ElectionWatch 2018: What Will Happen?

Continuing with a tradition begun in 2010 and continued in 2014, it's time (past time, really) for an ElectionWatch series of blog posts and articles offering insight and commentary on the 2018 U.S. congressional, senatorial, gubernatorial and state legislative elections. Although leap-year presidential elections are the "big shows" that generate increasingly huge amounts of political fundraising, campaigning, media attention and voter activity, I personally find the off-year elections a bit more interesting.

While millions of Republican, Democratic and independent voters regard presidential elections as the most consequential for our nation, the fact is that midterm elections are often just as influential, if not even more so, on the direction of our country. This is because our president, while head of the executive branch of government and director of national policy, is only one man, whereas the fifty state governors, ninety-nine state legislatures, one hundred senators, and 435 members of Congress do the lion's share of actual governing, thereby exerting tremendous influence on state and national policy by virtue of their offices and authority. Depending on the issue positions, agenda, and political affiliation of these lawmakers and executives, this influence is used either in support of or in opposition to the president's national policy goals. During the notoriously immoral and corrupt administration of President Barack Obama, for example, Republicans who took control of state legislatures, governorships, Congress, and the Senate provided an important check on the president's abuses of power by refusing to implement ObamaCare, suing the federal government over the unconstitutional HHS mandate, restricting abortion, protecting religious liberty, and enforcing immigration laws.

Yes, senators, members of Congress, governors, and state legislators are elected in presidential election years as well. However, the midterm elections provide a valuable barometer of national opinion across a wide range of issues, typically indicating voter support or lack thereof for the incumbent president and his agenda. In the historic 2002 midterms, Republicans expanded their majorities in both the House and the Senate due to voter approval of President George W. Bush's pro-life, economic and national security measures. As support for Bush's foreign policy waned, Democrats managed to narrowly take over Congress and pick up some state governorships in the 2006 election. The stunning Republican landslide victories of 2010 and 2014 were driven by massive public dissatisfaction with Barack Obama's abortion, healthcare, economic and tax policies.

What will happen in 2018? Will Republicans keep and strengthen their majorities in the House and the Senate as in 2002? Will Democrats seize control as in 2006? Or will something entirely different happen? To answer these questions in a meaningful way, we must attempt to combine historical perspective with an objective evaluation of the current complex situation in the United States.

We live in a country that is more deeply divided than at any time since the Civil War. Party lines have become fault lines segregating people with radically different values, issue positions, interests and income levels from each other. Republicans have become the party of traditional Judeo-Christian values and support for President Donald Trump, and Democrats have become the party of radical secularism and outright hatred of President Trump. Yet many Americans feel that neither party truly represents their interests. Civil discourse, the art of expressing one's opinions and convictions in a compelling yet respectful manner; and bipartisanship, the art of working together for the common good based on common values, have all but vanished from Washington, replaced by vulgar personal attacks and legislative deadlock. Meanwhile, many Americans, myself included, applaud President Trump's performance on certain issues such as abortion, religious liberty, the HHS mandate, court appointments, taxes, the economy, and (partially) immigration and foreign policy while taking issue with his decisions on renewable energy, environmental protection, and (partially) immigration and foreign policy.

Although it has certain unique aspects pertaining to our own time, our current national crisis is far from unprecedented, and history teaches that such profound wounds of division will be reflected in the election results. That said, it's tricky to predict what will happen on Tuesday night. On the one hand, Democrats are spending a ton of money to try to take over Congress, with the secular media and certain national opinion polls biased in their favor. But on the other hand, the economy is doing pretty well, which helps the Republicans. The latest polling averages from Real Clear Politics show Democrats winning a narrow seven-seat majority in the House of Representatives and Republicans holding on to the Senate, but as we saw with Hillary Clinton in 2016, the polls can be inaccurate. To offer my best guess at this point, I don't think we'll see a repeat of 2002 or 2006. I think something entirely different will happen: Republicans will maintain majority control of both the House and the Senate, albeit by extremely narrow margins.

Regardless of what happens, much is at stake in this election. The Democrats have vowed to impeach President Trump and force their own radically secularist agenda on our nation, and they will certainly attempt to do this if they achieve even a one-seat majority in the House. We need to pray earnestly for our country's conversion and healing, vote our values and leave the results in God's hands.

Abraham Lincoln: Defender of Truth and Justice

Today we Americans celebrated the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, one of the most respected and admired presidents in the history of our nation. Lincoln's greatness lay in his deep religious faith, his solid moral principles, and his honesty and integrity of character. Relying on these qualities, and with the aid of Divine Providence, he successfully guided our country through the stormy period of the Civil War, preserving the Union from disintegration and laying the foundation for a more just American society in which the civil rights of all human persons would be protected by law.

Lincoln knew that slavery was widely practiced and financially profitable, but he also knew that it was gravely unjust, and--for that reason alone--it had to be abolished. Deep within his heart and mind, he knew the truth about the evil of slavery, so he courageously spoke the truth about it and took concrete action as president to rid America of this social scourge. He was not a very good public speaker, but he spoke the truth and stuck to his principles. He did not compromise those principles for the sake of political advantage or out of fear of offending wealthy Southern slave owners. He did not surrender to discouragement over the difficulties he faced in attempting to eradicate an entrenched custom of southern American life. On the contrary, Lincoln stood firm in proclaiming the truth about the grave injustice of slavery and in his determination to make it illegal. At a time of national crisis, he put forth a vision for America of a re-united land in which every person born and raised would be a free citizen regardless of his or her race, skin color, or nationality. And that truth and that vision resonated with the American people, who sent Abraham Lincoln to the White House in 1860 and again in 1864. The results were the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared all slaves free; the Union's victory in the Civil War, which restored American unity; and the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which permanently outlawed slavery in the U.S. Although he paid the price of assassination for his courageous leadership and one hundred more years would elapse before his vision would be fully realized, Lincoln's legacy as a great civil rights pioneer and as a national hero is beyond dispute.

With his firm stand on basic principles of justice and natural law, Lincoln offers an encouraging role model for us twenty-first century Americans who are active in the pro-life, pro-marriage, and religious liberty movements of our own day. We who are fighting to protect the basic human rights to life and liberty and to preserve the traditional definition of marriage know that abortion is a lucrative business for those involved in it, that deviant sexual behavior has a certain appeal for those involved in it, and that the HHS mandate and ObamaCare are little more than government subsidies for large abortion, pharmaceutical, and insurance companies. But we also know that abortion and the HHS mandate are gravely unjust, while abortion and same-sex "marriage" violate the Creator's natural law, and--for those reasons--these three abominations must be abolished. We know the truth about these evils, so we must courageously speak the truth about them and take decisive action to rid our country of them. We must not compromise these principles for the sake of temporary political advantages or out of fear of offending radical secularists. And we must not surrender to discouragement by settling for restrictions on abortion or temporary court injunctions against the HHS mandate. On the contrary, we must stand firm in proclaiming the truth about the grave injustice and evil of abortion, homosexual "marriage," and the HHS mandate, and stand firm in our determination to abolish them. And we must put forth a vision for America of a land where every unborn child is protected by law; where marriage is always the union of a man and a woman; and where religious liberty flourishes. That truth and that vision will resonate with the American people, and notwithstanding predictable attempts to do them in, the three great civil rights movements of our time will ultimately achieve their long-sought victories.

Today, thanks to the godless and corrupt leadership of President Barack Obama, our nation is once again in grave crisis, more divided than at any time since the Civil War. We could use another president like Lincoln, a true leader--someone of deep Christian faith, solid moral principles, and honesty and integrity of character--someone who could unite and heal our country, someone who knows how to speak to people's hearts and articulate a clear vision for America. In a few months, I will offer my own endorsement for just such a candidate for president of the United States.

My 2014 Person of the Year

On last month's Christmas special edition of The World Over Live, EWTN news director Raymond Arroyo offered his pick for 2014 Person of the Year: the persecuted Christians of the Middle East. I felt that this was a good choice because it highlighted the increasingly desperate situation of the ancient Christian communities in Iraq, Syria, and the Holy Land who endured so many terrible sufferings in the past year--wanton terrorist violence, destruction of their churches and other priceless cultural treasures, forced displacement, and even martyrdom for their faith--all largely ignored by an indifferent world. A handful of voices in the wilderness, including Patriarch Sako of Baghdad and Prince Charles of England, courageously and repeatedly attempted to awaken the consciences of world leaders, urging them to do what lay in their power to stop these tragedies, but their appeals generally fell on deaf ears.

The increasingly obvious "globalization of indifference" decried by Pope Francis is indeed a cancer growing within our twenty-first century global society that is eating away at that society from the inside. This indifference is a bitter fruit of the destructive ideology of radical secularism, the pseudo-religion of the post-modern age that sees no need for God or religion in public life or international affairs. One major consequence of this indifference is an alarming erosion of religious freedom around the world, even here in the United States, a traditional haven of religious liberty. We are witnessing the truth of Pope Benedict XVI's statement during his visit to Cuba in March 2012 that "When God is put aside, the world becomes an inhospitable place for man." The words of Saint John Paul II uttered ten years before that remain true today: "The building of a global culture of solidarity is perhaps the greatest moral task confronting humanity today." Popes John Paul, Benedict and Francis have all made quite clear that such a global culture of solidarity cannot be built on moral relativism or religious syncretism or the tyranny of unregulated market forces or any other subjective standards; on the contrary, a thriving global community can only be built on the truly universal objective standards of respect for the natural law and human rights that are deeply engraved in the hearts of all men and women.

The tragically endangered Christian minorities of the Middle East remain in great need of our prayers, compassion, financial support, and political activism on their behalf. If we Catholics and Christians in this country were to unite in prayer and charitable support for these people and rally our nation's leaders to take concrete steps to defend their religious freedom, we could make a tremendous difference in the situation and help rescue Middle Eastern Christians from extinction.

On the subject of religious liberty and in light of the foregoing reflections, I will now offer my own choice for 2014 Person of the Year. Her name is Meriam Yahia Ibrahim Ishag, and she is the young Sudanese Catholic convert who was unjustly incarcerated and condemned to death for renouncing the Islamic faith of her childhood and marrying a Christian man. Meriam's story has certain parallels with the persecuted Christians of the Middle East. Like them, she was persecuted for her Christian faith. Like them, she refused to renounce her Lord and Savior. And like them, her plight was generally ignored by an indifferent world.

But thankfully, in Meriam's case (as also in the case of the Middle Eastern Christians), not all human hearts were coldly indifferent. As the clock ticked down to her scheduled execution immediately following the birth of her second child, millions of people all over the world joined her husband Daniel Wani, a businessman and U.S. citizen, in prayer that her innocent life be spared. And God in His great mercy used the power of prayer to deliver Meriam Ibrahim from death. By negotiating with Sudanese authorities, the Italian government and the Vatican managed to rescue her. Instead of being executed, she was released from prison, then re-arrested, re-released, and finally fled the country with her husband and two children. They arrived first in Italy, where Meriam's dream of someday meeting Pope Francis came true. Then the Sudanese Catholic family headed across the Atlantic to make their permanent home in the United States.

Amid all the terrible things that happened in the world last year, this was a wonderfully refreshing success story for religious liberty. America played its traditional role as a safe haven for victims of religious persecution and as a land of opportunity for immigrants hoping to make a fresh start in life. Catholic leaders in the Vatican and Italy acted as noble defenders of religious liberty, doing battle "in the trenches" behind the scenes to defend the basic right of a single person to hold and practice her faith without government interference. Justice prevailed, and an innocent human life was saved. And because of her courageous dedication to her Christian faith in prison and under threat of death, Meriam Ibrahim now stands before us as a true heroine of religious liberty. May God bless her and her family.

Inspired by Meriam's example, with trust in Divine Providence and under the protection of Mary Immaculate, Patroness of the United States, let us take up with renewed vigor the cause of religious liberty here in America in 2015. Despite numerous court injunctions, the unjust and unconstitutional HHS mandate is still on the books, still attempting to coerce us to violate the natural law and our religious convictions by promoting the murder of the innocent unborn. It is a stain on our national conscience, a blot on our reputation for religious freedom. We must do away with it! Congress must pass legislation to abolish this mandate without further delay. It is of critical importance to the future of America that our First Amendment rights be preserved intact. So let's continue the fight to defend our cherished religious freedom until it is fully restored. It will definitely be worth the effort.

Two Important Victories for Life and Liberty

Thanks be to God and to His Holy Mother, Mary Immaculate, Patroness of the United States, for granting our nation two important victories for life and liberty at the end of last month. Both of these victories were decisions handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court during the third annual Fortnight for Freedom.

On June 27, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled unconstitutional a law in Massachusetts that prohibited peaceful pro-life prayer warriors, protestors, and counselors from setting foot within thirty-five feet of an abortion clinic. No doubt strongly supported by Planned Parenthood, this so-called "buffer zone" law was a direct attack on freedom of speech. It was also an indirect attack on innocent human life, since its effect was to increase the number of abortions in the state of Massachusetts. Although the Court remained silent on the morality and legality of abortion, it had enough sense to clearly perceive the freedom of speech issue involved here. Now the pro-life movement in Massachusetts is free to do its important, life-saving work without interference from the state government. No doubt thousands of innocent unborn lives there will be saved in the coming years. Thanks be to God.

Then on June 30, the High Court handed down its widely anticipated decision in the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby case. By just one vote, the Court ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby and against the Obama administration, striking down part of the HHS mandate within ObamaCare that requires owners of secular for-profit businesses to include abortion-inducing drugs and contraceptives in their health insurance plans for their employees, even if this violates their religious beliefs and moral principles. The Court ruled that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed by Congress and signed by President Clinton in 1993, applies to owners of for-profit businesses, and that the federal government cannot force them to violate their consciences. This is a great victory for our First Amendment rights, for our right to act in accord with the law of God, and also for the unborn across our country, many of whose lives will be spared as a result of this decision. Moreover, this ruling has significant implications for what is left of the HHS mandate and ObamaCare, which are both looking more and more like Swiss cheese. If for-profit owners of secular businesses who object to providing abortifacients and contraceptives for religious and moral reasons are exempt from the anti-life mandate, then why shouldn't directors of religious and secular not-for-profit organizations who object to it for similar reasons be exempted as well? Why shouldn't EWTN and Catholic and Christian colleges and hospitals be exempted? Why aren't their CEOs legally free to follow their religious and moral beliefs in their administration of education and health care?

The Obama administration's exemption for religious institutions currently in force is based on a very narrow definition of "religious institution" as an organization that primarily hires and serves members of its own faith. That leaves out practically 99 percent of religious institutions in this country, most of which are not exclusive or cultist but part of the broader society, hiring and serving people of all faiths and none at all. Some of these religious institutions have rightly won their own exemptions from the mandate in state and federal courts. The remainder are still being coerced by the Obama administration against their religion and conscience, and against the First Amendment, into providing coverage for anti-life drugs that have no health benefits whatsoever. This has to stop. The Supreme Court must confirm the more than two dozen injunctions already granted by lower courts to dozens of religious organizations, and extend them to all religious institutions in America. The federal government has no right to pick and choose who can freely practice their religion and follow their conscience and who cannot. Our Constitution forbids the government from prohibiting the free exercise of religion. Therefore, the High Court must uphold the religious liberties and moral conscience rights of all Americans without exception. And that, necessarily, will mean the death of the HHS mandate and the demise of ObamaCare.

Once again, thanks be to God and His Holy Mother for these two victories for human life and liberty in our nation. We must keep praying and taking action to defend our God-given rights and liberties. Let freedom ring!

An Unnecessary Disaster: The Federal Anti-Life Earthquake Is Upon Us

The United States of America is now being shaken to its foundations by a devastating earthquake of unprecedented magnitude and proportions. The powerful shock waves of this tremendous seismic event are unleashing a flood of damage and destruction unlike anything the United States has ever experienced in its 238-year history. Never before have the timing, magnitude, cause, casualties, and effects of such a massive national emergency been predicted with such certainty and precision. Our elected officials were duly informed of the date this quake would occur, the severity of the event, what would trigger it, what it would destroy, and the consequences that would ensue. And the certainty of this foreknowledge conferred a corresponding obligation on our elected representatives, who are responsible for protecting the common good of all American citizens. But since appropriate action has not yet been taken by those in authority to halt this catastrophe, our nation is now beginning to suffer traumatic and incalculable loss.

This great earthquake was triggered by the collision of two massive tectonic plates on which our country rests—the Constitution and our federal government. The resulting shock wave is destroying our religious liberties and moral conscience rights. And the long-lasting moral, social, economic, and environmental effects of the quake will include millions upon millions of innocent unborn children slaughtered in their mother’s wombs; millions of families torn apart by immorality and love of pleasure; low birth rates and population decline; social chaos; record poverty rates; pollution of our rivers and farm soil by large quantities of toxic artificial chemicals; tens of thousands of hospitals, dispensaries, orphanages, nursing homes, soup kitchens, and crisis pregnancy centers, as well as thousands of businesses and scores of colleges and universities, shut down; thousands of lawsuits; financial instability; economic collapse; and a nationwide healthcare crisis that is already impacting every corner of America, leaving not a single community unharmed.

The worst part of this tragic ordeal is its unnecessary and preventable nature. Rather than a natural disaster, this horrendous and destructive earthquake is an unnatural disaster—-an entirely artificial event, deliberately inflicted upon our country by the godless, immoral, corrupt, irresponsible, and arrogant administration of President Barack Obama. That administration has decreed that ALL employers (except narrowly defined “religious employers”) MUST purchase health insurance coverage for their employees that includes abortifacients, contraceptives, and sterilizations (pills and surgical operations that murder the unborn child or prevent parents from conceiving children); furthermore, ALL charitable agencies MUST provide these filthy anti-life drugs and procedures or referrals for such drugs and procedures to their clients. The massive law enforcement apparatus of our federal government will soon be slapping huge tax penalties on all American employers and charitable directors who fail to comply with this outrageous and draconian new law known as the Health and Human Services (HHS) mandate.

This abominable law flagrantly violates the law of God, the Constitution of the United States, our fundamental rights and liberties as American citizens, and our dignity as human persons. It violates the Fifth Commandment by ordering employers and charity workers to help their employees and clients murder their unborn children; it also violates the Sixth Commandment by requiring the purchase and distribution of drugs that prevent married couples from conceiving new children. It violates the First Amendment by forcing religious believers and organizations to act contrary to their sacred beliefs. It violates our fundamental God-given rights of freedom of religion and freedom of conscience. And it violates our dignity as human persons created in the image and likeness of God by reducing us to mere objects whose sexuality and fertility are arbitrarily controlled by our government for its own benefit.

Besides being immoral, unconstitutional, coercive, and anti-human, the HHS mandate is also impractical and downright foolish. Abortion has done irreparable harm to the physical and mental health of more than 56 million American women over the past forty-plus years. To keep it legal and make it even more widespread is irresponsible in the extreme. To encourage Americans to kill their own children and refrain from conceiving them is a recipe for national suicide. Furthermore, artificial contraceptives are destructive to our environment; they pollute our nation’s waterways and eventually work their way into our farm soil and our food supply. To make them a product that all insurance carriers must supply is to invite further degradation of our natural resources. In addition, the mandate will deal a fatal blow to our fragile economy (still struggling to recover from the worst recession since the Great Depression) by imposing unsustainable tax burdens on thousands of business owners and charity leaders; discouraging the establishment of new businesses and charities; further reducing the available spending money of the average working American individual and family; and adding to an already grossly hyperinflated national debt.

The Obama administration has been patently dishonest and deceptive in its cleverly sanitized presentation of the “healthcare” mandate to the American public. For one thing, abortion, artificial contraception, and sterilization have nothing whatsoever to do with “health care.” Killing unborn children in their mother’s wombs is not health care; on the contrary, abundant research testifies that abortion is dangerous to female health. Preventing women and married couples from having children is not health care either. Abortifacients, contraceptives and sterilizations are designed to kill developing human life in the embryonic and fetal stages or to prevent its originating altogether. They are methods of population control entirely devoid of any health benefits. Were the Obama administration to more accurately designate its cherished decree the “life kill mandate”; the evil nature of this law would be clearer to the American people, who already oppose it by a substantial majority.

The Obama administration is also being dishonest about why it is forcing coverage of abortifacient drugs, birth control pills, and sterilization surgeries by all health insurance providers. The official reason for the compulsion is that the public health interest requires unlimited access to such anti-life drugs and procedures. This is ludicrous. Inexpensive artificial contraceptives are already widely available and purchased by millions. The real reason why the Obama administration is forcing coverage of immoral population control items by nearly all insurance providers is that it is aggressively pursuing a radically anti-life agenda driven by the money-hungry abortion, pharmaceutical and insurance industries that back it. In particular, the deceptively titled Affordable Care Act is the brainchild of Planned Parenthood and its loyal allies in the White House and the Senate, designed chiefly to subsidize the abortion cartel in the face of declining public demand for that horrific practice.

At the core of the mandate lies a twisted logic of injustice and selfishness. The duty of our federal government is to promote the common good of all Americans based on fundamental principles of justice and charity that come from God—principles that form the very foundations of human society, as Pope Benedict XVI reminded us in Caritas in Veritate. The HHS mandate is a direct violation of those fundamental principles: unjust because it encourages the murder of innocent unborn children and forces individuals and institutions to violate God’s law; and uncharitable because it leaves tens of millions of low-income Americans without health insurance and is forcing the closure of thousands of charitable institutions upon which millions of people depend for basic necessities of life. By issuing its pro-death mandate, the Obama administration has criminally abused its rightful authority, turned the power of government against the people, and sacrificed the common good to the “wealth care” interests of giant abortion, pharmaceutical, and insurance companies.

As unbelievable as it sounds, here in a Christian nation whose official motto is “In God We Trust,” in a “nation under God…with liberty and justice for all,” those employers and agencies who refuse to purchase and distribute gravely immoral products and services are being punished by their own elected representatives for obeying God’s law, their moral consciences, and their religious beliefs. The longer the HHS directive is allowed to remain in force, the more widespread, severe, and lasting chaos, distress, and human misery this artificial earthquake will unleash, dwarfing previous national crises such as the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor, Watergate, and even the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

No government has the right to compel anyone to act contrary to the moral law, to their moral consciences, or to their religious beliefs. We the citizens of the United States have the right and the sacred duty to work hard for the full repeal of the HHS mandate as soon as possible. Not only for our own sake but for that of our children and our grandchildren, we must hold our elected representatives responsible for this unjust law accountable for the mischief they are unleashing in violation of the law of God, the Constitution of the United States, and our fundamental rights and liberties as human persons and as American citizens.

Unlike any other law in our nation’s history, the HHS decree is inherently destabilizing for our country because it officially prescribes immorality as the law of the land. It turns the moral order established by the Creator upside down by punishing good and rewarding evil. As Father John Corapi used to remind us, “Immorality is un-American and a threat to national security!” The HHS mandate is a direct assault on religion and morality, the very foundations and “indispensable supports” of our nation’s liberty. It remains to be seen whether these twin foundations will prove strong enough to withstand the enormous assault now being unleashed upon them by the Obama administration.

Looking beyond the tragic events currently unfolding across our nation to a less than encouraging future, two glimmers of hope beckon on the horizon. The first is that the U.S. Supreme Court, which is currently hearing a case brought by Christian and Amish business owners against the HHS mandate, may rule it unconstitutional this coming June. Let us pray that our justices on the High Court will do their duty to strike down this flagrantly unconstitutional law and protect our religious liberties and moral conscience rights. However, given recent seriously flawed decisions by the Court such as its wholesale upholding of the Affordable Care Act in 2012, we should not be overly hopeful that this will happen; corruption has clearly infiltrated the High Court and is now influencing its major decisions.

The second glimmer of hope is that with the Congressional and gubernatorial elections this coming November, we the people will be given an important opportunity to bring a halt to the havoc being wrought by this great earthquake and to restore our cherished freedoms of religion and conscience. We must seize this opportunity to rescue our nation from the appalling crisis into which it has been so needlessly and recklessly thrown by the Obama administration. We will have both the opportunity and the responsibility to choose our governors, senators, and representatives. We must exercise that responsibility properly by voting only for true defenders of freedom who pledge to repeal the mandate, and by voting out of office every single elected official responsible for enacting and enforcing it. No enemies of liberty are fit to govern a free people.

As this great earthquake rocks our country, I find myself trembling for its security and survival. As I write this, a black curtain is being drawn across our Constitution and our cherished freedoms of religion and conscience for which our nation’s Founders laid down their lives are being crushed under the heavy boots of a tyrannical and totalitarian government. By arbitrary federal fiat, the United States of America is being transformed into a different country from what it was prior to the mandate. We are moving from being “one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all” to being one nation under Obama, indivisible, with tyranny and injustice for all enemies of the state. I shudder to think what it would be like to live under this regime of evil, frighteningly reminiscent of Communist China or the Soviet Union, for any length of time.

Although our elected representatives in the White House and the Senate have the duty and the power to halt this tremendous catastrophe, they are leaving our country exposed to dreadful ruin because they are corrupt and have little or no concern for the national well-being. Before laws and policies can change, hearts must change. Our Lady of Fatima said that many souls go to Hell because there is no one to pray and sacrifice on their behalf. We must continue to pray and fast for the conversion of those in the abortion, pharmaceutical, and insurance industries and in our government who are responsible for the HHS mandate and its damaging consequences. In the meantime, may God have mercy on our nation—-and may the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Immaculate Conception, Patroness of the United States of America, pray for us.

Copyright © 2014 Justin D. Soutar. All rights reserved.

Solemnity of the Annunciation of Our Lord



Bartolome Esteban Murillo, Annunciation (1655)

 Today is the Solemnity of the Annunciation of Our Lord, one of the greatest feasts on the Catholic liturgical calendar. (In some countries today is a holy day of obligation.) Today we celebrate the awesome and stupendous mystery of the Incarnation of the Eternal Son of God in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary for the sake of our salvation from sin. This great mystery, the fact that God freely chose to become one of us, is the foundation of our Christian faith. A mystery indeed worth pondering. In his infinite wisdom, God does not usually manifest his power in our history through "shock and awe," but rather He acts in silence and hiddenness. Here are two quotes from Pope Francis, reflecting on the mystery of the Annunciation and of Mary's divine maternity:

“The Lord has always taken care of the mystery and has covered the mystery. He did not advertise the mystery. A mystery that advertises itself is not Christian, it is not the mystery of God: it is a fake mystery! And this is what happened to Our Lady here, when she receives her Son: the mystery of Her virginal maternity is concealed. It is concealed for Her whole life! This shadow of God, in our life, helps us to discover our mystery, our mystery of the meeting with the Lord, our mystery of the path of life with the Lord.”

"The Mother of the Redeemer goes before us and continually strengthens us in faith, in our vocation and in our mission. By her example of humility and openness to God’s will she helps us to transmit our faith in a joyful proclamation of the Gospel to all, without reservation. In this way our mission will be fruitful, because it is modeled on the motherhood of Mary. To her let us entrust our journey of faith, the desires of our heart, our needs and the needs of the whole world, especially of those who hunger and thirst for justice and peace, and for God."

May we strive, with the help of God's grace, to imitate Mary's humility and obedience to God's Will, which leads to true freedom.

Speaking of freedom, today the U.S. Supreme Court is hearing the case brought by Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood against the Obama administration's HHS mandate, which forces business leaders to provide their employees with health insurance coverage that includes abortifacients, artificial contraception and sterilization procedures under penalty of gigantic fines. I am proud to stand with David Green, the founder and CEO of Hobby Lobby, and with the owners of Conestoga Wood in their refusal to comply with this unjust and immoral law. Business owners must have the freedom to act in accordance with the natural moral law when making healthcare decisions for their employees. Refusing to provide abortion-inducing drugs, artificial contraceptives, and sterilizations will not endanger anyone's health. Forcing businesses to provide these items under the mantle of "health insurance" represents a direct attack on the natural law and on the human right to act in accordance with that law. Furthermore, the HHS mandate violates our Constitutionally guaranteed rights to freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, and freedom to refuse to purchase unwanted or unnecessary products.

So much is at stake here. Let us pray to Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, Patroness of these United States, that the Supreme Court will render a just decision on behalf of the plaintiffs--a decision that will uphold God's law, our Constitution, and our inalienable rights.

The Importance and Potential of the Catholic Vote

(Note: This article originally appeared on the Intellectual Conservative Feb. 13, 2014 at http://intellectualconservative.com/the-importance-and-potential-of-the-catholic-vote/ and was re-published on EzineArticles Feb. 17, 2014 at http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Importance-and-Potential-of-the-Catholic-Vote&id=8326004 )

Almost any candidate running for president of the United States, for a state governorship, or for a U.S. Senate or House seat these days is clearly aware that he or she probably won’t win the election unless the better part of Catholics participating in that election choose to vote for him or her. In twenty-first century America, how Catholics vote generally determines the outcome of national and state election campaigns. The first presidential election of the century, the election of 2000, was an exception to this general rule, with Republican candidate George W. Bush barely scraping victory despite narrowly losing the Catholic vote. But in the more typical election of 2004, 52 percent of American Catholics cast their ballots for the Republican candidate, George W. Bush, resulting in his re-election as President of the United States. In 2008, on the other hand, Catholics opted for the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama, by a 55 percent margin, putting him in the White House by a comfortable margin. The historic 2010 midterm elections revealed Catholic voters as a major driving force of the Tea Party landslide: 58 percent of them chose Republican candidates for governor, House and Senate seats. Finally, U.S. Catholic voters tipped the close presidential election of 2012 in favor of Barack Obama by a margin of 50 to 48 percent—the same margin as the rest of the electorate.

The significance of the Catholic vote in American politics is unquestionable. But what exactly is this thing called “the Catholic vote,” and how does it work? To find out, let’s take a closer look at the political, social, and religious characteristics of the Catholics of the United States today.

Catholics are a complex and unique group politically. Although they comprise a substantial chunk of the U.S. population (roughly one-fourth or about 70 million), unlike Jews or Evangelicals, they are not overwhelmingly committed to a single political party. Rather, they’re split about 40/40 between the Republican and Democratic parties, while the remaining 20 percent or so are “swing voters,” those who aren’t firmly committed to either party and whose choices in a given election are shaped by a variety of superficial factors. It is these swing voters in each national election, as well as in most state elections, who determine whether the majority of Catholics goes for one party or the other and thus which party wins high office. So savvy politicians spend a great deal of money and effort to try to win this narrow demographic of Catholic swing voters, who comprise no more than 5 percent of the total U.S. electorate.

Part of the reason why Catholics as a whole are not committed to a single party is that they are a motley bunch, hailing from a variety of ethnic and economic backgrounds. They include Caucasians, Hispanics, Filipinos, other East Asians, African-Americans, rich and poor, business professionals and farm workers, urban and rural folk. Catholics are found in every milieu of American society; they inhabit every state and geographical region of the country (although they are spread more thinly in the South). These characteristics set Catholics apart from other religious groups, such as the Protestant majority (which is mostly white and Republican) and Jews (who are mainly Democrats and confined to the largest cities). Thus, it can be said that, given their political, ethnic and economic diversity, Catholics are generally representative of the nation as a whole.

The political characteristics of American Catholics are greatly influenced by how they believe and practice their faith. Less than one-fourth of them are faithful, practicing Catholics who allow their faith to shape their voting decisions and who follow the guidance of their bishops regarding both the negotiable and the non-negotiable issues at stake. For these good Catholics, the right to life of innocent unborn children, the definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman, the right of the Church to act in accord with its teachings and the rights of Americans to act in accord with their moral consciences and religious beliefs, and the right to life of the ill and elderly are of fundamental importance in choosing which candidate to vote for. While a candidate’s positions on other issues such as poverty, war, immigration, taxes, health care, or the economy are carefully considered as well, these negotiable issues are ultimately subservient to the non-negotiable issues of life, family, the moral law and human rights that form the very cornerstone of society. Since the Democratic Party has fervently embraced abortion and deliberately ostracized pro-life candidates, these devout Catholics usually end up voting Republican even if that runs against their preference because they have no other choice in good conscience. They are not necessarily loyal Republicans, and many of them are would-be Democrats. They are de facto Republicans whose voting habits are consistent and easily predictable.

Unfortunately, more than 75 percent of American registered Catholics do not even fulfill their basic religious obligation of attending Mass every Sunday, and of these non-practicing Catholics, a substantial portion are “cafeteria Catholics” (heretics) who refuse to accept certain teachings of the Church. Included within this latter group is the 40 percent of all U.S. Catholics who believe that a woman has a right to an abortion under certain circumstances. Also included within this group is the lion’s share of the more than 50 percent of American Catholics who use artificial contraception within their marriages in violation of Church teaching. These staggering numbers indicate a serious crisis of faith in the American Catholic Church, and they betray grave problems in the Catholic vote. Many of these so-called Catholics always vote Democratic regardless of their candidate’s position on life and marriage; some always vote Republican, even when the Republican candidate supports legalized abortion and same-sex “marriage”; and the remainder are swing voters who pick their party and candidate in each election with little or selective regard for Church teaching on the issues. Some nominal Catholics do agree with the Church that abortion is gravely immoral, but this does not stop them from voting for pro-abortion candidates in clear violation of Church teaching.

Within this overwhelming multitude of Catholics in name only, which includes some 60 million Americans, it is swing voters who determine the role that the Catholic vote plays in each national election as well as in most state elections. Catholic swing voters reelected President Bush in 2004 (that was good), elected President Obama in 2008 (that was bad), helped push the Tea Party to gubernatorial and Congressional victories in 2010 (that was good), and reelected President Obama in 2012 (that was bad). The fact that 55 percent of American Catholics helped put in the White House the most radically pro-abortion president in our nation’s history, and that 50 percent chose to reelect him despite his blatant attacks on the moral law, the Catholic Church, religious liberty and moral conscience rights, is a crying shame. These tragic results were due to Catholic swing voters allying with the substantial minority of Democratic pro-abortion Catholics.

Of course, it’s great when Catholic swing voters do the opposite, and join forces with faithful Catholics and staunch Republican Catholics to assure a victory for human rights and traditional values. In a triumphant press release following the historic 2010 midterm elections, Bill Donohue of the Catholic League announced that “Catholics voted 58-40 for the Republican candidates last night.” He noted that “[t]his was a dramatic 20-point swing from two years ago,” but then added, “What caused Catholics to bolt is not clear.” The reason for this dramatic swing was Catholic swing voters riding the wave of Tea Party enthusiasm that swept the country in reaction to President Obama’s unpopular and immoral healthcare reform law—which is now unfortunately in effect, thanks to those same swing voters having reverted to the Democratic Party two years later.

The fact of the matter is that these Catholic swingers, together with the vast assemblage of non-practicing Catholics in general, are essentially indistinguishable from the secular society and culture around them. They think and vote the way the people around them think and vote; their Catholic faith has little or nothing to do with it. Because they are not well-grounded in their faith, they allow the winds of fashion and popular opinion to blow them to and fro like rudderless sailboats. In 2008 the winds were blowing gently towards the Democrats, so that’s the way they headed. In 2010 the winds sharply shifted course towards Tea Party Republicans, so they caught the gusts and sailed along in that direction.

It is unfortunately true that Catholics in name only control the power of the American Catholic vote by virtue of their sheer numerical monopoly. That is a scandal. What’s even worse is that this situation is allowed to persist by another group we have not yet mentioned: millions of otherwise good practicing Catholics who don’t bother to register or go to the polls on Election Day. These Catholic non-voters frequently and adversely affect the outcome of elections by their failure to participate in the political process. Together with Catholics in name only, they are traitors to both their Church and their country. If these otherwise good Catholics were mobilized to do their duty to God and country, they would add to the faithful Catholics who already vote and help to neutralize the deleterious effects of the Catholic swing voters, thus critically influencing the outcome of important elections. It’s a shame to see the Catholic vote split among pro-abortion Catholics, faithful Catholics and swing Catholics who ignore or selectively apply Church teaching on the issues, while other Catholics just sit by and watch. These divisions are preventing the Catholic vote from achieving its true potential as a great force for good in our country. Meanwhile, so-called “Catholic” politicians eagerly exploit the Catholic vote for their own political gain while promoting a woman’s “right” to abortion or attacking the Church’s right to practice its teachings in public life.

The good news, however, is that these grave problems with the American Catholic vote can be overcome. In fact, change for the better within the American Catholic Church is not only possible, it is gradually unfolding before our eyes. Most “cafeteria Catholics” are over the age of 60, while most faithful Catholics are 45 and under. Young Catholics in particular are fervently dedicated to the pro-life cause. This was nowhere more clearly demonstrated than in the March for Life in Washington, D.C. in January 2013. Of the more than 800,000 people who took part in this event, a majority were Catholic teenagers and younger adults born since Roe v. Wade. This army of young, pro-life Catholics—some of whom were elected to state governorships and U.S. House and Senate seats in 2010 and 2012—continues to grow, while pro-abortion Catholics in the mold of Ted Kennedy are gradually declining and dying out. Younger Catholic priests are not afraid to speak from the pulpit the truth about the evils of abortion, artificial contraception, and gay “marriage,” and their numbers are slowly on the rise as well.

Imagine what the Catholic vote would be like if American Catholics were solidly united in the full belief and faithful practice of the religion they profess! Just imagine what would happen if all Catholic voters in the United States voted in accordance with Church teaching in every election. No pro-abortion candidate for president or governor would ever make it into public office; nor would most such candidates for U.S. Senate and House seats. Politicians would have a holy fear of the Catholic vote, knowing that to publicly take a pro-abortion or pro-gay “marriage” stand would cost them the support of their Catholic constituents. Furthermore, the already massive and growing pro-life, pro-marriage and religious liberty movements would be much stronger and even more effective if our elected representatives had four times as many Catholic constituents knocking on their doors and pressuring them to do away with legalized abortion, gay “marriage” and the HHS mandate. If every American Catholic citizen took seriously his or her grave moral obligation to form and vote his or her conscience in accord with Church teaching, we would have a different and much better country. And all this would happen if only Americans who currently profess to be Catholic took their faith seriously. The Catholic vote would take on even more formidable proportions if half of all American ex-Catholics—another 50 million people—were to return to the Church and begin voting as faithful Catholics. Imagine the beneficial consequences to our country of such a massive reversion to Catholicism!

As Catholics vote, so goes the nation. Good Catholics make good citizens. The sacraments (especially the Holy Eucharist and Confession), prayer (especially the Holy Rosary), and sound catechesis are the keys to revitalizing and renewing the Catholic Church in the United States—and in so doing, to unlock the hidden potential of the Catholic vote and make it truly a force to be reckoned with in future elections.

Copyright © 2014 Justin D. Soutar. All rights reserved.

To Representative Bob Goodlatte: "Please Don't Surrender to ObamaCare!"

Here is the text of a letter I have written to my representative in Congress, Bob Goodlatte, regarding the House Republicans' decision to fund ObamaCare until January 15, 2014:

Dear Representative Goodlatte:


As your constituent and as a Roman Catholic, I was deeply disappointed by the immoral, irresponsible, and cowardly decision of you and your House Republican colleagues to fund ObamaCare through January 15, 2014 in order to avert a U.S. Treasury default and end the partial federal government shutdown.

This decision to finance ObamaCare, even temporarily, was an immoral decision because it includes federal funding of abortion and because ObamaCare tramples on our sacred rights as human beings to act in accordance with the sovereign Law of God when it comes to human life, marriage and family, our religious and moral values, and our personal healthcare decisions. This decision was irresponsible because it took our nation even deeper into an impossible hole of debt by funding a massive, ill-conceived and unsustainable socialized medicine scheme our nation simply cannot afford. And this decision was cowardly because you and your colleagues surrendered your fundamental moral principles and convictions in the face of a fiscal crisis and gave the Obama administration exactly what it wanted: funding for ObamaCare.

I was strongly supportive of the courageous action you and your House Republican colleagues took in late September and early October by refusing to fund ObamaCare even at the cost of a federal government shutdown. You did the right thing by standing on principle and taking a risk to protect innocent unborn human lives. Unfortunately, however, when the Treasury default loomed in mid-October, expediency replaced principle; temporary convenience overshadowed moral integrity and human rights; and lesser economic issues trumped the fundamental moral issues our country is facing: abortion, artificial contraception, traditional marriage, euthanasia, radical secularism and loss of our nation's Christian identity, freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, and freedom to act in accord with the sovereign law of God.

By agreeing to fund ObamaCare for three months in a Continuing Resolution, you and your House Republican colleagues gave President Obama an enormous political victory--not only because you surrendered to his immoral and unconstitutional "healthcare" law, but also because your attention has been diverted from the grave moral issues our country is facing, such as human rights and America's Christian identity, to lesser economic and fiscal matters, such as the debt and the budget.

Mr. Goodlatte, let me ask you: Which is more important: protecting the U.S. Treasury from default, or protecting innocent unborn human life? Which is more important: reducing the national debt or protecting our First Amendment rights? Which is more important: fixing the economy or protecting our God-given rights as individuals and families to make our own healthcare decisions in accord with the objective moral law and without interference or compulsion from a corrupt and immoral government bureaucracy? Which is more important: getting the fiscal house in order or protecting American families, the basic unit of our society, from destruction by a massive onslaught of gravely immoral anti-life drugs and procedures they don't want and can't afford?

Mr. Goodlatte, you and your House Republican colleagues have lost your moral compass. I respectfully urge you and your colleagues to get your priorities straight and keep them straight. Moral issues should come first; economic issues should be secondary. If you don't stand strong and consistently defend our core principles and traditional values of human life, marriage, family, human rights, the Constitution, and our nation's Christian identity against all comers, how can you hope to accomplish anything of lasting value for our nation?

I want nothing to do with this outrageous monstrosity known as ObamaCare. I have always managed without health insurance and am not going to buy it now. I'm under the poverty line and can't afford it. And even if I could afford it, the federal government would have no right to force me or any other private American to purchase individual health insurance coverage, least of all coverage that includes gravely immoral products and services masquerading as "health care" that have nothing whatsoever to do with health care and everything to do with Communist Chinese-style population control for the profit of corrupt abortion, pharmaceutical and insurance industries.

Mr. Goodlatte, are you and your colleagues ready and willing to do what it takes to protect my right to refuse to purchase evil products I don't want and can't afford? Or will you continue to cowardly surrender to the Obama administration's high-handed dictates and allow immorality and tyranny to destroy our once-great nation?

I urge you in the strongest possible terms to take whatever measures are necessary and within your power to repeal ObamaCare in its entirety. And I will keep you and your colleagues in my daily prayers. May God give you the strength to always follow His sovereign law and do what is right, not necessarily what is convenient or politically correct.

Sincerely yours,



[Signed]

Justin Soutar

What's Wrong with the HHS Mandate?

On January 20, 2012, under the direction of President Barack Obama, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced an unprecedented new law: As of August 1, 2012, all forms of health insurance coverage provided by businesses to their employees and by not-for-profit organizations to their clients would have to include artificial contraceptives, sterilizations and abortion-inducing drugs. Furthermore, individual Americans would be required to purchase health insurance for themselves and for their families that includes these means and methods of population control. This official announcement aroused an immediate and fierce storm of protest throughout the United States. Catholic bishops, Protestant ministers, Jewish rabbis, hospital owners, charity CEOs, heads of colleges and universities, big and small business owners, state and federal government leaders, and ordinary American citizens all declared in no uncertain terms that they could not possibly comply with such a directive. The reason? It would force them to act in violation of their religious beliefs and moral convictions—and they were not about to blithely discard those sacrosanct tenets.



In response to this massive wave of protest, a few weeks later on February 10, 2012 the HHS announced a “compromise” to its sweeping mandate, in which two “exemptions” were handed to religious believers. First, “houses of worship” (i.e. churches, synagogues, mosques, etc.) would be exempted from the new law. Second, religious institutions that only hire and serve members of their own faith would not be compelled to furnish certain health care items if furnishing such items violated the principles of their religion. However, this “compromise” did little to abate the storm of protest against the new federal contraceptive, sterilization and abortifacient law. The Catholic bishops objected that it failed to adequately address the serious religious liberty issues raised by the HHS mandate. How so? Well, the second exemption to the mandate is extremely narrow and very few religious organizations qualify for it. And neither exemption addressed the concerns of individual Americans who do not wish to purchase anti-life products. So this HHS “compromise” still left an overwhelming majority of religious believers legally compelled to act against their beliefs.



A few months later, the U.S. Supreme Court completed its review of the encyclopedic Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, which authorized the Obama administration to issue the healthcare mandate in the first place. On June 28, 2012, the Court ruled that the entire Act is constitutional and that the HHS mandate is simply a legitimate exercise of Congressional power to lay and collect taxes. In his written majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts argued that the mandate is not really coercive in violation of the First Amendment because religious leaders, business and charity owners, and individual Americans who object to it can choose between obeying the law or paying the tax fines imposed for noncompliance with it. This landmark decision was quickly followed by another national wave of public outcry. What was wrong with the ObamaCare ruling? Critics pointed out that the tax penalties for noncompliance with the HHS mandate are severely crippling; a religious organization or business that fails to obey the law will be subjected to fines as high as 15 percent of its annual income or $100 per employee per day. Fines of these magnitudes will force many religious institutions and businesses across America to shut down. This is precisely why the National Federation of Independent Business took the Obama administration to the U.S. Supreme Court over the PPACA and the mandate—because they are coercive: Businesses are either forced to obey the law or forced to pay unsustainable fines. Furthermore, fines by their very nature are meant to ensure compliance with a law and to deter and punish noncompliance with it. The notion that the healthcare mandate is not coercive is total nonsense. By allowing ObamaCare to stand unchallenged, the Supreme Court left the First Amendment rights of religious institutions and business owners still exposed to the full onslaught of the HHS mandate.



Facing a barrage of more than forty lawsuits in federal courts across the nation—eleven of which had already been decided in favor of the plaintiffs at this writing—the Department of Health and Human Services held out its most recent olive branch to the American public on February 1, 2013, proposing certain “accommodations” to make its controversial healthcare mandate more palatable to the stubbornly religious masses. However, Catholic bishops and lawyers were soon sounding the alarm that the newly proposed HHS regulations do little if anything to allay their deep concerns about the mandate’s violation of religious freedom. In an op-ed entitled “Making Sense of Another Ambiguous ‘Compromise,’” Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia warned that the healthcare mandate “remains unnecessary, coercive and gravely flawed.” On EWTN’s news program The World Over Live with Raymond Arroyo, attorney Kyle Duncan of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty flatly dismissed the new “accommodations” as “window-dressing.” And Cardinal Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S. bishops’ conference, in an official statement on behalf of all the bishops, declared, “Throughout the past year, we have been assured by the Administration that we will not have to refer, pay for, or negotiate for the mandated coverage. We remain eager for the Administration to fulfill that pledge.”



What is lacking in this latest “compromise” from HHS? According to Cardinal Dolan, three issues remain unresolved: 1) The federal definition of a religious ministry remains extremely narrow. 2) Nearly all religious institutions are still compelled to fund and facilitate "services" such as contraceptives, sterilization, and abortifacients. 3) No protection is afforded to the conscience rights of for-profit business owners.



We’ve already discussed how the mandate affects religious institutions. But what about religious owners of secular for-profit businesses as well as of nonreligious charitable organizations who object that the HHS mandate violates their personal religious beliefs? No legal exemption from the mandate is afforded them. Lawyers for the Obama administration maintain that secular businesses must comply with it regardless of their owners’ personal religious objections to handing out artificial contraceptives, sterilizations and abortifacients in their healthcare plans. In other words, under the Obama regime it is a crime for a religious person who runs a secular business or not-for-profit organization to do so in line with his or her religious convictions if such convictions prohibit the distribution of abortion pills, contraceptive drugs and/or sterilization procedures. Forcing individual believers to violate their faith is as much an attack on the First Amendment as forcing entire religious institutions to do so.



And what about the conscience rights of that small but significant group of non-religious owners of secular businesses and charitable organizations who object to providing abortifacients on moral rather than religious grounds? Why should they be exempted from the HHS mandate? After all, according to the Obama administration, this healthcare law is driven by “a compelling public interest”: for their own good, the American people must have unrestricted access to abortifacient drugs, birth control pills and sterilization procedures. The answer is that the moral right to refuse to provide abortion-inducing drugs is found in the moral law, also known as the natural law—a set of universal principles of right and wrong which come from God and which are inscribed in the human conscience. This moral law guided the thinking and actions of our nation’s great founders and, together with faith in God according to the Judeo-Christian tradition, served as the framework for our country’s two principal founding documents: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.



The Declaration of Independence states: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to ensure these Rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” In this text, our nation’s founders acknowledged as self-evident truths that God created all human beings equal in dignity and endowed them with certain “unalienable” rights, i.e., rights that cannot be taken away, and that the role of government is to protect these rights. The founders knew that the moral law, written in the human conscience and in the Ten Commandments, requires respect for the right to life of every innocent human being and forbids murder. Moreover, in acknowledging “Liberty” as an unalienable human right, the founders understood liberty as 1) the freedom to act in accordance with the moral law, and 2) the freedom to practice one’s own religion without government interference. The former aspect—what we refer to today as “freedom of conscience”—was taken for granted by the founders; we refer to the latter aspect as “freedom of religion.”



In our Constitution’s Bill of Rights, the First Amendment states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Having come to this land from Europe, where some theocratic monarchs forced the state religion on their subjects and outlawed the public practice of other religions, our nation’s founders clearly understood that freedom of religion is a fundamental human right that requires legal protection from the opposing threats of single-religion dictatorship and religious persecution. Thus they wisely crafted a law that on the one hand forbids religious compulsion by the government, and on the other hand guarantees the freedom to practice one’s own religion without interference from the government.



Furthermore, the Fifth Amendment to our Constitution protects our unalienable rights to both life and liberty from arbitrary revocation by the government: “No person shall be…deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” This passage, along with most of the Fifth Amendment, was written to protect the rights of criminal suspects. When our nation’s Founders authored this text, they meant that no one could be executed, incarcerated, or deprived of his land without first being publicly tried and convicted of a crime. Unfortunately, some two hundred years later in the infamous Roe v. Wade decision, the U.S. Supreme Court arbitrarily reinterpreted the Fifth Amendment due process clause regarding the imprisonment and execution of criminals to justify legalizing the murder of innocent unborn persons. As a result of this flawed decision, over the last forty years nearly 56 million innocent unborn Americans have been deprived of their unalienable right to life, and with it all their other rights as well. A woman’s supposed “right” to an abortion on demand has no authentic legal basis in the Constitution.



By compelling individuals and institutions to help women kill their innocent unborn children regardless of moral objection to an intrinsically evil practice, the HHS mandate violates our sacred rights to life and liberty enshrined in the Declaration and the Constitution. Abortion violates the unalienable rights to life and liberty of the innocent unborn human being in its mother’s womb; therefore, it is both murder and tyranny and constitutes a violation of the Declaration and the Fifth Amendment. The HHS mandate violates not only the unalienable rights to life and liberty of the innocent preborn, but also the unalienable right to liberty of the American people, i.e., their freedom to act in accord with the moral law and with their religious beliefs; therefore, it is both murder and tyranny and constitutes a violation of the Declaration, the First Amendment and the Fifth Amendment.



The mission of civil government is to protect the God-given rights of its citizens and to promote the common good of society. Religion and morality—what George Washington referred to as “indispensable supports” of our nation’s liberty—are the essential foundations of human society. Atop this foundation, the traditional family is the essential basic unit of human society, the place where new human life is welcomed and nourished and where religious and moral values as well as civic duties are inculcated in the next generation of American citizens. Government has a solemn duty to respect religion, morality and the family and to avoid making any policies that would threaten their wellbeing. A government that dares to attack religion, morality, or the family is attacking the very foundations of human society. The Obama administration has dared to attack all three of these foundations of our republic by issuing a law that violates religious freedom, promotes immorality, and discourages families from welcoming new human life into their midst.



Our nation’s founders prophetically warned that the United States would not long endure without the twin pillars of religion and morality, that is, faith in God and adherence to his moral law. If the people of a nation don’t believe that human rights—especially the rights to life and liberty—come from God, then those rights will be perceived as coming from the state and the state will claim the authority to define their limits and to give or take away those rights as it sees fit. And if people don’t believe that it is morally wrong to deprive an innocent person of his or her right to life or liberty, then human life and liberty will not be respected.



Despite the claims of the Obama administration, the HHS mandate has nothing to do with looking after the health of the American public. Giving women drugs to kill their unborn children is not caring for the health of either mothers or preborn infants, and giving people artificial contraceptives (many of which are de facto abortifacients) and surgical sterilization procedures so that they can’t have children is not health care either. None of these so-called “preventive services for women” are necessary or even beneficial to the health and well-being of American women; on the contrary, they are unnecessary and harmful to both. The negative effects of abortion on the physical, mental and emotional health and well-being of women are now well documented: cancer, pregnancy complications, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety, depression, guilt feelings, and suicide. And artificial contraceptives have been shown to be harmful to the natural environment; their chemical waste byproducts pollute our nation’s water and soil and end up contaminating our food supply, which also degrades our health. Viewed objectively, the HHS order is an irrational and self-destructive national policy of population control: By helping American women to not bear children, it places the future of our entire nation at risk. This fact alone renders the “healthcare” mandate a grossly irresponsible and unethical decree of the federal government.



So if the HHS mandate is not about health care, what it is about? The answer is: money. The mandate is driven by powerful corporate interests—specifically the abortion, pharmaceutical, and insurance industries—which stand to profit immensely from legally mandated consumption of their products. Unfortunately, these wealthy and influential corporate giants are better represented in Washington, D.C. than the American people themselves are. They have bribed the Obama administration to give them exactly what they want—and they will do whatever it takes to ensure that the “healthcare” law remains firmly in place, no matter how destructive it is to our country.



Since announcing this high-handed and unprecedented “healthcare” directive over a year ago, the Obama administration has utterly failed to grant American citizens, business and charity owners, and religious institutions their fundamental right to act in accordance with the moral law and in accordance with their moral convictions and religious beliefs. The two HHS “compromises” presented thus far, with their narrow “exemptions” and dubious “accommodations,” are mere facades, totally devoid of genuine protections for the religious liberties and moral conscience rights of the American people. They’re carefully calculated political gestures designed to give the appearance of compromise and intended to weaken public resistance to a law that is immoral, unjust, and unconstitutional—a law that President Obama and his tyrannical accomplices have foisted on our nation without our consent, a law that they have no intention of rescinding or of substantially altering to comply with the First and Fifth Amendments.



The HHS mandate has been and continues to be loudly decried as an attack on religious liberty and the First Amendment, which it certainly is. But even more fundamentally, it is an attack on the moral law and on our right to act in accordance with that law. In our response as Catholic American citizens to the Obama administration’s radical anti-life policy, too much emphasis is being placed on the religious liberty and legal aspects of the issue and not enough on the moral and human rights aspects. The core of the issue is that the mandate forces American individuals and employers to purchase and distribute population control items that are gravely immoral for use either by pregnant women or by married couples. As Catholics, we need to articulate a more coherent defense of the natural moral law and of our right to always act in accordance with it—defending principles that we hold in common with other religious believers as well as with certain atheists and agnostics—in order to combat the insidious propaganda of the Obama administration more effectively.



The HHS mandate is an immoral and unjust law. Therefore, we the people of the United States have not only the right but the moral duty to refuse to obey it—and to work for its full reversal. It’s not enough to merely demand further exemptions from the mandate. This approach is inherently flawed because it implies tacit acceptance of an unacceptable law. For the reasons given in this article, the so-called “healthcare” mandate in principle is intrinsically, profoundly and irredeemably flawed, and because of that it must be completely overturned. We must not allow ourselves to become discouraged by the obstacles we face in achieving this necessary goal. We must not give in to a subtle defeatist mentality and cowardly surrender to the mandate as though it were carved in stone. Such a dangerous and evil law cannot stand for long without wreaking tremendous havoc on our nation. We the people of the United States must keep up the pressure on the Obama administration to revoke this terrible law—and if it refuses to do so, we must use our heads when we next go to vote and select responsible leaders who will protect and defend our God-given unalienable rights to life and liberty, so that we will once again be “one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”



Copyright © 2013 Justin D. Soutar. All rights reserved.

An Unnatural Disaster: The Federal Anti-Life Earthquake and Its Consequences for America

by Justin Soutar

Within a year and a few short months, the United States of America will be rocked to its core by a devastating earthquake of unprecedented magnitude and proportions. The powerful shock waves of this tremendous seismic event will unleash a flood of damage and destruction unlike anything the United States has ever experienced in its 237-year history. This massive earthquake will be triggered by the collision of two giant tectonic plates on which our country rests—the Constitution and our federal government. The resulting shock wave will destroy our religious liberties, our moral conscience rights, and our freedom to act in accord with the law of God. And the long-lasting moral, social, demographic, environmental, legal, economic, civil, and health effects of the quake will include millions upon millions of innocent unborn children slaughtered in their mother’s wombs; millions of families torn apart by immorality and love of pleasure; tens of thousands of hospitals, dispensaries, orphanages, nursing homes, soup kitchens, and crisis pregnancy centers, as well as thousands of businesses and scores of colleges and universities, shut down; record poverty rates; low birth rates and population decline; pollution of our rivers and farm soil by large quantities of toxic artificial chemicals; thousands of lawsuits; financial instability; economic collapse; civil unrest and conflict; and a nationwide healthcare crisis that will impact every corner of America, leaving not a single person untouched.

An Artificial Disaster—President Obama’s Anti-Life Mandate

The worst part of this tragic ordeal will be its unnecessary and preventable nature. Rather than a natural disaster, this horrendous and destructive earthquake will be an unnatural disaster—an entirely artificial event deliberately inflicted upon our country by the godless, immoral, corrupt, irresponsible, and arrogant administration of President Barack Obama. That administration has decreed that ALL employers (except narrowly defined “religious employers”) MUST purchase health insurance coverage for their employees that includes abortifacients, contraceptives, and sterilizations (pills and surgical operations that murder the unborn child or prevent parents from conceiving children); furthermore, ALL charitable agencies MUST provide these filthy anti-life drugs and procedures or referrals for such drugs and procedures to their clients. On January 1, 2015, the massive law enforcement apparatus of our powerful federal government will come down hard on all American employers and charitable agencies who fail to comply with this immoral, draconian, and outrageous new “law” known as the Health and Human Services (HHS) mandate. This abominable so-called “healthcare law” flagrantly violates the law of God, the Constitution of the United States, our fundamental rights and liberties as American citizens and as human beings, and our dignity as human persons created in the image and likeness of God. It violates the Fifth Commandment by ordering employers and charity workers to help their employees and clients murder their own unborn children; it also violates the Sixth Commandment by requiring the purchase and distribution of immoral drugs that prevent married couples from conceiving new children. It violates the First Amendment by forcing religious believers and organizations to act contrary to their sacred beliefs. It violates our fundamental rights as American citizens to freedom of religion and freedom of conscience, as well as our fundamental right as human beings to act in accord with the moral law. And it violates our dignity as human persons created in the image and likeness of God by reducing us to mere sexual and economic objects whose sexuality and fertility are arbitrarily manipulated by our government for the financial benefit of large private corporations.

Abortion is always a grave moral evil regardless of the circumstances. It should not be legalized, much less promoted or mandated, by any government. Forty years ago, our nation suffered a similarly cataclysmic jolt when seven men on our Supreme Court arbitrarily decided that any pregnant woman who wishes to do so has a “right” to kill her innocent unborn child for any reason whatsoever. That terrible ruling opened the floodgates to a torrent of mass murder that dwarfs the Holocaust and cries out to Heaven for vengeance. Even as the American people become increasingly pro-life and abortion rates decline, our society and nation are still suffering the bitter effects of that devastating High Court error known as Roe v. Wade. It is bad enough that the horrible crime of abortion has been legally permitted for decades here in the United States, in a country founded on explicit acknowledgement of the inalienable rights to life and liberty with which all human beings are endowed by their Creator. But it is much worse for a government to go beyond mere legal permission of abortion to actively promoting and encouraging the murder of the unborn by compelling the citizenry to get involved in spreading this grave evil—as our own government is now doing with the HHS mandate.

Artificial contraception is always a grave moral evil when used by married couples. Prior to the advent of Margaret Sanger and the pill in the 1920s, every Christian denomination in the United States echoed the Catholic Church in condemning the use of artificial contraception by married couples as a gravely immoral practice. The fact that most denominations no longer teach this does not change the objective moral law in this regard. God designed marriage as a permanent union of love and life between a man and a woman for their mutual happiness and the propagation of the human species. Love and life are supposed to go together in marriage; conversely, selfishness and death go hand in hand. When a married couple uses artificial contraception, they reduce each other to mere objects of sexual pleasure and refuse to cooperate with their Creator to bring new life into the world—thus foiling both the unitive and the procreative ends of marriage. Instead of being the stable, happy and fruitful union of love and life that it’s meant to be, their marriage becomes an unstable, miserable and fruitless union of selfishness and death. Artificial contraception has destroyed millions of marriages in our country over the last fifty years, with devastating consequences for our society and nation. Thus our government, which is responsible for promoting the common good of families and of society in accord with the law of God, should strongly discourage the widespread production and sale of artificial contraceptives. Instead, it is apparently determined to hasten the destruction of our society by forcing us to purchase and distribute these immoral anti-life drugs.

Besides being immoral, unconstitutional, coercive, and anti-human, the HHS mandate is also an impractical and downright foolish law. Abortion has done irreparable harm to the physical and mental health of more than 56 million American women over the past forty years. To keep it legal and make it even more widespread is irresponsible in the extreme. To encourage all Americans to kill their own children and refrain from conceiving them with a compulsory national anti-life policy is a recipe for national suicide. Moreover, artificial contraceptives are destructive to the environment; they pollute our nation’s waterways and eventually work their way into our farm soil and our food supply. To make them a product that all insurance carriers must supply is to invite further degradation of our natural resources. In addition, the mandate will deal a fatal blow to our fragile economy—still struggling to recover from the worst recession since the Great Depression—by imposing unsustainable tax burdens on thousands of business owners and charity leaders; by discouraging the establishment of new businesses and charities; by further reducing the available spending money of the average working American individual and family; by further exacerbating an already unmanageable national debt; and by artificially reducing the population of the next generation of American entrepreneurs and business leaders. Furthermore, complete enforcement of this untenable law in the face of massive civil disobedience would be a tremendous feat of executive action for our swollen federal bureaucracy and our overburdened criminal justice system. Even if they were doubled in size overnight, our existing police force, court system, and prison accommodations would prove hopelessly inadequate for the arrest, trial, and imprisonment of, say, 100 million Americans who refuse to obey the mandate or pay the fines. And some states may even secede from the Union over this draconian federal order, just as the southern states did over unjust federal banking and financial laws in the mid-1800s.

Why is our federal government so hell-bent on throwing our nation into turmoil with this evil and senseless anti-life decree? Because it is currently dominated by a godless, immoral, corrupt, irresponsible, and arrogant administration. President Obama mocks faith in God and denies our fundamental identity as a Christian nation. He rejects the law of God and arbitrarily decides for himself what is right and wrong. His administration faithfully serves the interests of large private corporations while pretending concern for the common good. His policies have fueled and continue to fuel rising poverty rates, a prolonged recession, and uncontrollable national debt. And he arrogantly rammed his costly, unconstitutional, coercive, and anti-life healthcare reform legislation (the deceptively named Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which authorizes the HHS mandate) through Congress despite overwhelming opposition from the American people—and then publicly threatened the Supreme Court not to get in the way.

The HHS mandate is the joint brainchild of abortion moguls, pharmaceutical executives, insurance tycoons, and our well-fed establishment politicians in the White House and the Senate. These elite folks are the masterminds of the traumatic, artificial, and unnecessary earthquake soon to disrupt our nation. And they have carefully designed and engineered this unnatural disaster exclusively for their own financial benefit.

Dishonesty, Deception, and Death for Profit

In the presentation of its so-called “healthcare” mandate to the American public, the Obama administration has exhibited blatant dishonesty and deception. For one thing, abortion, artificial contraception, and sterilization have nothing whatsoever to do with “health care.” Killing unborn children in their mother’s wombs is not health care, and preventing married couples from having children is not health care either. These immoral drugs and procedures are designed to kill developing human life in the embryonic and fetal stages or to prevent its conception altogether. Had the Department of Health and Human Services more accurately labeled its disgusting order the “life kill” mandate, the evil nature of this law would be clearer to the American people.

The Obama administration is also being dishonest about why it is forcing coverage of abortifacient drugs, birth control pills, and sterilization surgeries by all health insurance providers. The official reason for the compulsion given by HHS is that the public health interest requires unlimited access to these anti-life drugs and procedures. This is nonsense. Inexpensive artificial contraceptives are already widely available and purchased by millions of Americans each year. In reality, abortion, contraception, and sterilization are not forms of health care but rather methods of population control. The real reason for the anti-life mandate is that our federal government wants to control and dominate human life for its own dark purposes, including the eradication of the poor and the financial security of wealthy abortion tycoons.

Margaret Sanger, the eugenicist and racist foundress of Planned Parenthood, deliberately introduced abortion and artificial contraceptives into poor African-American neighborhoods in the 1920s to reduce our black population; even today, most Planned Parenthood abortion mills are situated in inner-city black and Hispanic neighborhoods, resulting in high abortion rates among these social and ethnic groups—and lots of income for Planned Parenthood abortion “doctors.” Population control of the many generates lucrative business profits for a few, with poverty providing a convenient excuse for wealthy abortionists and pharmaceutical manufacturers to increase their profits under the guise of “health care.” Furthermore, sterilizing the poor makes the rich feel less guilty about refusing to help them. When the financial crisis struck in 2008, our federal government spent hundreds of billions of dollars to rescue big banks from imminent collapse due to their own irresponsible lending practices; but the Obama administration’s $787 billion economic stimulus package did nothing to stave off rising unemployment and poverty rates. Since that time, the number of Americans in poverty has continued to grow steadily, reaching the current all-time high values. The right way to deal with this worsening problem—the loving, humane, pro-life, Christian way—would be to give the poor food and clothing and shelter and medical assistance and education. The wrong way to deal with it—the selfish, inhumane, anti-life, demonic way—is to sterilize and kill off the poor like rats. Our government has chosen the latter method.

If the Obama administration was honest about what it was doing with the mandate, it would say to us, “Our radically anti-life agenda is driven by the money-hungry abortion, pharmaceutical and insurance industries, and we’re being paid handsomely to advance their interests. The purpose of the mandate is to enable these big companies to stay in business and make even bigger profits. We don’t care a whit about the old-fashioned Ten Commandments or the antiquated Constitution or the runaway national debt or the health of the public or the well-being of the country or the growing millions of struggling folks out there on Main Street. All we really care about is fattening our wallets, retaining our grip on power and expanding that power as necessary to preserve and increase the wealth of the financial kings that govern Wall Street. Too bad if the America you once knew, the America that trusted in God and respected human rights, has to go down the drain; we worship and serve the golden calf of the Almighty Dollar. Too bad if you don’t like the new America; we’re in charge now, and you must do whatever we say or face the consequences.”

Now, the sacred duty of our federal government is to promote the common good of all Americans based on fundamental principles of justice and charity that come from God—principles that form the very foundations of human society, as Pope Benedict XVI reminded us in Caritas in Veritate. And the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church states: “Authority is exercised legitimately when it acts for the common good and employs morally licit means to obtain it.” (1) By issuing and enforcing its abominable HHS decree, the Obama administration is engaging in an illegitimate exercise of government authority because the mandate is diametrically opposed to the common good and employs morally illicit means to achieve immoral ends. Our elected representatives in Congress and the White House and those whom they appoint to head the various federal offices and departments bear a solemn responsibility before Almighty God to act as our public servants by consistently placing the good of the whole country ahead of private interest or personal gain. With their dangerous anti-life law, President Obama and his cronies are doing exactly the opposite, elevating private interest and personal gain above the common good. Their mandate constitutes a direct violation of the fundamental social principles of justice and charity. It’s unjust because it encourages the murder of innocent unborn children and attempts to force individuals and institutions to participate in such murder, thereby violating God’s law, our moral consciences, and our religious beliefs. And it’s uncharitable because it will result in the closure of thousands of privately run charitable institutions upon which millions of Americans depend for basic necessities of life.

A Reign of Sin and Evil

At the bottom of the federal anti-life mandate lies a twisted logic of evil, injustice and selfishness. The Obama administration seems perversely intent on preventing the conception and birth of children as though children were a dangerous plague to be eradicated. Children are in fact the greatest possible blessing for a nation, and lack of children the greatest possible curse. Unstinting champions of abortion “rights” such as President Obama, Vice President Joseph Biden, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, and Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi never seem to reflect on the fact that they were babies themselves once, and that they would not be alive today if their mothers had aborted them or artificially prevented their conception. These selfish politicians don’t care about protecting the lives of other innocent human beings as long as their own right to life is preserved inviolate.

The HHS mandate is what The Catechism of the Catholic Church calls a “structure of sin,” (2) a social situation or institution that is contrary to the divine law. (3) Structures of sin are the expression and effect of personal sins. (4) The federal anti-life mandate is an expression and effect of sins of greed, injustice and selfishness being committed by abortion, pharmaceutical, and insurance executives and by our corrupt elected and appointed officials in the Obama administration. “Sin makes men accomplices of one another and causes concupiscence, violence, and injustice to reign among them.” (5) As a structure of sin, the “life kill” mandate attempts to weave government officials, religious leaders, charity directors, business owners, and individual citizens together in a seamless web of deception, betrayal, exploitation, violence, and sexual immorality.

Unlike any other law in our nation’s history, the HHS decree is inherently destabilizing for America because it officially prescribes immorality as the law of the land. As Father John Corapi used to remind us, “Immorality is un-American and a threat to national security!” By punishing good and rewarding evil, the anti-life mandate turns the moral law established by our Creator upside down, thus betraying its demonic origin. For this evil law is ultimately inspired by Satan himself, the old archenemy of God and humanity, whom Scripture calls “the father of lies” and “a murderer from the beginning,” (6) to further his wicked agenda of death and destruction in our country. The Devil wants to kill off the American people and destroy the one true Church of Christ—and he is using Obama administration officials to get the job done. His faithful servants Vice President Biden, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, and Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi—all of whom claim to be members of Christ’s Church—are fanatically pushing anti-life drugs and procedures contrary to God’s law and attacking the freedom of the Church to act in accord with the moral law and with its religious beliefs. Some 2,000 years ago, Judas betrayed Christ for a bag of silver money; today Biden, Sebelius, and Pelosi are betraying Him for exactly the same thing. The Obama administration has fallen for the same old temptation with which the serpent ensnared our first parents in the Garden of Eden more than 6,000 years ago: the temptation to reject God in order to become God. Deceived by Satan, Adam and Eve arrogantly rejected God their Creator, denied their creaturely status and their dependence on Him, and subjectively and arbitrarily decided for themselves what was good and what was evil, abusing their freedom by transgressing the moral law. Now our elected and appointed federal officials have reached out and grasped the same forbidden fruit out of a desire to be like God but “without God, before God, and not in accordance with God.” (7)

Government Gone Wild

As unbelievable as it sounds, within a year and a few short months, here in a majority Christian nation whose official motto is “In God We Trust,” in a “nation under God…with liberty and justice for all,” nearly all business and charitable employers who refuse to purchase and distribute gravely immoral anti-life drugs and procedures will automatically become “lawbreakers,” subject to punishment by their own government for obeying the law of God, their moral consciences, and their religious beliefs. This artificial earthquake will unleash such widespread, severe, and lasting chaos, destruction, distress, and human misery, that it will dwarf previous national emergencies such as the Civil War, the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor, Watergate, and the Iranian hostage crisis. Enforcement of the federal anti-life mandate will make even the terrorist attacks of 9/11 look like a walk in the park. That tragedy was inflicted upon us by a foreign enemy, confined to three locations and a single day, killed thousands of innocent people, and affected tens of thousands of others. This tragedy will be inflicted upon us by our own government, is a permanent nationwide policy, will kill millions upon millions of innocent unborn children, and will affect the life of every single American.

No government has the right to compel anyone to act contrary to God’s law, to their moral consciences, or to their religious beliefs. We the people simply cannot obey this immoral, unjust, and uncharitable HHS decree. To do so would be an act of treason against God, our consciences, our religions, our families, and our country. As citizens of the United States, we have not only the right but the sacred duty to refuse to obey this law and to work hard for its full repeal as soon as possible. Moreover, we should refuse to pay the tax fines imposed for noncompliance with the HHS directive. These tax fines are unjust—not only because of the dollar amounts involved, and not only because they constitute a form of religious persecution explicitly forbidden by the First Amendment—but even more fundamentally because they are an attack on our freedom as human persons to act in accord with the objective law of God.

The role of government is to protect human rights, not to take them away. By issuing and intending to enforce its cruel and inhuman anti-life mandate, the Obama administration has criminally abused its rightful authority, betrayed the American people, turned the power of government against the citizenry, and sacrificed the common good to the “wealth care” interests of giant abortion, pharmaceutical, and insurance companies. We must hold our elected representatives and appointed officials in the federal government accountable for the unconscionable crimes they are perpetrating against the law of God, against our Constitution, against our fundamental rights and liberties as American citizens and as human beings, and against our dignity as human persons. President Obama and his lackeys should be removed from office immediately and justly punished for their misdeeds.

Where’s the Fire?

It may be true that most of us Americans are shocked, disgusted, and angry with the Obama administration for attacking our religious liberties and moral conscience rights with its draconian anti-life mandate. But apparently we are not shocked, disgusted, or angry enough. If we the people have been so upset about this obscene anti-life law from its inception, then why did we re-elect President Obama and his loyal accomplices in the Senate who are responsible for it, instead of demanding their impeachment and voting them out of office? Why aren’t we knocking down the doors of the White House and Congress at this hour and demanding the immediate repeal of the mandate? Why aren’t churches, pro-life organizations and religious liberty groups organizing massive fundraising events, letter writing campaigns, voter registration drives, and marches on Washington to make perfectly clear to the government that the American people will not tolerate this wicked law? Where is the courage, the zeal, and the determination to stand up and defend our bedrock American values of religion and morality, life and liberty, marriage and family?

Unfortunately, we Americans in general and Catholics in particular seem to lack the courage of our convictions. Millions of people have participated in Stand Up for Religious Freedom rallies in major cities across the country; God bless them for doing so. Our Catholic bishops have mobilized millions of their faithful to fight for religious freedom with the weapons of prayer, fasting, and political action; God bless them for doing so. But this is not enough. We the people need to rise up together in a highly visible and sustained fashion—not by the millions, but by the tens of millions—to send our government a clear and unmistakable message that it must respect our fundamental rights to freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, and freedom to act in accord with the law of God—rights on which our nation is built, rights for which our Founders risked their lives, rights which hundreds of thousands of Americans across the years have fought and died to preserve and hand on to us.

How much longer will we, the people of the United States—a large majority of whom call ourselves Christians—continue to sit back and allow an extreme radically secularist minority to illegitimately control and dominate the affairs of our nation? It’s time we put our Christian faith into meaningful action and translated our great numbers into political effectiveness. The time for passive indifference, for timid submissiveness, for discreet fence-sitting, and for quiet toleration of a dictatorship of evil, is over. The time for active resistance is upon us. It’s time we the sleeping “silent majority” of the American people—and Catholics in particular—rose up courageously to do battle with the enemies of our country.

We Must Act Now

As Edmund Burke famously wrote four hundred years ago, the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. America now stands at a critical juncture, threatened by certain massive destruction to be unleashed by President Obama and his accomplices. To sit idly on the sidelines, cowardly tolerating an abusive government and surrendering our nation to the dominion of evil, would be a crime. All Americans of good will who love their country must unite to defend their Ship of State from destruction by the opportunistic and unscrupulous Washington politicians who have commandeered it and will soon be wrecking it for their own advantage. What can—and must—we do to avert this impending national catastrophe?

1. Repent and convert. Before national laws and government policies can change, human hearts must change. And before we can change the hearts of others, we must change our own. During this Year of Faith, we Catholics in particular are called “to an authentic and renewed conversion to the Lord, the one Savior of the world.” (8) Let’s clean out our hearts, repent of our sins and faults, and strive to live more faithfully as true followers of Christ.

2. Pray and sacrifice for the conversion of sinners and the reversal of the HHS mandate. Prayer is the most powerful weapon we have to defeat the forces of evil. Our Lady of Fatima said that many souls go to Hell because there is no one to pray and sacrifice on their behalf. We Catholics should pray and offer sacrifices daily for the conversion of those in the abortion, pharmaceutical, and insurance industries and in our federal government who are responsible for this evil anti-life law. Bishops and priests should offer Masses for the conversion of sinners and the reversal of the mandate. Every Catholic family and individual in America should pray the Rosary daily for these intentions, and those who can do so should make a weekly Holy Hour for these intentions. Since we are engaged in a spiritual battle with the Evil One and his minions, we should also request the help of the angels, especially that of Saint Michael the Archangel, Prince of the heavenly host. In addition, our bishops should join with other religious leaders in organizing a national campaign of prayer and fasting for the reversal of the mandate, culminating (if possible) in a nationally televised candlelight prayer vigil to be held on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol on the evening of December 31, 2014.

3. Strengthen our defenses. In the battle against the HHS mandate thus far, our good Catholic bishops have rightly focused attention on our religious liberties and moral conscience rights. However, as long as we focus only on our religious and moral rights as Catholics and as American citizens and avoid getting into more challenging philosophical discussions of the natural law on which our nation’s Founders built our republic and to which all human beings are subject, a major weakness will remain in our approach. By failing to squarely and consistently challenge the false modern doctrine of moral relativism on the sure ground of objective moral truth, we unwisely surrender this ground to our radically secularist opponents, who then dictate the rules of the game for public moral discussion and strengthen their illegitimate occupation of the public square. We must take back what rightly belongs to us. That is, we must articulate a clear defense of the objective moral law written by God in all human hearts, revealed to Israel in the Ten Commandments of the Decalogue, and fully revealed in Jesus Christ and His Church. We must show how this divinely revealed moral compass guided the Founders in charting the course of our nation, and that it is adherence to the law of God that makes us a great nation. We must show how the Ten Commandments, together with the ancient Roman language and law, form the basis of our modern legal system. We must explain how former U.S. laws against abortion, obscenity and pornography were grounded in the objective moral law, and why our nation should enact such laws once again notwithstanding faulty judicial decisions to the contrary. We must demonstrate the universal and unchanging nature of this objective moral law by highlighting its ubiquitous presence in societies and cultures throughout human history. We must show how adherence to the moral law has enabled peoples and nations to flourish and become great (e.g. ancient Rome, medieval Europe, modern America)—and how conversely, abandonment of the moral law has led to the decline and destruction of once-great nations (e.g. ancient Carthage, modern Communist countries). By showing that the immutable law of God is the foundation of our republic and the common heritage of all mankind, it will become clear that we American Catholics are not just demanding freedom to act in accord with our particular religious beliefs and moral consciences, but in accord with objective moral truth. Freedom to act in accord with the moral law is the most basic, the most fundamental of all human rights—even more fundamental than freedom of religion and freedom of conscience, for religion and conscience can both be abused to justify grave violations of the moral law. The HHS mandate doesn’t just violate the religious and conscience rights of American believers; even more fundamentally, it violates the right of all Americans as human beings to act in accord with the objective law of God. By moving beyond a somewhat shallow and subjective “religious liberties and moral conscience rights” approach to a deeper, more profound way of reasoning based on the objective truth of the natural law itself, our logic will resonate not only with fellow American Catholics but also with all people of goodwill in America and beyond, thus enabling us to recruit a broader coalition of allies and mount a more united and effective challenge to the mandate. While defending our specific religious liberties and moral conscience rights as Catholic Americans, we must also defend the timeless freedom of all Americans and all peoples to act in accord with the law of God.

4. Organize our resistance. To fight and win a war, the ground troops and their leaders must not only be well trained, but also properly organized and directed under a central command. Hundreds of religious, civil rights, and patriotic organizations—some recently founded, others well established—are scoring frequent minor victories for life and liberty against the tyrannical anti-life Obama regime independently and on their own, but their efforts must be better organized and coordinated to achieve major success on Capitol Hill. All 501 (c)(3) charitable, educational, and legal associations committed to defending human life and liberty in accord with the law of God and the Constitution of the United States (e.g. Priests for Life, the National Pro-Life Alliance, the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, Hillsdale College, Project Moses, and the Heritage Foundation) should unite to form a Foundation for Life and Liberty, while all 501 (c)(4) political lobby groups committed to defending the same (e.g. Fidelis, Patriot Voices, and Senator Rand Paul’s Campaign for Liberty) should unite to form a Campaign for Life and Liberty. Furthermore, these two parallel groups of agencies should jointly establish a larger umbrella organization called the American League for the Defense of Life and Liberty. This League and its member organizations should be publicized in its own website and print periodical as well as through EWTN, the National Catholic Register, blogs, and social media. By uniting and coordinating their efforts, these disparate religious, civil rights, and patriotic groups will achieve more effective results at the federal level.

5. Take action. Our Constitution’s Bill of Rights expressly guarantees our God-given rights to freedom of speech and of the press, to peaceably assemble, to petition the government for a redress of grievances, (9) and to vote. (10) As American citizens, we should take full advantage of each of these rights to bring the maximum possible pressure to bear against the Obama administration. We should write letters to the editors of local newspapers exposing the evil nature and folly of the federal anti-life mandate, and calling for its prompt reversal. We should join at least one of the above-mentioned groups, take action when urged to do so, and donate whatever we can to help support their efforts. We should write, call, fax and email President Obama, Vice President Biden, HHS Secretary Sebelius, and our senators and representatives in Congress to demand the immediate and full reversal of the HHS mandate—and we should keep doing this over and over until they comply. And if, despite massive public pressure, our elected representatives and appointed officials still refuse to yield to our demands, we must seize the opportunity presented by the Congressional elections of 2014 to rescue our nation from the appalling crisis into which it will otherwise be so needlessly and recklessly thrown by the Obama administration. By getting sufficiently large pro-life and pro-liberty majorities in both the House and the Senate, we can reverse the mandate and impeach President Obama and his cronies.

Will America Survive the Impact?

One of America’s Founding Fathers, John Adams, once observed: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” The HHS mandate is a direct assault on religion and morality, what George Washington called “indispensable supports” of our nation’s liberty. It remains to be seen whether these twin foundations will prove strong enough to withstand the enormous assault about to be unleashed upon them by the Obama administration. As the close election of 2012 demonstrated, our nation is at a critical juncture in its history. Do the American people still believe that religion and morality are essential to the prosperity of their nation? That human life and freedom as well as human sexuality are sacred gifts from their Creator, to be used wisely in accord with His law for His glory and the good of their fellow citizens? That heterosexual marriage and the traditional family are divine institutions of love and life and the basic building blocks of authentic human society? That both the government and the governed are equally subject to an objective and unchanging law of God? These traditional convictions which the Founders took for granted appear to be steadily eroding under the forceful and well-coordinated propaganda onslaught of an aggressive radically secularist minority in Hollywood, the mass media, the universities, the courts, and the federal government. The rhetorical question posed by Thomas Jefferson more than two hundred years ago rings especially pertinent today: “Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the Gift of God?” If twenty-first century Americans lose this conviction, they will lose their freedom as well.

The Choice Is Ours

Now as never before, the fate of America hangs in the balance. Our future depends on the course we chart in the coming months and years. Two ways are set before our country: the way of life and the way of death. (11) If we choose the way of life, returning and clinging wholeheartedly to the principles of religion and morality on which the Founders built our nation, America will overcome her present difficulties and survive to prosper and become once again a great nation. God delivered Jerusalem from destruction by the Assyrian King Sennacherib at the humble prayer of King Hezekiah. (12) He also saved Nineveh from threatened destruction when its inhabitants turned away from sin. (13) If we Americans—-individually and as a nation—-humbly and sincerely repent of our sins and ask God for mercy, He will likewise forgive us and deliver our nation from evil.

On the other hand, if we choose the way of death, God will allow our nation to suffer the dreadful consequences of that choice. A black curtain will be drawn across our Constitution. Our cherished freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, and freedom to act in accord with the moral law will be crushed under the heavy boots of a tyrannical and totalitarian government. And we will be invaded and occupied by a foreign power—perhaps China—just as decadent Israel was conquered by the Babylonians and evil Carthage was destroyed by the Romans. America would do well to heed this divine warning from the prophet Isaiah:

Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil, who change darkness into light, and light into darkness, who change bitter into sweet, and sweet into bitter!... To those who acquit the guilty for bribes, and deprive the just man of his rights! Therefore, as the tongue of fire licks up stubble, as dry grass shrivels in the flame, Even so their root shall become rotten and their blossom scatter like dust; For they have spurned the law of the LORD of hosts, and scorned the word of the Holy One of Israel. Therefore the wrath of the LORD blazes against his people, he raises his hand to strike them; When the mountains quake, their corpses shall be like refuse in the streets… He will give a signal to a far-off nation, and whistle to them from the ends of the earth; speedily and promptly will they come. None of them will stumble with weariness, none will slumber and none will sleep. None will have his waist belt loose, nor the thong of his sandal broken. Their arrows are sharp, and all their bows are bent. The hoofs of their horses seem like flint, and their chariot wheels like the hurricane. Their roar is that of the lion, like the lion’s whelps they roar; They growl and seize the prey, they carry it off and none will rescue it. (14)

And President Abraham Lincoln echoed this biblical prophecy in a national call for prayer and fasting issued during a previous moment of great national crisis, 150 years ago:

Those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord… We know that, by His divine law, nations like individuals are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world… We have been recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown; but we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own.

Will we become once again “a wise and understanding people, a great nation” (15) that trusts in God, a nation “under God…with liberty and justice for all,” or will we foolishly reject God and trust in our own strength? The choice is ours.

The Return of the King

Although the powers of evil may do their utmost to kill the American people and destroy Christ’s Church, all their efforts are doomed to ultimate failure. With his Cross and Resurrection, Christ the King of the Universe has already begun God’s final triumph over sin, death, and Satan. This triumph will be definitively completed at the end of the world, when He will return in glory to judge all mankind. Every second brings us nearer to that final day. “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the LORD…His truth is marching on!” (16) For those who have served Christ faithfully in this life, it will be an indescribably joyful and glorious day of victory that heralds entrance into the eternal life, liberty, and happiness of Heaven, where they will reign with Him forever. On the other hand, for those who have betrayed Christ in this life, it will be an unimaginably sorrowful and horrible day of defeat that signals entrance into the eternal death, slavery, and misery of Hell, where they will be tormented by Satan and his demonic hordes forever.

Copyright © 2013 Justin D. Soutar. All rights reserved.

ENDNOTES

1. Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 406.
2. § 1869.
3. Ibid; Cf. Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 400.
4. Ibid.
5. Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 1869.
6. John 8:44.
7. Saint Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua: J. P. Migne, ed., Patrologia Graeca (Paris, 1857—1866), 1156C.
8. Pope Benedict XVI, Apostolic Letter Porta Fidei (The Door of Faith), no. 6.
9. Amendment I: “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
10. Amendment XV: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude--.” Amendment XIX: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” Amendment XXIV: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay poll tax or other tax.” Amendment XXVI: “The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age.”
11. Cf. Deut. 30:19.
12. 2 Kings 18 & 19.
13. Jonah 3.
14. Isaiah 5:20, 23--25b, 26--29.
15. Deut. 4:6 (Douay-Rheims version).
16. Julia Ward Howe, “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” verse 1.