If liberals are as concerned about discrimination as they say they are, why aren't they on the front lines of the Little Sisters of the Poor case? These nuns are the real victims of intolerance and inequality -- yet you don't see the Left picketing Health and Human Services with the same ferocity they're pulling out of North Carolina and Mississippi. Why? Because people like President Obama think that only the people who agree with their views should be free to exercise them. That became painfully clear in the Obamacare mandate, when organizations, businesses, schools, churches, and even monasteries were ordered to pay for pills and procedures that violate their conscience.
The clash between the administration and these nuns has been one of the most embarrassing fallouts from the president's law, as people on both sides of the political spectrum fail to see why HHS is demanding that even Little Sisters should have to pay for birth control. At the heart of the case now before the Supreme Court is a clever little accounting gimmick that HHS concocted that would supposedly spare religious groups from the choice of violating their faith or the law. The only problem is that the "compromise," which drives the coverage through a third party, doesn't solve anything. It still makes men and women complicit in the act and payment of the coverage. Most Americans understand that. It's a shame the White House doesn't.
In a new Marist poll, people were asked if they thought the government is "being unfair in its treatment of Little Sisters of the Poor and other religious employers." By more than a 20-point margin, Americans agreed the "accommodation" was unfair. Like us, the Knights of Columbus's Carl Anderson said, they don't think it's reasonable "for the government to demand that some -- and only some -- religious employers engage in activity that is totally unnecessary to the government's stated purposes of providing elective and morally problematic drugs to employees."
This is what religious freedom is all about! The same First Amendment that gives Little Sisters of the Poor the right to object to this health coverage is the same First Amendment that gives photographer Elaine Huguenin the right to walk away from a same-sex wedding job. To "get over" that, as Governor John Kasich (R-Ohio) has suggested, is to get over what it means to be American!
Tony Perkins' Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC senior writers.
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