If President Obama thought Catholics were going to move past their anger at his administration’s demand that most employers–even Catholic ones–provide health insurance that covers birth control and abortion services, today’s attack by the chairman of the Knights of Columbus will remind him that the fight has just begun.
At the 8th Annual National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington, Carl Anderson, CEO and chairman of the Knights of Columbus, assails Obama’s birth control mandate as an assault on religious freedom and liberty. The breakfast theme: “Religious Liberty: Threatened at Home and Abroad.”
What’s more, he puts an economic cost on the rules from the president’s Health and Human Services Department that require most employers to provide workers access to insurance that covers contraception, sterilization and the “morning after” birth control pill.
“Health care workers now face the choice of holding on to either their religious beliefs or their jobs,” he says in excerpts provided to Secrets. “In other words, if the health care institution provides services contrary to Catholic moral teaching, Catholic doctors and nurses need not apply,” he adds.
The Church, which opposes abortion, has protested the rules because while churches are exempted, church-based charities and facilities are not.
Anderson goes further, however, charging that the administration is really at war with religion, and the abortion mandate is just one sign of that battle. “We see a new government intolerance of religion,” he says at the breakfast held at the Marriott Wardman Hotel.
Anderson adds, “I venture to say that, never in the lifetime of anyone present here, has the religious liberty of the American people been as threatened as it is today. Yet today we find a new hostility to the role of religious institutions in American life at a time when government is expanding its reach in extraordinary ways.”
The Knights, at 1.8 million members, is the world’s largest Catholic family fraternal service organization.
