And you say I mix church and state?
Today, despite thousands of complaints against the decision, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius ordered healthcare programs to offer contraception including religiously affiliated hospitals. Get it...if you operate a hospital to offer charitable care your choice is quickly becoming either to stop offering charity care, so you end up getting your health care from big government, or offering a medicine or device which goes against the teaching of your church.
What is the issue here you ask? Lots!
While I do not speak for all Christians or even the Roman Catholic Church to which I belong, my faith is clear in its teaching that life itself is brilliant and wonderful and inherently good. There are no unwanted babies - as some organizations would have you believe - because God loves them all. Life is precious and it should be treated as such
While some attack contraception because it leads to premarital sex, the Church is in many ways much more pragmatic. It does not condone premarital sex. It does not condone extramarital affairs. However, the much more grave sin to the Catholic Church would be to use contraception and stop the possibility of creating a life - a practice considered intrinsically evil.
So where does that put us? As Catholics, this requirement will force Catholic practitioners to commit a mortal sin. A sin that would not allow us to be in communion with our own church and thereby not allowing us to practice our faith. This would seem to be the entire point. You can hold your beliefs as a Catholic or your can practice medicine.
And who applauds this decision? Planned Parenthood, a group who is about everything but parenthood. Planned Parenthood, who takes in millions a year, and who by its own admission destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives last year. In any other place on earth, this would be genocide, but in America it is called choice.
