by Joy Pullman
Washington DC’s City Council is moving to force religious K-12 schools and universities to pay for employee abortions and sponsor on-campus gay advocacy organizations.
Throwing Christians to the lions to be eaten alive versus forcing them to engage in a series of lawsuits that will devour their financial sustenance or to close shop and remove to a more tolerant jurisdiction are certainly distinct varieties of persecution, and the former much worse than the latter. But both are religious persecution. It seems the West is now determined to hunt down the very religious tradition that has not only sustained but enabled it to vibrantly flourish, all in the name of the equality of man that Christianity was first to declare and establish. In other words, we’re witnessing a slow-moving cultural murder-suicide.
Patrick Reilly of the Cardinal Newman Society discusses in the Wall Street Journal this week only the latest in our recent series of government intrusions upon religion, in the Washington DC City Council’s decision to amend the city’s “Human Rights Act” to require religious K-12 schools and universities to fund and encourage on-campus gay advocacy groups. It is considering another “reproductive health” amendment that
could prevent religious schools from enforcing contracts in which teachers pledge to be moral examples to students and to abide by religious teachings—including teachings against abortion, sterilization or contraception.
Proponents and opponents believe this amendment also could be used to force the district’s employers—including religious nonprofits—to cover abortion in employee health plans. That would go a step further than ObamaCare’s mandatory coverage of sterilization and contraception, which has been challenged by 55 lawsuits from religious colleges, charities and other nonprofits.
One wonders in passing why on earth DC’s council would attack schools that rescue so many local children from a positively horrific “public” education system that is an international shame to our country—but perhaps that description of it reveals the answer.
