"One nation, under God..."

While I find it heartening that so many Catholic institutions have risen to the challenge of the Obamacare contraceptive and abortifacient insurance mandate forcing every Catholic institution that isn’t actually centered on an altar to offer these “services”, I am growing uneasy about the too-narrow grounds upon which they are basing their legal and Constitutional argument. I fear we are storing up trouble, the kind that can cost us the war even if we win this battle.

Of course it is wrong to force Catholic and other organizations to subsidize and in effect promote life-destroying technologies that violate their deepest beliefs. Of course the "exception" to the rule is drawn so narrowly that one pundit stated that Jesus himself would not qualify. Of course the "compromise" offered to indignant pro-life organizations (that they wouldn't pay for the morally repugnant services, their insurance companies would -- with the money they got from the pro-life organizations) was a transparent dodge and an insult to intelligence. Of course these organizations have the right and the obligation to oppose this mandate.

However, the true foundation of the right to oppose this dreadful imposition is being omitted in all of the arguments in court and in the court of popular opinion. We cannot afford the risk of leaving it unsaid, so I'll put it simply and clearly.

We do not derive the right to oppose this monstrous diktat from our membership in a Catholic organization, be it the Catholic Church, the Knights of Columbus, or any other organization. We are not given our rights by the government, or even the Constitution. We betray the founding of this nation under God when we think so.

We are children of God, and from God do we receive our rights of conscience! The founders of this nation knew this very well. It is not the purpose of government to grant us rights; it is the obligation of government to protect our God-given rights from the impositions of others, even if (perhaps especially if) those imposing are in the government.

By not pressing this argument of individual, God-granted rights, we risk allowing the idea that only groups of people large enough to battle other groups or the government bulldozer possess rights that our rulers are bound to respect. (I'm hoping that at least some of my readers were angered at seeing the word "rulers" in the previous sentence.)

The genius of the founding of this republic, a genius that has at times worn perilously thin in the last 50 years was that an individual's God-given rights could not be taken away or diminished, even if the rest of the country were against him. In the classic movie Judgment at Nuremberg, Judge Haywood (played by Spencer Tracy) speaks of the value of "a single human life". Here in America, we speak of a single human's rights. While we must band together to defend our right to refuse to violate our consciences, no matter who insists that we must, our rights do not come from numbers. They come from God.

My ruler does not abide in Washington or Albany. My only ruler dwells in Heaven, and it is to Him that I will one day have to answer to. He tells me that life is the sacred gift of God, and is most demanding of my defending when it is at its most helpless. He tells me that His law is above all human law. He says that the unborn child in the womb, no matter the stage of development, is my brother or sister in Christ. He says that marriage is, and can only be, a union under God of one man and one woman. He says that I have rights from His grace, and not from the "grace" of any earthly master.

And I believe.