Brutally Honest

What anti-Catholic bigotry?

This anti-Catholic bigotry:

The ACLU has filed a brief in support of the HHS mandate, comparing Catholics to racists.

The ACLU and the ACLU of Eastern Missouri recently filed an amicus brief supporting the mandate which requires employers to provide insurance coverage for abortifacients, contraception, and sterilization procedures without a co-pay. The case, O’Brien Industrial Holdings v. Department of Health and Human Services, is a challenge by a private company which argues that the contraception rule is a violation of religious liberty.

In its brief, the ACLU compares Catholics to racists, arguing that declaring that you don’t want to support the killing of the unborn with abortifacients is akin to refusing to serve African-Americans.:

Regrettably, not so very long ago, businesses similarly claimed that their right to religious liberty entitled them to discriminate against African-American customers in public accommodations; universities claimed a religious liberty right to discriminate against African-American students; and employers claimed their right to religious freedom entitled them to pay men – who they considered to be the head of household based on their religious beliefs – more than women. Fortunately, in each of these cases, the courts squarely rejected the claims, recognizing that the right to religious liberty does not encompass the right to discriminate against others. This Court should come to the same conclusion here. Indeed, acceptance of Plaintiffs’ claims would not only contravene this clear and consistent precedent, but would also open the door for arguments that countless antidiscrimination statutes should be unenforceable in the face of a claim that the discrimination is
mandated by a religious belief.

The ACLJ is representing O’Brien in this case.

“This is the most ridiculous brief I’ve ever read,” ACLJ lawyer Francis Manion told The Cardinal Newman Society.  “There’s nothing to do but heap scorn and ridicule on it.”

He pointed out that the irony is that the government has acknowledged the validity of some religious objection. “So is the ACLU saying the government is promoting racism?” Manion laughed. “It floored me when I read it. I could be angry but I just laughed instead.”

He suggested that the ACLU brief was more of a press release garnered to gain attention for the liberal organization rather than a serious legal document.

I'm not so quick to let the ACLU off the hook.  I don't think it's a press release garnered to gain attention.  I think it's core liberal doctrine.

Faithful people, particularly orthodox, traditional, faithful people, are a threat.  And in this day and age, you take out a threat by labeling it racist, homophobic, bigoted.

This is how they roll.

This is who they are.

'Gov. Tim Pawlenty said that officials' public objections to the Christian-owned fast food chain are "chilling."'

I think it's past time for politicians to speak out against the fascism being propagated by leftists in this country:

Fresh from lunch at Chick-Fil-A, former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty said that officials' public objections to the Christian-owned fast food chain are "chilling."

"Now you have the police power of government intimidating and threatening people, being used to intimidate and threaten people, based on their free speech rights and their religious views," Pawlenty said Saturday of city officials' objections to president Dan Cathy's public disavowal of gay marriage.  "I mean it’s chilling.  I mean it’s stunning, it is jaw-dropping.  And so I think strong people who see this need to stand up and say no we don’t do that in the United States."

...

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin on Friday posted on Facebook two pictures of a visit to a Chick-Fil-A in The Woodlands, Tex., where she supported insurgent conservative U.S. Senate candidate Ted Cruz. She posted the comment, "Stopped by Chick-fil-A in The Woodlands to support a great business."

GrandLarson, after chronicling a number of gay initimidation events, makes cogent points:

This whole campaign of intimidation makes you wonder how long it will be until it simply becomes impossible for one to be a traditional Christian and a business owner. If you are forced to believe in gay marriage or be denied restaurant permits, or forced to photograph gay marriages or be sued, or forced to provide products you think are immoral or face government fines, will Christians even bother  to open-up shop? We aren’t to that point yet, but if these stories become less like anomalies, and more just the way the business world works, it is very possible.

Where are the open-minded liberals?  Where are the tolerant leftists?  Where are the fair-minded progressives?

"Post comfortable Catholicism"

Via Mark Shea, this post by Fr. James Schall should make all thinking people understand fully the importance of what may very well be our last free election:

Bruce Fingerhut in South Bend called my attention to Father George Rutler’s essay in crisismagazine.com (July 13), entitled. “Post-Comfortable Christianity.” Father Rutler is the well-known pastor of the Church of Our Savior in New York City. He is a man of many, many talents, a witty and insightful lecturer, often on EWTN. With his Scot origin, he has been known to appear in the kilt version of the Roman Collar at the Highland Games. Rutler is a convert Episcopal priest who speaks the King’s English, speaks it well and clearly.

The title, “Post-Comfortable Christianity,” Rutler explains, is not used in place of “Post-Christian,” since “nothing can come after Christ,” a profound theological observation in itself. We have lived as Catholics in relative peace in recent times. We think we belong and are accepted by this culture. Indeed, we have sometimes bought an easy version of our faith that requires little sacrifice and no Cross. 

We have not had to worry, or so we thought, about ourselves being discriminated against or persecuted. Such despicable activities were, we thought, against the law. They were events that happened “elsewhere.” We never thought that our law could itself be “against the law.” The Third Millennium began with fireworks and Ferris wheels, Rutler commented, but is now “entering a sinister stage.” We have not anticipated that so many Catholics, often public leaders, when it came to a choice between God and Caesar, would opt for Caesar in his worst form.

...

Rutler puts it this way: “If their (Catholics) influence is not decisive, and the present course of federal legislation accelerates, encouraged by a self-destructive appetite for welfare statism on the part of ecclesiastical bureaucracies, the majority of Catholics with tenuous commitments to the Faith will evaporate.” This analysis is the European fate now applied to the Church in the States.

We should be clear, as writers like Paul Rahe have pointed out, that this subjection of Catholicism to the control of the state is being carried out by officials that many of them voted for in great numbers and with enthusiasm. We have not been able to imagine that the Catholic Church in its essential moral teaching would come to be seen as an enemy of democracy and human “rights.” Yet, these new versions of democracy and human “rights” embody positions that diametrically oppose human life, marriage, basic morality, and the nature of transcendence. No one who cannot accept this new version of “rights” will be a member of the new state that has come to exist before our very eyes. The “inversion” of morals is almost complete. It is “sinister.”

Will we wake up to the threat?

Or will we continue to be distracted?

Lord help us see.

"Never before has an administration taken such a bold step"

I find it hard to believe that this is happening in America:

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...

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.

...

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.

Obama's America.

Land of the not so free, home of the oppressed.

“Chick-fil-A doesn’t belong in Boston”

Yesterday morning we covered the fact that Chik-fil-A's President was quoted as saying that which he actually never said and has been villified since for words never uttered.

Late yesterday the mayor of Boston jumped smack dab into the center of this made up controversy:

Mayor Thomas M. Menino is vowing to block Chick-fil-A from bringing its Southern-fried fast-food empire to Boston — possibly to a popular tourist spot just steps from the Freedom Trail — after the family-owned firm’s president suggested gay marriage is “inviting God’s judgment on our nation.”

“Chick-fil-A doesn’t belong in Boston. You can’t have a business in the city of Boston that discriminates against a population. We’re an open city, we’re a city that’s at the forefront of inclusion,” Menino told the Herald yesterday.

“That’s the Freedom Trail. That’s where it all started right here. And we’re not going to have a company, Chick-fil-A or whatever the hell the name is, on our Freedom Trail.”

So to reiterate from yesterday, all the president of Chik-fil-A did was defend the traditional understanding and definition of marriage, he never mentioned gays or gay marriage.  From the linked interview in that piece, the president's own words deemed controversial by so many are actually quite innocuous:

Some have opposed the company's support of the traditional family. "Well, guilty as charged," said [Dan] Cathy when asked about the company's position.

"We are very much supportive of the family -- the biblical definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that.

"We operate as a family business ... our restaurants are typically led by families; some are single. We want to do anything we possibly can to strengthen families. We are very much committed to that," Cathy emphasized.

"We intend to stay the course," he said. "We know that it might not be popular with everyone, but thank the Lord, we live in a country where we can share our values and operate on biblical principles."

For those words, the man and the business are being pummelled?  Seriously?

What this shows is that the mayor of Boston is misinformed at best or worse, and more likely, an opportunist who thinks inroads can be made here to further an agenda and to pander to those fomenting that agenda.

Here's to the hope that this backfires in the mayor's face and severely.

[Image found at RedPlanetCartoons.]

Crossposted at Wizbang.

Obama's war against business heats up (UPDATED)

In case you missed this being covered on your local affiliates, King Obama decided on Friday to lay into those of you who've worked hard to start and maintain a business:

President Barack Obama addressed supporters in Roanoke, Virginia on Friday afternoon and took a shot at the business community. President Obama dismissed any credit business owners give themselves for their success:

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me -- because they want to give something back.  They know they didn’t -- look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own.  You didn’t get there on your own.  I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart.  There are a lot of smart people out there.  It must be because I worked harder than everybody else.  Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.  (Applause.)

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help.  There was a great teacher somewhere in your life.  Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive.  Somebody invested in roads and bridges.  If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that.  Somebody else made that happen. 

Think on this for a moment.  All that Obama is, he is because of someone else.  He didn't work hard.  He isn't all that smart.  People around him made him what he is today.

So naturally the man is going to suggest that any one else who's succeeded in life couldn't have succeeded on his own. 

Naturally.

It is becoming increasingly more difficult to listen to the man on the TV and not chuck a heavy object in the general direction.

Increasingly more difficult to especially have to sit through and listen to people attempt to defend this guy and what he's doing to America.

God grant me patience, gentleness and self-control.

UPDATE: Mark Shea has had an about face of sorts on this and it's well worth a read:

A number of people (including John C Wright, no fan of Obama) are arguing that he is making the common sense point on behalf of solidarity: that no man is an island. Fair enough. As when Randian and related lunatics argue for subsidiarity, he is right as far as that goes. No man is an island. Nobody is an atomized individual who relies on nobody and nothing to pull himself up by his bootstraps to success (which is why Randian are lunatics to say so and why their cardinal error is to completely ignore solidarity).

He's got more and it's cause for pause.  Check it out.

Zimmerman to be released on bail... again

I don't know a thing about posting bond or what goes into deciding what the bond ought to be (it all seems quite arbitrary to me) but the bottom line is that once again, George Zimmerman may be bailed out assuming he can raise the 10% needed on the newly declared $1 million bond:

A Sandford judge today ordered George Zimmerman, the Neighborhood Watch volunteer who shot and killed Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17-year-old, released on $1 million bail but called him a manipulator.

It was not immediately clear how long it would take the 28-year-old Zimmerman to arrange his release.

Defense attorney Mark O'Mara said Friday that Zimmerman's legal defense fund had a balance of $211,000, more than enough to cover the 10-percent non-refundable portion charged by most bonding companies.

Zimmerman had been free on $150,000 bond for five weeks when Circuit Judge Kenneth Lester Jr. ordered him back to the Seminole County Jail.

That's because Zimmerman's wife had testified under oath that the couple was nearly destitute when bank records show money was pouring in from a support-George-Zimmerman website at the rate of $1,000 a day.

On the day Shellie Zimmerman testified that the couple was broke, she and her husband had access to $130,000, a defense financial expert testified Friday.

In his nine-page order, the judge today chastised Zimmerman.

"By any definition, the defendant has flaunted the system," Lester wrote. "It appears to this court that the defendant is manipulating the system for his own benefit."

Lester also was troubled, he wrote, that Zimmerman and his wife hid the money and that George Zimmerman had a second, undisclosed passport.

"Notably, together with the passport, the money only had to be hidden for a short time for him to leave the country if the defendant made a quick decision to flee. It is entirely reasonable for this court to find that, but for the requirement that he be placed on electronic monitoring, the defendant and his wife would have fled the United States with at least $130,000 of other people's money."

I don't see Zimmerman to be the flight risk that the court sees the man to be... but then again, I don't see him to be as guilty as the court seems to be treating the man.

So this travesty continues.

It occurred to me that the Sandford court system may've found a revenue generator in Mr. Zimmerman... after all, if they simply continue to revoke the man's bond, then reinstate it time and again, they'd find themselves to have quite the funding stream.

Seems like nothing more than an extension of the scam that surrounds this case already.

Franciscan University - First institutional Catholic casualty of Obamacare

From the Catholic university's own website:

The Obama Administration has mandated that all health insurance plans must cover “women’s health services” including contraception, sterilization, and abortion-causing medications as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). Up to this time, Franciscan University has specifically excluded these services and products from its student health insurance policy, and we will not participate in a plan that requires us to violate the consistent teachings of the Catholic Church on the sacredness of human life.

Additionally, the PPACA increased the mandated maximum coverage amount for student policies to $100,000 for the 2012-13 school year, which would effectively double your premium cost for the policy in fall 2012, with the expectation of further increases in the future.

Due to these changes in regulation by the federal government, beginning with the 2012-13 school year, the University 1) will no longer require that all full-time undergraduate students carry health insurance, 2) will no longer offer a student health insurance plan, and 3) will no longer bill those not covered under a parent/guardian plan or personal plan for student health insurance. The current student health insurance plan will expire on August 15, 2012.

We encourage you to decide how you are going to provide for accidents or illnesses requiring visits to physicians, health clinics, or the hospital emergency room while you are a student here. As always, our Health Center on campus will be staffed by a certified nurse practitioner Monday – Friday during normal business hours. No insurance is necessary to receive basic health-related services at the Health Center, and the visits cost only $5 at the time of service. However, if you are referred off campus for further lab testing, physician specialists, X-rays, etc., you will be responsible to pay for those services.

Tom Crowe at CatholicVote adds:

“If you like your health care coverage you can keep it. ”

In various phrasings this was one of the more oft-repeated reasons  we were given to support, or at least not to oppose, Obamacare. But like so many other things that have come out of this administration, it also turns out not to be true.

To be sure, the President and HHS are not forcibly kicking anyone off their health insurance plan. Yet. But we knew before the ink was dry that companies would very likely have a financial incentive to drop health care coverage altogether and dump their employees onto the public exchanges.

No, we were told, that wouldn’t be the case. Lo and behold...

And so it starts.  

This is your hope and change.

 

 

 

"The mainstream media are not terribly interested in this story"

That and more from Robert Avrech who notices the lack of interest in an event that can't be used to foist an agenda on the gullible and the emotive:

That’s because their outrage is only a tactic in the liberal war against Conservatives. Liberals are not really upset about Trayvon Martin’s death. They only view Martin as a prop in their kabuki theater. To be moral one must have consistent values. But liberals have selective values.

George Zimmerman is a “white Hispanic” who carried a gun and shot a black man. Thus he is an evil racist. If the liberal media even bothered to cover this story, which they won’t, they would designate Alton Hayes as a “frustrated youth who has no other means of expressing his legitimate grievances in a racist society.” It’s the same progressive thinking that justifies homicide bombings against Jews in Israel.

By the way, if George Zimmerman is a white Hispanic doesn’t it follow that Barack Obama is a white black man?

Mr. Avrech is referencing this story... a story that means next to nothing to those so moved by the Martin/Zimmerman tragedy:

Alton L. Hayes III, a west suburban man charged with a hate crime, told police he was so upset about the Trayvon Martin case in Florida that he beat up a white man early Tuesday.

Hayes and a 15-year-old Chicago boy walked up behind the 19-year-old man victim and pinned his arms to his side, police said. Hayes, 18, then picked up a large tree branch, pointed it at the man and said, “Empty your pockets, white boy.”

The two allegedly rifled through the victim’s pockets, then threw him to the ground and punched him “numerous times” in the head and back before running away, police said. Hayes and the boy are black; the victim is white.

After being arrested, Hayes told police he was upset by the Trayvon Martin case and beat the man up because he was white, Cook County State’s Attorney’s office spokeswoman Tandra Simonton said, citing court records.

You can't help but wonder what effect President Obama's comments on Trayvon Martin's death had on this thug.

Neither can you help but wonder what effect Obama might have if he were to step in and attempt to extinguish the racial flames he helped fan.

Perhaps, given that Obama is half white, he could now comment on how the son he never had might've looked like this victim.

But we know that won't happen.

Obama believes firmly that he benefits from all this.  As do the race pimps and the race baiters.  

They know the great number of  gullible and easily led who succumb to emotion and misguided guilt rather than facts and truth and so will do what they can to take advantage of them.

A pox on them all.

Crossposted at Wizbang.

This is NOT a hate crime. Nope.

By tim, The Godless Heathen

So says the Baltimore County Police Commissioner. Yes sir, looks like some love to me.

From GatewayPundit, where there is also another video of this barbarity shot from a different angle.

But don’t worry, Present Obama and AG Eric Holder will be holding press conferences and investigating this soon. Yup.