Tag Archives: Religious Liberty

News

UK midwives protest ruling forcing them to perform abortions

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From the UK Telegraph. (H/T Dina)

Excerpt:

Mary Doogan, 57, and Concepta Wood, 51, told NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde they were not prepared to delegate, supervise or support staff who were looking after patients through “the processes of medical termination of pregnancy”. Their position was rejected by officials and they hope to have the ruling set aside in a judicial review.

The women claim the refusal to recognise their entitlement to conscientious objection violates their rights under Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

They say they “hold a religious belief that all human life is sacred from the moment of conception and that termination of pregnancy is a grave offence against human life”. Their involvement in the process would be wrongful and “an offence against God”.

Miss Doogan and Mrs Wood, both midwifery sisters at the Southern General Hospital in Glasgow, are seeking a ruling at the Court of Session in Edinburgh on their entitlement to conscientious objection under the 1967 Abortion Act. David Johnston QC, for the women, said the matter became an issue for the midwives, who were long-standing employees, in 2007.

They had both previously given notice of conscientious objection to any involvement in abortions and said they were not expected to participate in such treatment. But in 2007 the health board introduced changes that meant patients undergoing medical terminations were cared for in the labour ward, where the women worked. They were not expected to administer abortion-inducing drugs but management said requiring conscientious objectors to provide care for patients through a termination was lawful.

If the health care system were private, then it would be easy for midwives to find another company to work for that did not violate their consciences. But when the government runs the whole health care system, where are you supposed to go? They are a monopoly and they make the rules. Yet another reasons for Christians to vote for smaller government. In a free market, if you don’t want to buy something from one store, you can go to another store. There is competition. But where are these nurses supposed to go? They are midwives, and the government and the courts make the rules in a government-run health care system.

Even here at home, Obama is showing his hostility to rights of conscience.

News

Supreme Court hands Obama administration a major defeat on religious liberty

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From the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Excerpt: (most links removed)

The Supreme Court has rejected the Obama administration’s argument that it can dictate who churches hire as ministers or clergy in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The Obama administration unsuccessfully arguedthat the government can dictate who churches hire, as long as it also subjects secular employers to the same dictates regarding who they hire (so-called rules of general applicability). Taken to its logical conclusion, this argument would allow the government to ban a church or synagogue from hiring based on religion (defeating the whole purpose of religious freedom, which is to allow churches to promote their own religion) or sex (preventing the Catholic Church from having a male priesthood). No Supreme Court justice bought the administration’s argument, made on behalf of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). The Supreme Court unanimously found that such government control over who churches can hire would violate the religion clauses of the First Amendment.

If federal antidiscrimination laws covered churches’ hiring of clergy, as the Obama administration demanded, they would have to not just avoid discriminating based on things like sex or religion, but would also have to radically alter sensible hiring criteria by eliminating longstanding, neutral church practices that have the affect of inadvertently screening out more members of a minority group than of other groups (so-called “disparate impact” or “unintentional discrimination”). For example, some branches of the Lutheran Church have hiring criteria for religious broadcasters on their radio programs, such as “knowledge of Lutheran doctrine,” and “classic music training,” that few minorities satisfy (only 2 percent of all people with Lutheran training are minorities, and only 0.1 percent of people with both Lutheran training and classical music training are minorities), given the Lutheran Church’s historical roots in overwhelmingly white areas like Scandinavia and Minnesota. Even though they are happy to have black applicants, and do not treat black applicants worse based on their race, the EEOC could easily sue them for racially disparate impact if the Obama administration’s argument had been accepted. (The religion clauses of the First Amendment not only protect who churches hire as ministers, but also other people who serve as “voices of the church,” such as theology professors, and religious broadcasters on behalf of a church.)

We previously wrote about ways that the Obama administration is attacking religious freedom and separation of church and state at this link. We described how the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is wiping out jobs and discouraging hiring and job creation through onerous interpretations of federal employment laws, at this link.

Good news for religious liberty means bad news for Barack Obama.

News

Christmas not so merry for Christians living under Islamic rule

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I found that video on Right Scoop via Director Blue.

Gates of Vienna has more news coverage, and they are claiming that the death toll in Nigeria is at least 60 people from 5 separate bombings.

Here’s a longer essay about the problem from Dave Warren. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

The “Arab Spring,” which was welcomed this year as an expression of “democracy” by the West’s political, media, and chattering classes, has brought social convulsion to one Arab state after another. Against the background of what is to my view instead a large catastrophe, Christian communities that have existed in each state since centuries before the arrival of Islam, are being eliminated.

…[W]ith the Americans gone, Iraq now slips the rest of the way off the world media map. It may crawl back on with full-scale civil war. And perhaps, eventually, notice will be taken that Iran’s revolutionary regime, already represented within Maliki’s entourage, is using the disorder to attach Iraq as a satellite. This is not something even Shia Iraqis could want; but they will have it as a consequence of disintegrative war between Sunni and Shia, Arab and Kurd, abetted by an utterly corrupt and dysfunctional “democratic” political class.

Meanwhile, tonight’s Midnight Mass has been cancelled, so far as I can see through the Internet, at Christian churches throughout the country. Estimates of the number of Christians who have fled Iraq now approach or exceed one million; and the reason for their leaving may be read in graffiti sprayed over their empty and assaulted churches. This persistently reminds worshippers of past massacres, and promises they will be next.

The collapse of once-peaceful Egypt into disorder has had similar effects, as the old secular military establishment bids to retain some semblance of its former power and pomposity, while the Islamist parties sweep parliamentary elections.

In the first moments of Egypt’s “Arab Spring,” triggered by the country’s relatively tiny and secular middle class, Coptic Christians were already feeling the rise in heat. But there were several fine displays of solidarity, in which leading Muslims attended church services in defiance of Islamist terror threats.

As ever, in revolutionary situations, the heroic phase ended quickly. We’re advancing now through the squalid phases. For the safety of their parishioners, night church services are already switched to broad daylight, and as in Iraq, there are ever-more-cumbersome security measures to pass through, to get into a church at all.

Nothing can be done, or more certainly, nothing will be done by our own “progressive” governing classes, even to anticipate the coming fallout.

Something to keep in your prayers. And when you get the chance to vote, keep in mind Christians living in other countries where there is no religious liberty. I find it interesting to note that the two situations Warren raised have different solutions. In Iraq, the right thing to do was to keep our forces in there to stabilize the region. In Egypt, the solution was not to get involved at all.