Obama vs. Constitution, Again

I'm sure most of my readers have already heard about the Obama Administration's recent mandate that religious organizations, including Catholic charities, hospitals, & universities, provide their employees with health insurance coverage for contraceptives and abortifacients even if doing so violates their beliefs (which it does in many cases). Work has been busy lately, so I've been a bit late to the party on this. I hope it's obvious to most of my readers that this is an assault on our 1st Amendment religious freedoms. It should also be obvious that this is just one example of what happens when government grows too big and starts trying to control every area of our lives. After all, ObamaCare requires every American to purchase government-approved health insurance, which is also a violation of our constitutional freedoms, and it's really not much of a step from that to this birth control mandate imposed on religious organizations.

I found a great article by one of my favorite National Review Online authors, Andrew McCarthy, about this attack on religious freedom by Obama. It's called "The Contraceptive Mandate's Shaky Justification," and it does a great job of explaining how ridiculous Obama's claim is that women in our country lack access to "reproductive services." And don't be fooled by the so-called compromise that Obama's Administration has since offered to try to appease his critics -- it is all show and no substance, as this NRO editorial makes clear.

This issue is just one of many that demonstrate Obama's hostility toward religion. Other examples, many of which I have posted about here, include his radical pro-abortion positions, his refusal to defend or enforce the Defense of Marriage Act, his appointment of radical gay activist Kevin Jennings as his safe schools czar, his rolling back of freedom of conscience provisions for medical practitioners, his cavalier attitude toward global human rights, and his removal of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops from its position as administrator of the government's Human Trafficking Program despite its excellent qualifications to do so. Not to mention his administration's recent attempt to argue before the Supreme Court that the government should be able to interfere in religious organizations' choices to hire or fire their own leaders and teachers (which was fortunately shot down unanimously).

Of course, I'm sure people who are indifferent or hostile to religion or who want to silence religious expression in the public square and eliminate the influence of religious values on our society are perfectly happy with all of these decisions and actions. What I don't get is why any Christian who takes his/her faith seriously would ever consider voting to re-elect Obama (or sitting out the election).

UPDATE: I found another great article on the birth control mandate, this one written by Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and a blogger himself. Mohler analyzes a column by Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times in which, after lying about Christians wanting to ban contraceptives, Kristof defines religious freedom in this way: "“The basic principle of American life is that we try to respect religious beliefs, and accommodate them where we can.” Wow. Whatever happened to "inalienable rights" and "no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion"? It is scary when we have reached the point when a mainstream liberal columnist for one of the largest newspapers in the country defines freedom of religion as the government trying to respect and accommodate religion where it can.