BIG C CATHOLICS

Here is a simple question with an obvious answer: Is President Barack Obama more deferential to the religious sensibilities of Afghan Muslims or the religious freedom of American Catholics? The answer: Obama is more deferential to the religious sensibilities of Muslims in Afghanistan than to the religious freedom of Catholics in the United States. Let’s stipulate a point of principle out front: People should not burn Korans, period. To burn a Koran, whether as a premeditated act of spite or as a boneheaded mistake, is wrong. That being said, the Korans burned at Bagram Air Force in Afghanistan were burned as the result of a boneheaded mistake--not as a conscious effort to affront Muslims. Here in the United States, President Obama’s decision to order Roman Catholics to act against the teachings of their faith by forcing Catholics to buy insurance that pays for sterilizations, artificial contraceptives and abortifacients was not made by mistake. Obama did it with long and carefu...

By Rick Jervis From Maine to Arizona to southern Louisiana, Catholic churches across the country echoed with scorn for a new federal rule requiring faith-based employers to include birth control and other reproductive services in their health care coverage. Dozens of priests took the rare step of reading letters from the pulpit urging parishioners to reach out to Washington and oppose the rule, enacted Jan 20. The rule requires nearly all employers to provide their employees access to health insurance that covers artificial contraception, sterilization services and the “morning after” birth control pill. The mandate exempts individual churches but applies to Catholic universities, Catholic-based charities and to groups affiliated with Methodists, Baptists and other denominations. Roman Catholic leaders morally oppose artificial birth control and related services, and they called the rule an infringement on their constitutional rights. “This is the government interfering in...