Has Hillary Declared War On the Catholic Church?

Well, it’s official.  Hillary Clinton kicked of her presidential campaign declaring war on “religious beliefs.”  The presumptive Democratic nominee for the presidency is insisting that Catholic belief in the sanctity of marriage, and the right to life from conception to natural death, “must be changed.”  Here are her exact words:

“Far too many women are denied access to reproductive health care and safe childbirth, and laws don’t count for much if they’re not enforced. Rights have to exist in practice — not just on paper.  Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will and deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.”  (Speech at Columbia University, April 28, 2015)

Are women in America really being “denied access to safe child birth?”  Or did she mean ‘safe child-killing’?  Ironically, Hillary started off the speech saying, “Every life matters,” referring to the black man who died in police custody in Baltimore.  If you’re a black man, breaking the law, your life certainly matters, but if you’re an unborn child it has no value.  With all this talk about African-Americans being targeted, hasn’t anybody noticed that the abortion industry targets predominantly black neighborhoods, and that black women abort nearly half their children in urban areas?   Invoking her new grandmother image, Hillary commented that “every single child should be cared for, as if it were our own.”  Although I read the entire text of the speech, I don’t know which child she was referring to, presumably the man-child arrested by the police, because her next sentence called for reforming our criminal justice system so as to be more fair to black people.  She praised President Obama for his calling on police to wear body cameras.

That same week, Hillary spoke at the Women in the World Summit where she warned that, “women will not have full access to reproductive health care, until deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs, and structural biases are changed.”  She used the exact same words, apparently part of her stump speech as she campaigns for the presidency.  So, if Hillary becomes our next president, she is promising to call for changes in religious beliefs.  President Obama has already begun this process through the administrative laws that require employers, including religious organizations, to provide contraception, sterilization and abortion drugs or pay enormous fines.  In this vein, he has directed to Justice Department to pursue cases, like the one against The Little Sisters of the Poor, all the way to the Supreme Court.  He has also endorsed legal action against businesses that refuse to participate in gay marriage ceremonies and celebrations, ignoring the decades old Religious Freedom Restoration Act, signed into law by that paragon of religious propriety, Bill Clinton, (under duress from a Republican-controlled Congress).

On a more positive note, last week Congress voted to prevent the city of Washington D.C. from revoking an ordinance that protects religious institutions from being sued for failure to comply with “reproductive health” demands of citizens who want sterilization and abortion services from hospitals and doctors whose religious beliefs prevent them from offering those services.  The city can appeal this all the way up to the president, and if the Mr. Obama overrides Congress, there are probably not enough votes in the Senate to prevent a veto.

Clearly, the tide is turning against religious beliefs.  Hillary is appointing herself the arbiter of what constitutes acceptable religious beliefs, and she demands that we must all hold and adhere to her judgement.  In her world, apparently, she gets to do as she pleases with regard to following the law governing things like her official correspondence when she was Secretary of State, but as President of the United States, she would dictate what religious beliefs the rest of us must adopt.

Another story in the news the past few weeks had to do with the Hollywood couple who are fighting in court over their fertilized eggs, now that they are no longer a couple.  I haven’t followed the story very closely, but my understanding is that the guy wants the frozen embryos to remain in stasis and not destroyed, so that in the future it might be possible for him to father these unborn children.  The woman apparently does not want to have his children anymore, and does not want him to have them implanted in a surrogate and raised by him.  In the process of reporting on this story, one news outlet mentioned that nationally, there are about 600,000 frozen embryos.  What no one seems to recognize is that each and every one of these embryos is a nascent human being, waiting to be born.  They are not “property” nor are they merely “tissue.”  They are frozen human persons, each imbued with the miraculous gift of life, each having a right to that life.  But like the Who’s of Dr. Seuss, they are so small, everyone denies their existence, and their right to life.  Our culture has become so accustomed to discarding unborn babies that no one thinks twice about the fact that approximately 3000 babies are destroyed in their mother’s wombs every day, and that’s just here in America.  Fifty million Americans have been killed before birth since abortion became the law of the land 42 years ago.  Imagine how much more vibrant our economy would be with 30 million more people in the workforce and 20 million more in school.  Those tax dollars and increased productivity would have been a huge economic stimulus, and probably precluded our staggering national debt.  Medicare and Social Security would surely be in better financial shape, and who knows what genius and potential we’ve destroyed that might have made substantial contributions toward solving the medical and scientific challenges we still face?

It’s going to be a long, long election season.  I detest all the political ads we’ll have to endure, and I especially hate all the mud-slinging that elections bring on.  Nevertheless, we are a democracy and the worst thing we can do now is give up on our country in disgust over the political process as it plays out.  I hope and pray there will be a candidate who is capable of restoring the greatness of our Republic by addressing the crisis of culture that is leaning further and further to the left, even to the point of criticizing religious beliefs.  . In last Sunday’s gospel Jesus warned that He is the vine and we are the branches.  If we are cut off from the source of all life, we will wither and die.  We are losing our moral footing as a nation and as a culture.  We need a strong leader who is willing to fight for a return to our roots (the True Vine) and the moral basis on which our society was founded.  Let’s pray for the right candidate to emerge and successfully challenge Hillary before it’s too late for our once great nation to recover from the onslaught of lies and the culture of death we seem to have adopted.