This is how protected beliefs become prosecuted "bigotry"

Sister Mary Ann Walsh, director of media relations for the USCCB, wonders if "late night comics who mock the church ... have set the tone of the government's current salvos against religious freedom", and then warns:

In the effort to redefine marriage, we see the government threatening religious discrimination in the name of--you guessed it--preventing discrimination. The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), passed by Congress and signed by President Clinton, declares that marriage is between one man and one woman. But the Department of Justice, which is charged with defending Acts of Congress like DOMA against constitutional challenge, declared in March that it would stop doing so. In July, Justice went further and started filing briefs that attack DOMA's constitutionality. Most disturbing in this flip-flop is its rationale: DOMA's definition of marriage must be abandoned and then attacked because it is motivated by bias and prejudice, comparable to racism. That is, the Justice Department simply writes off as bigots those with longstanding support for traditional marriage. And if the Justice Department gets its way in court, those considered bigots by the federal government will be marginalized with the full moral, economic and coercive power of the state.

For example, an employer who provides unique employment benefits to the actually married risks being disqualified from government funding - and most other government cooperation - and likely being sued for "discrimination." A government clerk who expresses a conscientious objection to cooperating with same-sex civil union ceremonies risks a pink slip.

In short, this is what happens when the view that marriage is between a man and a woman becomes a violation of the U.S. Constitution. And this is what the Justice Department urges--apparently forgetting that imposing special disabilities on people and groups because of their religious beliefs offends the First Amendment at its core.

Read her entire post, "Looks Like Leno, Letterman Setting Tone at HHS, Justice Department" (Sept. 22, 2011). What was it that Benedict XVI said, quoting St. Augustine, in his first address on his visit to Germany?

"Without justice – what else is the State but a great band of robbers?", as Saint Augustine once said (1). We Germans know from our own experience that these words are no empty spectre. We have seen how power became divorced from right, how power opposed right and crushed it, so that the State became an instrument for destroying right – a highly organized band of robbers, capable of threatening the whole world and driving it to the edge of the abyss.

It's an very bad thing to have your money and property stolen. It's even worse to have your rights stripped away in the name of "tolerance" and under the false pretense of "discrimination". Alas, it seems that the cynical promises of hope and change are proving to be half right and completely wrong.

Comments

[Robert Miller]

Sister Mary Ann has performed a signal service to the Church in the United States by the frankness of her comments.
Now we are beyond any deference to political correctness: Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty free at last.
Archbishop Dolan put the issue squarely in his letter to BO, but Sister Mary Ann has "put it in the vernacular" in a way that can rouse the "masses".
She needs to get on the "lecture circuit" for talk shows and Catholic university commencements.
I think her take is brilliantly lucid.

[Howard]

The current administration is in big trouble due to the economy. If they lose the upcoming election, the real question will be what if anything a Republican administration would do to reverse these trends.

[Magister Christianus]

After the Israelites refused God's will that they have judges and continued demanding a king, we come to what is perhaps the most frightening verse in the Bible, 1 Samuel 8:22. God tells Samuel to give the people what they want. Technological advances have developed at an increasingly rapid pace within the past ten years, and our social decline seems to have matched it. A mere decade ago, there was not so much open talk about the acceptance and promotion of sodomy in every arena. A wall has been erected, by whom I am not sure, between the reasoning of the state and the reasoning of the Christian faith. Where once the latter could, on reasonable grounds, speak into the former, there is now a divide that seemingly cannot be crossed. Christians can argue to a certain extent using secular lines of reasoning, but at the end of the day, our arguments always return to the One Who proclaimed Himself to be the Truth, Jesus Christ. When this line of reasoning has been ruled a priori off the table, what can we do? We must pray fervently for God to open eyes and soften hearts.

[Gail Finke]

Several years ago when the push for "same-sex marriage" first became mainstream, I read a position statement on a website from some homosexual activist group. What I remember about it was the bizarre statement that members had to oppose "marriage benefits being for married people only." That's when I realize that we had headed toward the Bizarro World. Of course, marriage benefits had been extended to unmarried people long before, but that's the first time I had heard it said so plainly. Marriage is in big trouble.