Beginning now, with the opening of government-run health-insurance exchanges, President Barack Obama will be prohibiting American Catholics from practicing their faith in the way they live their daily lives.
This is an act of tyranny. Yet, many Americans in positions of public authority and influence have greeted it with silence and inaction.
I do not use the word tyranny lightly here. Obama is abusing his power as president to unilaterally impose on Catholics - and millions of other Americans who share the Catholic moral view on certain matters - a regulation that forces them to act against their moral convictions and the teachings of their faith.
He has declared war on their souls.
The Catholic Church teaches that sterilization, artificial contraception and abortion are intrinsically immoral and Catholics cannot be involved in them.
Last year, President Obama's Department of Health and Human Services issued a regulation, under Obamacare, requiring that almost all health care plans in the United States must provide coverage, without any fees or co-pay, for sterilizations, contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs.
Obama was boasting about this regulation last week.
At no time has he offered to exempt from it those individual Americans whom he has put in the position of needing to choose between obeying his bureaucratic mandate and the teachings of their faith.
Since Obama's administration first issued this regulation, America's Catholic bishops have forcefully and unambiguously declared it an "unjust law."
"A human law has the character of law to the extent that it accords with right reason, and thus derives from the eternal law," says the Catholic Catechism, quoting St. Thomas Aquinas. "Insofar as it falls short of right reason it is said to be an unjust law, and thus has not so much the nature of law as of a kind of violence."
Yes, Obama's sterilization-contraception-abortifacient mandate is "a kind of violence."
"If rulers were to enact unjust laws or take measures contrary to the moral order, such arrangements would not be binding in conscience," says the Catholic Catechism. "In such a case, 'authority breaks down completely and results in shameful abuse.'"
Yes, Obama's sterilization-contraception-abortifacient mandate is a "shameful abuse."
Archbishop Timothy Broglio, leader of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese for the Military Services, succinctly explained the evil of Obama's regulation in a letter he asked Catholic chaplains to read to U.S. troops attending Mass in January 2012.
Obama's regulation, Archbishop Broglio said, "strikes at the fundamental right to religious liberty for all citizens of any faith."
"It is a blow to a freedom that you have fought to defend and for which you have seen your buddies fall in battle," the archbishop told the troops.
"We cannot - we will not - comply with this unjust law," he said.
Many other bishops said these exact words in letters to their own dioceses: "We cannot - we will not - comply with this unjust law."
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