Life Advocacy Briefing

Congress Must Act – Now – on the Mandate

UNLESS CONGRESS ACTS before Aug. 1, religious institutions and programs across America are going to be required to furnish abortifacient contraceptives via their employee insurance plans despite more than a year of protests and appeals. Though the Obama Regime claimed last week to have modified its regulation, the modification is nothing more than smoke and mirrors.

Legislation is pending in both houses to amend the ObamaCare law in order to provide conscience coverage in insurance and also for healthcare personnel.

The Senate bill, S-1204, sponsored by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and six co-sponsors, has been resting in the Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions since June 20. The House measure, HR-940, has been awaiting action since March 8 by the Health Subcommittee of the Committee on Energy & Commerce; it was filed by Rep. Diane Black (R-TN), along with 180 co-sponsors.

Because of likely partisan antipathy in the Senate toward these reasonable, compassionate, principled proposals – and because of the looming deadline – it is critical that Congressional leaders attach the text of these bills to whatever “must-pass” legislation comes before the Congress in the next two weeks.

Readers are urged to call House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) at 1-202/225-0600 and Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (KY) at 1-202/224-3135 to ask them to put the ObamaCare Conscience legislation at the top of their priority list before the annual August recess.

Hobby Lobby Wins Key Round Against ObamaCare Mandate

U.S. DISTRICT JUDGE JOE HEATON granted an appeal by owners of Hobby Lobby in late June, ordering a temporary injunction against Health & Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to block $1.3-million-per-day fines on the national crafts chain for failing to comply with the ObamaCare abortifacient mandate. The fines were scheduled to kick in July 1.

Becket Fund general counsel Kyle Duncan, representing the major retailer in its fight against the ObamaCare mandate, said in a story by CNSNews.com, “‘Hobby Lobby and the Green family faced the terrible choice of violating their faith or paying massive fines starting this Monday morning. We are delighted that both the 10th Circuit and the district court have spared them from this unjust burden on their religious freedom.’”

The case is scheduled for its next round of hearings for July 19 in Oklahoma City, now without the threat of fines during the remainder of the judicial process.

In related news Geneva College has won its bid for a temporary injunction allowing its exclusion of the “morning-after” pill in its student health coverage plan. The Plan B exclusion is a step in the Pennsylvania Christian college’s lawsuit against ObamaCare’s contraception mandate. Alliance Defending Freedom’s Catherine Glenn Foster points out, according to OneNewsNow.com, that “it is within Congress’s power to find a solution… ‘if they’re serious about protecting young girls and parental rights.’”

‘Going All Out in Texas’

THE BATTLE HAS BEEN REJOINED to protect Texas women and babies from what TLC Channel’s Michelle Duggar has termed the “baby holocaust.” The popular TV mom spoke at an Austin rally last Monday.

All eyes were on the Texas capital late last month for a dramatic showdown, complete with an 11-hour filibuster staged by State Sen. Wendy Davis in her last-ditch effort to block comprehensive protections including a post-20-week gestation ban and abortion industry regulations. Her filibuster – and a mob outburst in the capitol – beat the clock and spurred GOP Gov. Rick Perry to call for a second special session of the legislature to make another attempt.

This time pro-life activists from across the nation have made it personal by countering the pro-abortion presence with a significant rally of their own, bringing out thousands as well as celebrities such as Mrs. Duggar, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, and 2012 GOP Presidential candidate Rick Santorum, who said, “This has become the most important pro-life battle in the country right now because leftist groups like Planned Parenthood, NARAL and the National Organization for Women are going all out in Texas.”

In her report from the rally, Operation Rescue’s Cheryl Sullenger commented, “Adding to the urgency of passing the abortion restrictions this year were recent allegations of three former abortion clinic employees that Houston abortionist Douglas Karpen routinely kills late-term babies born alive during abortions using practices similar to those of convicted murderer Kermit Gosnell.”

The bill passed the House again in the special session and was sent to the State Senate last week, with Senators vowing due deliberation and Gov. Perry promising to sign the measure when it reaches his desk.

On Wisconsin!

WISCONSIN GOV. SCOTT WALKER (R) chose the day after Independence Day to sign legislation requiring abortion-seeking mothers to undergo an ultrasound and ultrasound technicians to point out the unborn child’s features and organs, according to Jake Miller, reporting for CBS News.

The new law, already challenged in court by Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), would also, reports Mr. Miller, “[bar] doctors without admitting privileges at local hospitals [within 30 miles] from performing abortions.” Plaintiffs have secured a preliminary injunction against the admitting-privileges requirement until the US District Court’s hearing scheduled for July 17.

“Abortion clinic operators say the bill would cut the number of clinics offering abortions in Wisconsin from four to two,” reports the Chicago Tribune, citing the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel as source, “and one of the remaining clinics would have to significantly cut back on operations.” Aww.

The governor said, according to Mr. Miller, citing Associated Press as source, “The measure ‘improves a woman’s ability to make an informed choice that will protect her physical and mental health now and in the future.’” It will also protect many unborn children, particularly if the courts in this country permit the law written by the people’s representatives to take effect.

Standing Up to the Regime

THE CAMPAIGN OF THE OBAMA REGIME to discriminate against conservative, patriotic and pro-life organizations has evidently settled even into the US Dept. of Agriculture (USDA).

When Care Net of Windham County, Vermont, sought a loan from the USDA Rural Development’s Community Facilities Loan & Grant Program, it met all published requirements for such a loan. But then the pro-life pregnancy counseling service met a snag.

U.S.D.A. learned that Care Net incorporates Bible study into its counseling and care program and denied the application, reports Nate Kellum, guest columnist for OneNewsNow.com, electronic news service of the American Family Association.

“Care Net appealed the decision,” writes Mr. Kellum, “arguing for their constitutional right to free speech and free exercise of religion on their own property. And Care Net won.” The decision was made by the USDA’s National Appeals Division, demonstrating the value of not taking “no” for an answer when one’s Constitutional right to religious freedom is being trampled by a hostile bureaucracy. What welcome news that in this matter, at least, the God-fearing American citizens did not have to go to court to secure the rights already secured to them by our Constitution.

Wolf Cries ‘Wolf’

THOUGH NEW YORK’s ABORTION INDUSTRY RECENTLY LOST its bid – advanced by Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) – to enact legislation even more radical than the Supreme Court’s disastrous Roe v. Wade ruling, the National Abortion Rights Action League’s New York branch can still count on some units of the state legislature to do its bidding.

The legislature’s Joint Commission on Public Ethics, to which the lawmakers have ceded significant authority, voted in a late-June closed-door session to exclude “NARAL Pro-Choice NY” from the state’s lobby disclosure law, another Cuomo pet project.

Under the new measure, lobby groups are required to disclose to the public the names of their supporters. NARAL, however, reports Johanna Dasteel for LifeSiteNews.com, “complained that their donors would be put in danger should their contributions be exposed.” And the commission granted their requested exemption.

In reality, notes Ms. Dasteel, threatened violence in New York has taken the opposite direction. “Pro-abortion activist … Ted Shulman,” she writes, last year “pled guilty for making [death] threats to numerous pro-life leaders, including Fr. Frank Pavone of Priests for Life, headquartered on Staten Island, and Prof. Robert George of Princeton University.”

The Pelosi ‘Faith’ Cult

Commentary by Ben Johnson, LifeSiteNews.com, posted July 8, 2013

The rhetoric is getting weird out there.

As the House of Representatives considered passing a ban on abortions beyond the 20th week of pregnancy, Congresswoman Gwen Moore [D] of Wisconsin filled the chamber with the rhetoric of a fundamentalist preacher. Reacting with righteous fury, the Representative from Milwaukee shouted, “This bill is an abomination!”

The Biblical language to defend late-term abortion – as much an affront against science as against Scripture – calls to mind the true definition of abomination:

• “There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire” – that is, that sacrifices his children to a false god – “For all that do these things are an abomination unto the LORD; and because of these abominations, the LORD thy God doth drive them out from before thee.” (Deuteronomy 18:10, 12);

• “These six things doth the LORD hate; yea, seven are an abomination unto Him: A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood. … A false witness that speaketh lies.” (Proverbs 6:16-17);

• “Nothing unclean, and no one who practices abomination and lying, shall ever come into [the New Jerusalem], but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life.” (Revelation 21:27, NASB).

Moore’s moronic mutterings would be little more than unfortunate political rhetoric, except for the fact that of late a little schola of “progressives” has begun chanting about their religion of abortion-on-demand.

At about the same time, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi [D-CA] invoked her Catholic faith to say abortion is “sacred ground” to her.

Pelosi held herself out as a patristics scholar on the issue of when life begins in 2008, telling Meet the Press: “I would say that as an ardent, practicing Catholic, this is an issue that I have studied for a long time. And what I know is, over the centuries, the doctors of the church have not been able to make that definition. And St. Augustine said at three months. We don’t know. The point is, is that it shouldn’t have an impact on the woman’s right to choose. … [O]ver the history of the church, this is an issue of controversy.”

She went on to say Christianity has believed life begins at conception for “like maybe 50 years or something like that.”

If she had really studied the teachings of her flaunted and flouted faith for virtually any time, she would know that abortion has been condemned as a cardinal sin from the earliest moments in Church history.

The Didache (sometimes called The Teaching of the 12 Apostles), which may have been written at about the same time as the Book of Revelation, says, “You shall not procure [an] abortion, nor destroy a newborn child.”

Abortion is condemned by The Letter of Barnabas, written perhaps as early as 74 AD; by early Church writers like Athenagoras in 177 AD, Tertullian in 197 AD, Hippolytus in 228 AD, and many others.

Perhaps the definitve word came from Archbishop Basil of Caesarea – a writer so powerful he was called St. Basil the Great. He wrote in 375 AD that anyone “who deliberately destroys a fetus is answerable for murder. And any fine distinction as to its being completely formed or unformed is not admissible among us.”

Of course, 375 AD was 32 times 50-years-ago. Maybe Pelosi was speaking figuratively, like Jesus saying we must forgive 70 times 7, or the like.

The sudden retreat behind the language of heretical faith exposes the Democrats’ ruse that they are serially incapable of determining the moment that life begins – as modern science, biology and embryology textbooks have.

When confronted with the unanimous testimony of science, they retreat to a confused haze, muddying the debate by falling back on pre-scientific phrases uttered by St. Augustine of Hippo (d. 430 AD) and Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274). Each, with the science of his day, guessed that perhaps life begins at the moment of “quickening.”

Like St. Basil, neither taught that abortion was a blameless act.

Why would the radical Left increasingly use such religious language to defend the indefensible, the gruesome murder of the unborn?

Because abortion is their religion.

Its promoters cling to it more closely than any other political principle. They consecrate it as “sacred” and brand any attempt to constrain it as “an abomination,” a blasphemy against their idolatrous creed. Any attempt to reason about it is met with emotion-laden non-sequiturs and fulminating excommunications. How else can one even conceive of a book like The Sacrament of Abortion?

Jesus Christ – Who had seen some religious frauds in His day – said in the Sermon on the Mount, “By their fruits, ye shall know them” (St. Matthew 7:20). Moore, Pelosi, et al., stand on a faith that has resulted in the bloodshed of more than 50 million dead children – red and yellow, black and white, they were all deprived of life.

That is strange fruit, indeed.