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PDFThe crux of the Obama Administration's argument is that when Christians form a corporation they give up the right to exercise their religion---they cannot run their business according to their Christian beliefs.
In the context of this case, the administration is making its argument that killing an embryo seeking to implant in his or her mother's womb is not an abortion.
The dispute involves a regulation that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius issued under the Affordable Care Act. This regulation says that virtually all health insurance plans must cover, without any fees or co-pay, all FDA-approved “contraceptives.”
But what the FDA and the regulation call “contraceptives” include drugs and devices that sometimes work not by preventing conception but by ending a human life after conception. In other words, in these circumstances, the mandated drugs and devices are not contraceptives at all, but post-conception killing agents.
Today the US Department of Justice is trying to make the case that killing an embryo is not an abortion.
But the DOJ is also "evolving" in their "truth", because what they are saying today is different than what they were saying last September in the brief to this same Court.
"Relative truth" gets tricky.
When the Justice Department petitioned the Supreme Court to take up the Hobby Lobby case last September, the administration conceded in its petition that among the mandated drugs and devices were some that did indeed prevent human “fertilized eggs” from implanting in their mothers’ wombs.
Today, the US Department of Justice is trying to tell the Supreme Court that killing an embryo is not an abortion.
Terrance Jeffery has written an excellent article and has given clarity to this issue that is before the Court today.
Jeffery points out that although the DOJ says it isn't an abortion, "a collection of citations" posted on a Princeton University website, medical dictionaries, embryology texts, and a federal commission, have all defined fertilization as the beginning of a new human life with the formation of an embryo."
Jeffery's in depth article concludes, "The Obama Administration wants Americans to believe an 'emergency contraceptive' can act post conception to kill a 'fertilized egg'---but dos not mean it induces an abortion."
"It just kills a human being," he says.
This is a defining moment for religious freedom in America and for "Life" itself.
This is about much more than the Green family who own Hobby Lobby and are seeking to practice their Christian faith in their business. It is a confrontation between the forces of life and those who seek to honor its sanctity and the forces who seek to expand abortion as "choice" and a convenient way of birth control---or in some cases eugenics.
This decision will touch every American citizen in some measurable way.
It is also a profile on the struggle in America to defend religious freedom against the hypocrisy of the abortion and progressive movement that consistently works to destroy life and erode freedoms.
Often this struggle is subtle and unnoticed. For example: This administration and the secular progressive movement have recently replaced the term "religious freedom" with the term "freedom of worship."
Just words, some would say. But its more than that.
Religious freedom speaks to public practice or public expression. Freedom of worship speaks to a practice within the church building or "worship" services, etc.
You are welcome to express your religious beliefs within the church building, but not in the public market place of the culture.
I noted that Mrs. Obama in her speech to Chinese students this week affirmed a right to "freedom of worship" not "freedom of religion."
Make no mistake, religious freedom as our Founders understood and established it, is under severe attack.
So is the sanctity of life.
The attack on life and liberty is born from the same root.
When you trace the roots of the abortion movement in America, it is not difficult to see how we have evolved to this level of disregard for life.
The disregard for life has paralleled an evolving disregard for God and eternal principles, including the very basis of our freedom and liberty in America.
Cardinal Raymond Burke, head of the highest court at the Vatican, was quoted in an article Friday saying President Barack Obama's policies "have become progressively more hostile toward Christian civilization."
He said that Obama wants to restrict religious freedom and force individuals, outside his or her place of worship, "to act against his rightly formed conscience, even in the most serious of moral questions."
They are telling us we are "free" to express ourselves in the context of a church building, but we can not express our religious views in any meaningful ways in the culture.
Next week the Planned Parenthood Federation of America will present House Minority Leader (former Speaker of the House) Nancy Pelosi with Planned Parenthood's highest award---the "Margaret Sanger Award."
Hillary Clinton received the award in 2009.
The award is named to honor the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger.
Margaret Sanger's life work was the advancement of eugenics---breeding better humans through eugenics.
Sanger's original organization became known as Planned Parenthood in 1942.
Sanger wrote a number of articles and essays intended to advance eugenics in the culture.
In 1921, Sanger wrote an essay titled, "Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda" which was published in the October 5 edition of "The Birth Control Review."
In the article Sanger expressed her deep belief and full support for eugenics---which was, and is defined as "a science that tries to improve the human race by controlling which people become parents."
Sanger's work particularly targeted the Black community. Planned Parenthood continues that tradition to this day, focusing their abortion business on minority neighborhoods.
In the essay linked above she noted that eugenics had been subject to "the cruel ridicule of stupidity and ignorance."
Sanger goes on to write: “In the limited space of the present paper, I have time only to touch upon some of the fundamental convictions that form the basis of our Birth Control propaganda, and which, as I think you must agree, indicate that the campaign for Birth Control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical in ideal with the final aims of Eugenics.”
The essay goes on to state: “As an advocate of Birth Control, I wish to take advantage of the present opportunity to point out that the unbalance between the birth rate of the ‘unfit’ and the ‘fit,’ admittedly the greatest present menace to civilization, can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between these two classes."
“In this matter, the example of the inferior classes, the fertility of the feeble-minded, the mentally defective, the poverty-stricken classes, should not be held up for emulation to the mentally and physically fit though less fertile parents of the educated and well-to-do classes."
“On the contrary," Sanger continued, "the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective."
The 1921 article in "The Birth Control Review" was neither the first nor last time Sanger discussed eugenics.
The February 1919 issue of "The Birth Control Review," she published an article entitled, "Birth Control and Racial Betterment," which she argued that birth control advocates and eugenicists both want the “elimination of the unfit.”
In her 1919 essay, Sanger argued that women had a "right" to decide how many children to have.
“We further maintain that it is her right, regardless of all other considerations, to determine whether she shall bear children or not, and how many children she shall bear if she chooses to become a mother," wrote Sanger.
In the “conclusion” of an undated, typed, draft article that is included in the Margaret Sanger Papers at the Library of Congress and that is entitled, "The Unfit," Sanger did not say that it was a woman's right to decide how many children to have but it said that some people should be given "a choice of sterilization or isolation."
In that article she wrote:
“We can see how naturally we are today brought up to those questions of birth control as an instrument of higher breeding and regeneration of the race."
“The Question of race betterment is one of immediate concern, and I am glad to say that the United States Government has already taken certain steps to control the equality of our population through the drastic immigration laws."
This is a glance at the roots of the battle against life in America. CNS NEWS has written a more detailed article on Sanger and this subject.
Influential women like Hillary Clinton and now Nancy Pelosi are regularly awarded the "Margaret Sanger Award" for their efforts in advancing her work.
The legacy of Margaret Sanger lingers in the halls of Congress, and now the halls of the highest Court in the land.
God help us.