctorate of Philosophy from Oxford University, has been named by Time magazine as one of “The Twenty-five Most Influential Evangelicals in America.”
President Obama’s recess appointment of Chai Feldblum to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) provided an insight to the president’s views, Dr. Land said. Feldblum has said whenever religious rights come into conflict with sexual rights, that sexual rights must prevail. “That’s exactly what’s happening in the Health and Human Services contraceptive and abortifacient directive,” he said. “They are saying that a woman’s right to have free contraceptive services and free abortifacients trumps the deeply held religious convictions of Catholics and Baptists and others. That’s a war on religion.”
Several of the Obama administration’s actions have convinced observers the president harbors an aversion to Christian values. “I do know hostility to religious conviction in the public square when I see it, and I see it in the Hosanna case,” in which the Obama administration attempted to narrowly define the ministerial exemption in hiring, Dr. Land told LifeSiteNews.com. He called the Obama administration “radically secularist” on his weekly radio program.
The op-ed he co-authored came exactly one week after Dr. Albert Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said evangelical Christians may be required to face imprisonment over the issue. Dr. Mohler said in his daily podcast, “You at least have to admire the courage of the Roman Catholic bishops in saying they are willing to go to jail rather than to comply with this. How many evangelical presidents and pastors and leaders would be willing to do the same?”
“We’re going to find out in coming months,” he warned.
He said despite media coverage portraying the new regulation as a Catholic issue, “evangelicals need to stand back and – in our own terms, on our own doctrine – understand that our religious liberty is being similarly subverted and attacked.”
Government encroachments on religion have long concerned Dr. Land. Last December, he joined 59 other non-Catholic religious leaders in signing a letter to Barack Obama stating, “religious organizations beyond the Catholic community have deep moral objections to a requirement that their health insurance plans must cover abortifacients.”
Dr. Land and Duke noted in their op-ed that the government protects other Christians from violating their consciences by exempting pacifists from serving in the military, but “the administration is refusing to allow those who believe that abortion is the deliberate killing of an innocent human being to follow faithfully the dictates of his or her conscience on a matter as grave as the death of an unborn child.”
“A person who is not free to follow the dictates of his or her moral conscience is not free,” they wrote. “Our Baptist forebears died and went to prison to secure these freedoms.”
In the upcoming presidential election, Dr. Land hoped faithful voters would consider the importance of religious liberty. “This is a very serious and defining moment in American society,” he said.
The Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, with more than16 million members and 45,000 churches in the United States.
Hold on to them, if Obama gets another 4 years you might need them.
If we could get some Southern Baptist black preachers to come out agains this mess, Obama would be fried.
I doubt it will happen though, they have been watching black genocide for years now and said nothing.
The battle cry is four words:
“WE WILL NOT COMPLY.”
It IS law. That’s the problem. The Act devolves on the Secretary the right to decide. That’s why the bishops were stupid not to oppose the enactment of Obamacare. I fear that even now there will be some bishops who will support Obama in 2012, or at least not oppose him. I am reminded of those German bishops who stubbornly clung to the idea that because Hitler had been baptised a Catholic and because he was polite to the bishops that he —personally—was not responsible for the anti-Catholic propoganda and actions of the Nazi Party.
very few.
Jesus is our sweetest path...our sweetest refuge!
Even pain is sweet for Him!
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Six Things Everyone Should Know about the HHS Mandate
Santorum: Obama Hostile to Christians
Understanding Oppostion to the HHS Mandate (Part 1): Why the Church Won’t Pay for Contracept
The Bishops Chickens Coming Home to Roost.
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Bishop David Zubik confronts Obama
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Phoenix bishop (Olmstead): defy feds on birth control
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Bishop [Daniel Jenky] Blasts Secularist Intolerance, Calls For ‘Assertive Action’ to Defend Church
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That is the problem. Congress routinely abdicates the power to legislate by commanding some executive department or agency to 'promulgate regulations' or set up guidelines, etc., which carry the weight of, or create the stipulations in, the law.
The effect is that the executive agency can make law by decree and the Congress can blame others for fleshing out the frameworks they created.
As proof, gun sales last year at all time high.
Congress has no legitimate, Constitutional power to do that. We gave Congress and Congress only the power to make law.
I think the following example applies as well.
Congress can no more constitutionally assign its law making duties than the President can assign his Commander-in-Chief responsibilities.
Maybe. But the real tactic will be to take the tax exempt status from church corporations. Few will stand for that.
I agree with you, but that is only our opinion.
The power to tax is the power to destroy. There are many in academia especially who would like that.
Ah yes, in theory, but it has long engaged in the British practice of crafting broad legislation that leave too much discretion to the executive. That is because Congress is too busy carving up the turkey for its constituents. Meanwhile the meat of the law is made by executive order and by regulation. The fact that no budget has been passed for so long ought to be the cause of a congressional vote. But the Senate is in the hands of the majority leader who lets nothing happen. Meanwhile the Republicans refuse to inform the country that all the obstruction comes from a the other party.
Not only will it stymie the administrative state, our legislators will be accountable for any awful regs they allow.
We desperately need to apply this to Congress.
Once upon a time, that used to be the case with acts of Congress. That was before 1942, when Congress began withholding and started taxing the middle-class. There are those who dery the fact that the bottom half of the population pays no income tax. I think this is the wrong tact. Until 1942, the income tax applied only to the top ten percent. But as FRD realized, this limited the power of the government. If every tax payer had to pay quarterly, as many small businesses must, things would not have gotten out of hand. We have been a nation on a war-fotting since 1942, and if one war ends, another begins. The cold war, the war on poverty, the war on drugs, etc.
Once upon a time, that used to be the case with acts of Congress. That was before 1942, when Congress began withholding and started taxing the middle-class. There are those who dery the fact that the bottom half of the population pays no income tax. I think this is the wrong tact. Until 1942, the income tax applied only to the top ten percent. But as FRD realized, this limited the power of the government. If every tax payer had to pay quarterly, as many small businesses must, things would not have gotten out of hand. We have been a nation on a war-fotting since 1942, and if one war ends, another begins. The cold war, the war on poverty, the war on drugs, etc.
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