Health and Human Services claims it “accommodated” our religious beliefs and offered us an “opt-out.”

I wish that were true. In fact, the government has candidly told the Supreme Court that we “don’t get an exemption” at all. Rather, what Health and Human Services is calling an “opt-out” is really an “opt-in” — a permission slip where we authorize the use of our religious health plan to offer services that violate our beliefs and waive our protections under federal civil rights laws. That’s why they need our signature.

The government says this isn’t a problem because it will pay for the services that violate our religious beliefs. But for us this is not a money question; it is a moral question about what we offer in our plan. It’s similar to high schools that have removed soda machines from their property because they don’t think soda is good for children. It doesn’t matter that the soda companies will pay for the machines. And the school’s decision doesn’t prevent children from getting soda elsewhere. The school simply doesn’t want to be responsible for providing something it believes is bad for its students. It is the same with us.

We follow Catholic teaching that abortion and contraception are wrong, but it is very important to understand that this case is not about women’s access to contraception. The administration already exempts many secular corporations like Exxon Mobil and Visa from having to provide the services we are objecting to, because those companies never updated their plans and are “grandfathered.” Add in the exempted plans for military families, the uninsured and cities like New York, and about a third of all Americans don’t have plans covered by this mandate.

We recognize that not everyone agrees with us, and that the government will make laws and provide services we don’t support. But in a free and diverse society, the American government should not force its citizens to act in violation of their religious beliefs, especially when there are so many exemptions already, and much more effective ways to meet the government’s stated goals.

(source: Obamacare’s Birth-Control ‘Exemption’ Still Tramples on Rights – The New York Times)

Chesterton manages at once the proper relation of “God so loved the world” to “if any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him” and a refutation of the perverse doctrine and myth of Progress:

What is right with the world is the world. In fact, nearly everything else is wrong with it. This is that great truth in the tremendous tale of Creation, a truth that our people must remember or perish. It is at the beginning that things are good, and not (as the more pallid progressives say) only at the end. The primordial things — existence, energy, fruition — are good so far as they go. You cannot have evil life, though you can have notorious evil livers. Manhood and womanhood are good things, though men and women are often perfectly pestilent. You can use poppies to drug people, or birch trees to beat them, stone to make an idol, or corn to make a corner; but it remains true that, in the abstract, before you have done anything, each of these four things is in strict truth a glory, a beneficent speciality and variety. We do praise the Lord that there are birch trees growing amongst the rocks and poppies amongst the corn; we do praise the Lord, even if we do not believe in Him. We do admire and applaud the project of a world, just as if we had been called to council in the primal darkness and seen the first starry plan of the skies. We are, as a matter of fact, far more certain that this life of ours is a magnificent and amazing enterprise than we are that it will succeed.

(source: What is Right With the World)

A good read, reasoned and impassioned:

I know I’m being glib and jocular as I criticize Bill and other friends. That’s basically how I argue. But let me be clear (as Obama likes to say too often): I hate this. I hate it. I hate attacking people I respect. I hate hearing from former fans who say they’re ashamed to have ever admired me or my writing. I hate being unable to meet fellow conservatives half-way. One of the things I love about conservatism is that we argue about our principles; as I’ve written 8 billion times — more or less — we debate our dogma. I love our principled disagreements. But I honestly and sincerely don’t see this as a mere principled disagreement. I see this as an argument about whether or not we should set fire to some principles in a foolish desire to get on the right side of some “movement.” I have never been more depressed about the state of American politics or the health of the conservative movement. I hate the idea that political disagreements will poison friendships — in no small part because as a conservative I think friendship should be immune to politics. I certainly hate having to tell my wife that my political views may negatively affect our income. But I truly fear that this is an existential crisis for the conservative movement I’ve known my whole life. And all I can do is say what I believe. If Donald Trump is elected president, I sincerely and passionately hope I will be proven wrong about all of this. But I just as sincerely and passionately believe I won’t be.

(source: Donald Trump’s Media Supporters — Principles Don’t Matter for Them)

There is no reason we should want to tolerate the slaughter of innocents just because it’s regulated to protect some of those involved (by ensuring the clean and efficient slaughter of others).  But there really is a reason to press for laws which insist that the killing of babies not actually be more dangerous than real life-saving care, especially that it not be sold as “safe, legal, and rare” only to actually be less safe than going to the ER with a serious illness.

One reason is that it will actually shut down clinics that profit from the slaughter of children.  That’s a really good reason, and nobody should disclaim it.

But there’s another reason, and that reason has everything to do with the astonishingly, even irrationally, vehement opposition of so many allies of the slaughter industry to even the most common sense medical reforms:

Those who slaughter the innocent for a living, and the profiteers and ideologues that organize them, promote them, and build an industry on the body parts of babies, do not want regular health care personnel anywhere near the process.

Nurses, you see, tend to become unreliable when they are actually required to participate in murder.  Real doctors do, too.

For more on this see Coenhoven’s excellent article on forgiveness. This is from the introductory essay of a special issue on the subject:

attempts to strip forgiveness-talk of cultic particularity have obscured the ways in which the purportedly secular talk of forgiveness that plays a significant role in our culture remains indebted to Christian thought.

As an example of an interesting admixture of both trends at once, consider the briefly popular recent news story about Lucy Mangum, a six-year-old girl who, after undergoing surgery to repair a leg severely bitten by a blacktip shark, told reporters that she forgave the shark because she believed it had not meant to harm her (Fox News 2011). I do not mean to chide Lucy for applying the idea of forgiveness to a creature that lacks the agential credentials I consider necessary for forgiveness; she is a guide. The “folk” concept of forgiveness on which she drew involves the idea that forgiving is not being angry at, or visiting retribution on, something that has caused you trouble. This approach does not tie forgiveness to repentance; indeed, Lucy rightly perceived that forgiveness is now commonly justified on the basis that the perpetrator is not really to blame.

It seems to me that this way of thinking—popularized in best-selling books that tout the benefits of forgiving everything from God to the weather—drains the idea of forgiveness of its significance, undermines the sense of meaning and inspiration the term still widely stirs, and avoids the profound questions about grace in the midst of fault that it has traditionally evoked. If this is all that one means by forgiveness we might as well use less freighted terms, such as “overlooking” or “getting over it,” which would seem to serve just as well.

(source: The Possibilities of Forgiveness)