• Catholics Care. Catholic Vote Index
• Week 1 – Catholics Care. Catholic Vote: an Introduction
• Week 2 - Catholics Care. Catholics Vote: Political Engagement is Every Catholic’s Duty
• Week 3 – Catholics Care, Catholics Vote: The Question of Conscience
• Week 4 – Human Life and Dignity
• Week 5 -  Conscience Formation by the Numbers
• Week 6 - Religious Freedom and Ugly Assumptions
• Week 7 - Strengthening and Defending Marriage is a Matter of Justice
• Week 8 - Poverty and Helping People to Flourish
• Week 9 – Untangling the International Knot
• Week 10 - Immigration Reform and a Reasonable Church
• Week 11 – Temptation and Voting

The series will be freely available and we will add links to this page each week as they are released.

We participated in a nationwide “Stand Up For Religious Freedom” rally against the HHS Mandate on March 23, 2012 locally at the Capitol Building in Atlanta and the Federal Building in Athens, Georgia.

Here is a link to the AJC website story: http://www.ajc.com/news/rallies-in-georgia-and-1396383.html

Here is the link to the Athens Banner-Herald story:   http://onlineathens.com/breaking-news/2012-03-23/athens-protestors-take-birth-control-mandate .

Bishop Luis Zarama read a statement from Archbishop Gregory at the Atlanta rally. Archbishop Gregory’s statement was also read in Athens.

All who support religious liberty must continue contacting Congress seeking a legislative change that will permit religious institutions to continue their current practices of providing health insurance to employees without violating their religious beliefs. The most significant legislation to override the regulations adopted by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is the “Respect for Rights of Conscience Act of 2011” which is identified as  HR 1179 in the United States  House of Representatives and S 1467 in the United States Senate.

As early as the week of February 27, 2012, the Senate may vote on the “Respect for Rights of Conscience Act” in the form of an amendment to Transportation Authorization Bill (S. 1813). For this purpose Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO), the primary sponsor of S. 1467, has introduced Senate Amendment 1520. Senators Isakson and Chambliss have co-sponsored S. 1467 but it is important to encourage them to continue their support by voting for Amendment 1520 to the Transportation Authorization Bill.

The Action alert from the National Committee for the Human Life Amendment provides a convenient way for getting your message to our senators.   http://www.nchla.org/actiondisplay.asp?ID=292

Originally posted to the USCCB BLOG by Sister Mary Ann Walsh on February 13, 2012.

WASHINGTON—The mandate for virtually all private insurers, including most religiously-affiliated organizations such as Catholic hospitals, universities and charities, to include contraceptives, sterilizations and drugs that can cause early abortions in their employee health plans is akin to mandating that a kosher deli to serve pork, the chairman of the Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops told Congress.

In his February 16 testimony to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Bishop William Lori of Bridgeport, Connecticut, outlined the bishops’ opposition to the Health and Human Services (HHS) mandate through an extended parable of a country where a new law requires all businesses to serve pork, including kosher delicatessens.

When the Orthodox Jewish community expresses its outrage, Bishop Lori said, it’s met with arguments of “But pork is good for you,” “So many Jews eat pork, and those who don’t should just get with the times,” and “Those Orthodox are just trying to impose their beliefs on everyone else.”

Bishop Lori’s parable had a happy ending, that people recognized “it is absurd for someone to come into a kosher deli and demand a ham sandwich,” “it is beyond absurd for that private demand to be backed with the coercive power of the state,” and “it is downright surreal to apply this coercive power when the customer can get the same sandwich cheaply, or even free, just a few doors down.”

“The question before the United States government—right now—is whether the story of our own Church institutions that serve the public, and that are threatened by the HHS mandate, will end happily too. Will our nation continue to be one committed to religious liberty and diversity? We urge, in the strongest possible terms, that the answer must be yes.”

The full text of Bishop Lori’s testimony may be found online: www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/religious-liberty/upload/lori-testimony-for-oversight-on-religious-freedom-2012-02-16.pdf

 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

BISHOPS RENEW CALL TO LEGISLATIVE ACTION ON RELIGIOUS LIBERTY

Regulatory changes limited and unclear

Rescission of mandate only complete solution

Continue urging passage of Respect for Rights of Conscience Act

WASHINGTON – The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) have issued the following statement:

The Catholic bishops have long supported access to life-affirming healthcare for all, and the conscience rights of everyone involved in the complex process of providing that healthcare. That is why we raised two serious objections to the “preventive services” regulation issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in August 2011.

First, we objected to the rule forcing private health plans–nationwide, by the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen–to cover sterilization and contraception, including drugs that may cause abortion. All the other mandated “preventive services” prevent disease, and pregnancy is not a disease. Moreover, forcing plans to cover abortifacients violates existing federal conscience laws. Therefore, we called for the rescission of the mandate altogether.

Second, we explained that the mandate would impose a burden of unprecedented reach and severity on the consciences of those who consider such “services” immoral: insurers forced to write policies including this coverage; employers and schools forced to sponsor and subsidize the coverage; and individual employees and students forced to pay premiums for the coverage. We therefore urged HHS, if it insisted on keeping the mandate, to provide a conscience exemption for all of these stakeholders–not just the extremely small subset of “religious employers” that HHS proposed to exempt initially.

Today, the President has done two things.

First, he has decided to retain HHS’s nationwide mandate of insurance coverage of sterilization and contraception, including some abortifacients. This is both unsupported in the law and remains a grave moral concern. We cannot fail to reiterate this, even as so many would focus exclusively on the question of religious liberty.

Second, the President has announced some changes in how that mandate will be administered, which is still unclear in its details. As far as we can tell at this point, the change appears to have the following basic contours:

•  It would still mandate that all insurers must include coverage for the objectionable services in all the policies they would write. At this point, it would appear that self-insuring religious employers, and religious insurance companies, are not exempt from this mandate.

• It would allow non-profit, religious employers to declare that they do not offer such coverage. But the employee and insurer may separately agree to add that coverage. The employee would not have to pay any additional amount to obtain this coverage, and the coverage would be provided as a part of the employer’s policy, not as a separate rider.

•  Finally, we are told that the one-year extension on the effective date (from August 1, 2012 to August 1, 2013) is available to any non-profit religious employer who desires it, without any government application or approval process.

These changes require careful moral analysis, and moreover, appear subject to some measure of change. But we note at the outset that the lack of clear protection for key stakeholders–for self-insured religious employers; for religious and secular for-profit employers; for secular non-profit employers; for religious insurers; and for individuals–is unacceptable and must be corrected. And in the case where the employee and insurer agree to add the objectionable coverage, that coverage is still provided as a part of the objecting employer’s plan, financed in the same way as the rest of the coverage offered by the objecting employer. This, too, raises serious moral concerns.

We just received information about this proposal for the first time this morning; we were not consulted in advance. Some information we have is in writing and some is oral. We will, of course, continue to press for the greatest conscience protection we can secure from the Executive Branch. But stepping away from the particulars, we note that today’s proposal continues to involve needless government intrusion in the internal governance of religious institutions, and to threaten government coercion of religious people and groups to violate their most deeply held convictions. In a nation dedicated to religious liberty as its first and founding principle, we should not be limited to negotiating within these parameters. The only complete solution to this religious liberty problem is for HHS to rescind the mandate of these objectionable services.

We will therefore continue–with no less vigor, no less sense of urgency–our efforts to correct this problem through the other two branches of government. For example, we renew our call on Congress to pass, and the Administration to sign, the Respect for Rights of Conscience Act. And we renew our call to the Catholic faithful, and to all our fellow Americans, to join together in this effort to protect religious liberty and freedom of conscience for all.

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Keywords: Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan, USCCB, U.S. bishops, HHS, preventive services, religious liberty, President Barack Obama, contraception, birth control, religious institutions, Catholic health care, hospitals, universities, social services, charities, employers, coverage, insurers, plans

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USCCB Pro-Life Secretariat