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.
