Posted on 09/06/2012 12:42:37 PM PDT by markomalley
A dissenting Catholic group believes that the First Amendment protection of religious freedom applies to personal decisions but does not allow people to apply their beliefs to every area of their lives.
Sara Hutchinson, domestic program director of Catholics for Choice, explained that religious freedom protects "me acting in my own faith for my own life" but does not extend to actions in other areas of life, such as business decisions about company policies and health insurance plans.
"Our faith charges us to respect religious pluralism and religious freedom," said Hutchinson. This means "respecting an individual's right to follow his or her own conscience and religious beliefs and practices as well as in moral decisions."
But while this constitutional freedom covers "personal beliefs" and private decisions made as "an individual," rights of conscience are forfeited when "acting as an employer," she argued.
Business owners making decisions about policies and health care contracts "are actually serving as an institution" and therefore cannot apply the teachings of their faith to such decisions, she said.
Hutchinson spoke as part of a panel on religious freedom at the Holiday Inn Charlotte Center City in Charlotte, N.C.
The Sept. 4 event took place during the Democratic National Convention but was not an official convention event. It drew about six attendees.
Panel speakers argued that Americans' religious freedom will be severely restricted if they cannot get birth control for free.
They slammed those who oppose a federal mandate requiring employers to offer health insurance covering contraception, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs free of charge.
Critics of the mandate, including leaders of the Catholic Church and other faiths, have voiced strong concerns that the regulation violates the religious liberty of employers who hold sincere moral objections to such coverage.
Hutchinson criticized "the Vatican and the bishops" and warned of a devious campaign by Church leaders to amass power and suppress dissenters.
"Under the guise of religious liberty, the bishops want to rewrite the rules on health care, employment, adoptions, marriage and more, so that they can deny civil rights for anyone who disagrees with them," she charged.
Hutchinson argued that this campaign is "a real threat" to true religious liberty, which requires employers to offer free coverage of contraception and abortion regardless of their views, and then leaves it up to the "individual conscience" whether or not use such coverage.
Catholics for Choice and its partner organizations are working to "stand strong against the bishops and their allies," who threaten "true religious freedom" with their "false cries of religious liberty," she said.
Bishop Tonyia Rawls, a lesbian and minister at the Freedom Center for Social Justice in Charlotte, also spoke at the religious freedom discussion. Rawls emphasized the importance of fighting for the "right to choose" and of supporting efforts to redefine marriage.
Rev. Harry Knox, president and CEO of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, said that "religious liberty is a very complex subject" but agreed that such freedom does not extend to employers who wish to follow the tenets of their faith in the health coverage they offer.
Knox, a homosexual advocate who was appointed by President Obama to the President’s Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, said that he worked in this role to ensure that faith-based organizations using tax money to serve those in need would not be permitted to do so in rooms with religious symbols.
People of different faiths or no faith could be "harmed" by such an environment, he said, and religious organizations such as hospitals and food banks should therefore have to cover or remove crucifixes, religious pictures and other faith symbols to make the room "neutral."
On the topic of abortion, Knox emphasized the importance of "empowering the person that you're counseling" and said that the role of a pastor is largely "to be quiet" and let individuals make their own decisions.
No individual or institution can tell other people "what is right for them," he said, adding that these moral discussions are "fundamentally a matter of perspective."
For the Church to suggest that its moral teaching is based in objective and unchanging truth is "the worst kind of hubris" and displeases God, he argued.
The faithful must fight against religious groups seeking to "impose their set of values on everybody else," Knox stressed, because "when that happens, people get hurt."
Delusional and in darkness. All of them.
Read a great book on the capture of Adolph Eichmann. One of the first defenses he offered after capture and questioning was "I personally like Jews and admire their culture. But orders had to be followed."
I hope these clowns keep Adolph company in hell.
Doesn’t matter. That kind of thinking is still out of communion with the Church.
Shame on them. CINOs.
It’s kinda like how for most of 1984 Winston Smith was free inside his own head so long as no one noticed and reported him, or how he could keep a diary so long as he wrote outside the view of Big Brother and if he hid it well.
What a CROCK!
So we have a bunch of liberals infiltrating the Catholic church as they’re not just happy enough to have their liberal what ever goes tax free political meeting uniterian so called church.
Now they want to call themselves Catholics but ignore what Catholics believe in.
And is it any wonder why so many look at them as “it’s all about them , the world evolves about them “
I’m personally against tape and murderer, but is it wrong if me to expect government to make it illegal? If someone wants me to help them do something legal but morally distasteful should I go along with it, and keep my scruples to the few moments in bed before I drift off to sleep, when those things are pertinent?
Obviously defecient in an understanding of the Constitution....
"Therefore"? There's an unstated premise there - and it's patently false.
Hutchinson argued that this campaign is "a real threat" to true religious liberty, which requires employers to offer free coverage of contraception and abortion regardless of their views
So true liberty is being forced to do something, says 'Catholics' for Big Brother.
For a “Catholic” group, they really don’t know what’s in the Bible, do they?
I suggest they read James 2: 14-26.
"Man ... must necessarily be subject to the laws of his Creator.. This will of his Maker is called the law of nature.... This law of nature...is of course superior to any other.... No human laws are of any validity, if contrary to this: and such of them as are valid derive all their force...from this original." - Sir William Blackstone (Eminent English Jurist)
The Founders DID NOT establish the Constitution for the purpose of granting rights. Rather, they established this government of laws (not a government of men) in order to secure each person's Creator endowed rights to life, liberty, and property.
Only in America, did a nation's founders recognize that rights, though endowed by the Creator as unalienable prerogatives, would not be sustained in society unless they were protected under a code of law which was itself in harmony with a higher law. They called it "natural law," or "Nature's law." Such law is the ultimate source and established limit for all of man's laws and is intended to protect each of these natural rights for all of mankind. The Declaration of Independence of 1776 established the premise that in America a people might assume the station "to which the laws of Nature and Nature's God entitle them.."
Herein lay the security for men's individual rights - an immutable code of law, sanctioned by the Creator of man's rights, and designed to promote, preserve, and protect him and his fellows in the enjoyment of their rights. They believed that such natural law, revealed to man through his reason, was capable of being understood by both the ploughman and the professor. Sir William Blackstone, whose writings trained American's lawyers for its first century, capsulized such reasoning:
"For as God, when he created matter, and endued it with a principle of mobility, established certain rules for the...direction of that motion; so, when he created man, and endued him with freewill to conduct himself in all parts of life, he laid down certain immutable laws of human nature, whereby that freewill is in some degree regulated and restrained, and gave him also the faculty of reason to discover the purport of those laws."
What are those natural laws? Blackstone continued:
"Such among others are these principles: that we should live honestly, should hurt nobody, and should render to every one his due.."
The Founders saw these as moral duties between individuals. Thomas Jefferson wrote:
"Man has been subjected by his Creator to the moral law, of which his feelings, or conscience as it is sometimes called, are the evidence with which his Creator has furnished him .... The moral duties which exist between individual and individual in a state of nature, accompany them into a state of society . their Maker not having released them from those duties on their forming themselves into a nation."
Americas leaders of 1787 had studied Cicero, Polybius, Coke, Locke, Montesquieu, and Blackstone, among others, as well as the history of the rise and fall of governments, and they recognized these underlying principles of law as those of the Decalogue, the Golden Rule, and the deepest thought of the ages.
An example of the harmony of natural law and natural rights is Blackstone's "that we should live honestly" - otherwise known as "thou shalt not steal" - whose corresponding natural right is that of individual freedom to acquire and own, through honest initiative, private property. In the Founders' view, this law and this right were inalterable and of a higher order than any written law of man. Thus, the Constitution confirmed the law and secured the right and bound both individuals and their representatives in government to a moral code which did not permit either to take the earnings of another without his consent. Under this code, individuals could not band together and do, through government's coercive power, that which was not lawful between individuals.
America's Constitution is the culmination of the best reasoning of men of all time and is based on the most profound and beneficial values mankind has been able to fathom. It is, as William E. Gladstone observed, "The Most Wonderful Work Ever Struck Off At A Given Time By he Brain And Purpose Of Man."
We should dedicate ourselves to rediscovering and preserving an understanding of our Constitution's basis in natural law for the protection of natural rights - principles which have provided American citizens with more protection for individual rights, while guaranteeing more freedom, than any people on earth.
"The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom." -John Locke
Source: "Our Ageless Constitution"
Do these people make this s**t up as they go along? What the CINO is saying is that Luther was right and the popes wrong. Probably a product of situation ethics so prevalant after the worst disaster to hit the Catholic Church, Vatican II.
Ironic that there are so many parallels between the religious and the secular when LIBs are in charge. Eventually, anything run by LIBs has two paths - anarchy or totalitatarianism.
Of course, if you listen to many of the extreme fundies, even on this forum, all of that is trumped by John 3:16.
All you have to do is believe the right things. Nothing else matters.
These people are like the liberals who claim they are just as patriotic as conservatives, maybe more so. And you're a bigot if you don't go along with them.
No such thing as “Catholics for Choice”. You either abide by the teachings of the Catachism of the Catholic Church or join a liberal “church” that allows murder of the unborn.
Mass. Constitution 1780
Art. II. It is the right as well as the duty of all men in society, publicly and at stated seasons, to worship the Supreme Being, the great Creator and Preserver of the universe.
And no subject shall be hurt, molested, or restrained, in his Person, Liberty, or Estate, for worshipping God in the manner and season most agreeable to the DICTATES OF HIS OWN CONSCIENCE, or for his religious profession or sentiments, provided he doth not disturb the public peace or obstruct others in their religious worship.
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