Posted on 05/29/2015 6:25:34 AM PDT by marshmallow
The persecution of the Catholic Church and other morally conservative religious bodies has begun in the United States.
As predicted, it isn't -- thank God -- bloody persecution like the persecution of Christians in many countries. But it's real persecution and likely to get worse.
This new persecution currently has two prongs.
One consists of pressuring individual religious believers to cooperate with public policies inimical to faith. The other prong is pressure targeted at religious groups and institutions to adapt their programs to the promotion of values hostile to the sponsors' moral convictions.
When and if the Supreme Court announces its discovery of a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, it will be taking a giant step in both directions and paving the way for more. As we saw in Indiana earlier this year, efforts to protect the right of conscientious objection to the radical redefinition of marriage will come under even fiercer assault.
Perhaps Indiana's religious freedom law did need tweaking, but the opponents would have preferred no law at all. For them, simply legalizing gay marriage isn't enough. Dissent must be stamped out.
Consider the case of the Oregon couple, Christian owners of a bakery (now closed), who recently were held liable for $135,000 in damages for declining to bake a wedding cake for a lesbian couple. They did nothing to prevent the lesbians from marrying -- their offense was not wanting to lend a hand to the celebration.
As for the second prong of persecution -- pressure to adapt religious programs and institutions to the promotion of hostile values, coupled with vitriolic denunciations of whoever says no to doing that -- it has been visibly in operation lately in San Francisco, where Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone came under attack for saying that teachers in Catholic schools shouldn't teach things............
(Excerpt) Read more at realclearreligion.org ...
5.56mm
It will be a painfully slow taorture that eats away at us by killing the children. Like poison.
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