Backlash Against Thought Police

The left-wing Thought Police have gained strength in recent years and they’ve been flexing their muscles wherever they can. Christian ministers in Canada and in the UK who speak publicly against homosexuality on Biblical grounds are charged with hate speech. Students, teachers, and many others have muzzled themselves in fear of retribution by politically-correct superiors, but there are signs their reign of terror may have peaked.

The Roman Catholic Church has been in their sights because of its teachings that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered” and that abortion is murder. Direct confrontations with the Catholic Church have been mostly avoided until recently.

In Ontario, provincial authorities are requiring that Catholic schools establish “Gay-Straight Alliances” or “GSAs,” ostensibly to prevent bullying. In Canada and in the US, this has been a Trojan Horse for pushing the homosexual agenda in schools from kindergarten through high school. Catholic authorities in Ontario refused, arguing that promoting homosexual acts violates church teaching. They’ll establish clubs to prevent bullying, but will refuse to teach anything implying that homosexual acts are acceptable. The ball is in the Ontario Ministry of Education’s court now. Catholics there are wising up, finally, and drawing a line in the sand. Expect a battle.

In the Diocese of Maine, Bishop Malone instructed all its priests to read a letter from the pulpit challenging President Obama’s mandate that the Catholics in the US provide contraception services as part of health insurance coverage to employees of Catholic hospitals, schools, and other social service agencies. This coverage must be provided without co-pay and must include tubal ligations, vasectomies, and so-called “morning after pills.” The Catholic Church teaches that the primary purpose of sex is procreation and that artificial birth control is wrong. It also teaches that human life begins at conception and so-called “morning-after pills” work by destroying embryonic human life. Here too, Catholics are wising up and drawing a line in the sand. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) is claiming a violation of its rights under the First Amendment’s “free exercise [of religion]” clause. Expect a battle here too.President Obama is gambling. He’s trying to get his secular/socialist camel’s nose into the Catholic tent. He knows a majority of Catholics disagree with the church’s teaching on contraception and many don’t agree on abortion either. Quite a few liberal Democrat members of the US House and Senate are nominal Catholics who have been openly pro-abortion for decades, yet still receive the sacraments publicly in their parishes. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) ruled in 2006 that individual bishops could refuse them the Eucharist but most declined to exercise that authority. Some did however, including bishops in dioceses serving former Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius as well as now-former congressmen David Obey (D-MO) and Patrick Kennedy (D-RI). Ironically, Sebelius is serving in Obama’s cabinet as Health and Human Services Secretary and was named by my priest last Sunday morning as the author of the Obamacare ruling against which Maine’s Bishop Malone strenuously objected.

Conservative Catholics are encouraged by the USCCB’s public challenge to President Obama. We’ve been waiting a long time. Early in the Obama presidency, the White House asked Georgetown University to cover up the symbol “IHS,” which stands for “Jesus,” that would have been visible behind Obama as he spoke. Unbelievably, Georgetown - a Jesuit university - complied. Talk about cowardice. No wonder Obama believes he can bully Catholics.

On another front: The fields of psychology and social work have been virtually taken over by the left-wing, homosexual Thought Police. Recently however, graduate schools of social work around the country are being sued after requiring students to accept homosexuality as normal regardless of their religious objections. One woman in Augusta, Georgia was told to attend “gay pride” parades or be denied a degree. She was ultimately expelled from the program and a federal appeals court sided with the university on December 11, 2011. An identical lawsuit by a Michigan woman expelled from her counseling program because of her religious views on homosexuality was upheld by a different federal appeals court just the other day. Given these opposite rulings in two different federal appeals courts, it would appear that the US Supreme Court will have to resolve this ultimately.

Obama’s open challenge to the Catholic hierarchy as represented by the USCCB on this Obamacare ruling may be a major misstep. Six of the nine justices on the US Supreme Court are Catholics, and at least four of those take their religion seriously. They’ll be ruling on the constitutionality of Obamacare in just a few months.

As the culture war escalates on all these fronts, fence-sitting Catholics as well as other Christians in the US and Canada will be forced to get off on one side or the other. It’s past time they did, but better late than never.