Posted on 07/25/2012 6:42:23 PM PDT by Petrosius
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.
Actually, I'd have no problem with this at all. Anyone who works for the guy is free to leave and go work somewhere else. If his work force is limited to people who are willing to pay that stupid "tax," I can't imagine he's going to be in business for very long.
Has the SHTF yet? If not, what will it take? The most fundamental rights are being trampled and NOTHING is being done about it.
IF SECESSION NOT BE, THEN REVOLUTION MUST.
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.
Fixed it. Similarly, SOME Fundies, SOME Jews, and SOME Moslems, not to mention SOME atheists—in various proportions—supported all the socialist drivel you mention. And a lot don't, especially now.
Wonder Warthog is correct in saying "the Catholic bishops of today are not the knee-jerk liberals who once infested the US Catholic bishopry. Those folks are being shuffled off to "honorable retirement" as fast as Pope Benedict can arrange it. ."
In the pews, with the passing of the Baby Boomers, the Catholics still in the Church are increasingly young, traditional, conservative—and fertile. Not your father's Catholic Church. Even back in the 1980s and '90s, Catholics by the tens of thousands got arrested for shutting down abortion mills, and have saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of babies ever since through pro-life pregnancy counseling centers. With that movement and the promotion of ultrasound imaging, the majority of the country now calls itself "pro-life."
Keep your political intelligence up to date and don't fight your allies, if you really want to win.
Obama’s argument is effectively that the First Amendment doesn’t apply to individuals, churches or businesses. It only applies to terrorists.
If I don’t pay for witchcraft supplies for my employees I am forcing my religion on them?
I don’t know how much more of this insanity I can stand to watch. This is such a crock it would be laughable if it wasn’t such a dead-serious effort to rape the people of America out of their God-given freedoms.
These employees are not required to do a darn thing. Your comparison is totally wrong.
The company is refusing to buy abortifacients, sterilants, and contraceptives for the employees to use.
It would be like a Muslim company refusing to buy crucifixes and communion wafers.
You certainly have a point. The Church changes in the US as those raised with great piety, great tradition, under devout priests and bishops pass on, and the younger are trapped in an extraordinarily casual and godless culture. It is somewhat miraculous in a “me” centered society that the young stay at all in the great Church.
So Muslims get exempted from Obamacare, but Catholics have to help pay for abortion. This country is being run by an alien thug.
SOME Catholics have supported socialism (....)
Thank you for that fix. I, nor any parish I have ever belonged to, have ever supported Socialism or the redistribution of private wealth.
“The federal government can and will compel them to either surrender their business”
No wonder: You didn’t do that. Someone else did that!:
You’re right. The only thing for any Catholic to do here is complete noncompliance with the law. As in total. A law that goes against natural law is no law, but evil, and we are obliged, as such, to disobey it. Utterly. If you are an employer, disregard the HHS mandate. If you are and employee, buy no insurance, since a 1 dollar fee specifically pays for abortion. Pay no taxes, either, since for the moment, once this is effective, a portion of your taxes pays for abortion, specifically. Obama is counting on people, Catholics especially, in this case, being weak-kneed about this. Show him he and his gang of apostates are wrong.
The Church explicitly does NOT support socialism, nor direct "wealth distribution", though apparently many of the older US bishops and some priests and nuns don't understand that. And I can assure you that a great many Catholics are not supportive of ANY of those notions you listed. It remains to be seen whether, now that the American Church "has been mugged" by the gov't, positions and policies on other fronts will change among the hierarchy.
“Catholic social ministry begins and ends with Jesus Christ,” he said. “If it doesn’t, it isn’t Catholic.”
Archbishop Chaput
Do you think teh Catholics on FR “support socialism?”
Maybe an insulated Baptist from the DEEEEEEEEEEEP South, and they just discovered there's a whole new world out there with ideas “totully furren, an’ diffrent, too” to their experiences?
(Apologies to all truly Christian Baptists, it was just the first Christian sect that came to mind)
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