Un-merry Christmas from the ACLU
By Michelle Malkin
MichelleMalkin.com
Ho, ho, ho! Just in time for
Christmas, the American Civil Liberties Union has
launched a new salvo against people of faith. Even
as billions around the world celebrate the birth of
Christ, joyless, abortion-obsessed secularists never
take a holiday.
On Wednesday, the ACLU sent a letter
to federal health officials urging the government to
force Catholic hospitals in the U.S. to perform
abortions in violation of their core moral
commitment to protecting the lives of the unborn.
They’re counting on sympathetic Obama rationing czar
Donald Berwick — a recess appointee whose radical
views on wealth and health redistribution were never
vetted by Congress — to dictate which religious
principles hospital operators can and cannot follow.
The ACLU reiterated its call for a
federal probe — read: fishing expedition — of
Catholic hospitals nationwide that refuse to provide
“emergency” contraception and abortions to women. In
practice, of course, every request for abortion is
an “emergency” to the left.
The Catholic Church makes clear that
it is morally permissible under certain
circumstances to treat directly the cause of the
mother’s medical condition, even if those efforts
unintentionally and indirectly cost the baby’s life.
But Catholic health providers must never directly
trade one life for another.
Civil liberties activists have a
particular vendetta against devout Phoenix Catholic
Bishop Thomas Olmsted, who recently revoked the
Catholic status of a rogue hospital that performed
several direct abortions, provided birth control
pills and presided over sterilizations against the
church’s ethical and religious directives for health
care. “It would be unfaithful to pretend the
institution is still Catholic,” Olmsted concluded.
“The dioceses cannot be permitted to
dictate who lives and who dies in Catholic-owned
hospitals,” the ACLU’s lawyers fumed in response.
But shall it be left to the ACLU and
Obamacare bureaucrats to determine the Catholicity
of a Catholic hospital?
And shall it be left to litigious
secularists to sabotage the First Amendment rights
of religious-based health care entities with
impunity?
Hell no.
The ACLU now seeks to unilaterally
rewrite a federal emergency medical treatment law
passed by Congress in 1986 to mandate that all
hospitals provide abortions. But for more than three
decades, under both Republican and Democratic
administrations, federal law has firmly established
strong conscience protections for individual health
care providers and hospitals who are reluctant or
unwilling to “counsel, suggest, recommend, assist or
in any way participate in the performance of
abortions or sterilizations contrary to or
consistent with” their “religious beliefs or moral
convictions.”
As the Washington-based Becket Fund,
a public interest law firm that defends the free
expression of all religious traditions, pointed out
to the feds: “The ACLU has no business radically
re-defining the meaning of emergency health care,’
just as it has no business demanding that religious
doctors and nurses violate their faith by performing
a procedure they believe is tantamount to murder.
Forcing religious hospitals to perform abortions not
only undermines this nation’s integral commitment to
conscience rights, it violates the numerous federal
laws that recognize and protect those rights.”
According to the Catholic Health
Association, Catholic health care facilities form
the largest not-for-profit health service sector in
the United States — serving one out of every six
patients in America and providing 15 percent of the
hospital bed capacity in the country. Moreover,
Catholic health care institutions employ about
540,000 full-time workers and 240,000 part-time
workers.
If the abortion lobby gets its way,
faithful Catholic hospitals and Catholic medical
professionals who follow their consciences and
adhere to canon law could see their federal funding
yanked. And radical social engineers may well force
the shutdown of countless Catholic hospitals at a
time when Obamacare costs and consequences are
already wreaking havoc on the health industry.
Fewer jobs, less access to health
care, less freedom and more lives lost: Merry
Christmas from the ACLU.
Copyright 2010