President Obama and his Act of Uniformity

By: American Decency Staff

By:  Chris Johnson In England in 1559, Queen Elizabeth I instated the Act of Uniformity requiring everyone in England to attend a state-sponsored church every Sunday which used the Book of Common Prayer – essentially mandating that all citizens subscribe to her own personal beliefs. Fifty years later, in 1607, the members of several Puritan churches fled England for Holland, so that they could worship God outside of the Anglican tradition. Thirteen years after that they landed in what would become Massachusetts and formed a colony free from any outside influence on their religious activity. Another 170 years down the road their progeny cut ties with England in a Declaration of Independence which named certain "unalienable rights" given by God among which were "the  right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Eleven years later, in 1787, our forefathers agreed on a constitution which laid out the framework of our government, and then, after another two years, they amended that constitution to include several additions to the list of "unalienable rights," beginning with the right to freely practice one's religion: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Today, 222 years later, we have come full circle. President Obama has now declared that his personal beliefs on contraception trump the religious beliefs of Catholics who run hospitals or other charitable organizations. As part of the health care bill passed in 2009, the Obama administration recently decreed that all organizations which provide health insurance for their employees must include contraception "medication," including Plan B, the abortifacient. As I write this, news is breaking that the administration has changed its policy.  The president announced today that Catholic organizations' insurance plans will not be required to include contraception coverage, but the insurance company they go through will be required to provide "free" contraception for any employees who ask for it. As they say, however, there's no such thing as a free lunch – or in this case a free birth control or abortifacient pill.  If insurance companies just white out the words "contraception coverage" on the bill,that is not solving the problem. So, the compromise isn't a compromise at all. It's the president playing "I've got your nose" with the Catholic church, except he really does have their nose and he's only pretending to give it back. The president's mandate is especially interesting when you consider that constitutional law professors like himself have been crowing for the last half of a century about the "wall of separation between church and state " (you need only look as far as the fourth paragraph in this piece to see that those words are not part of the First Amendment.) As has been often noted, those words came from a letter written by Thomas Jefferson to a church worried about the government using the words of the First Amendment to encroach on their freedoms. Jefferson assured them that would never happen because the First Amendment was there to separate the two spheres, keeping the state out of the church's business. Now we have the government doing exactly what the recipients of Jefferson's letter were afraid of. The First Amendment has been flipped on its head so that we barely recognize a true violation of it. We are used to hearing it invoked only to decry valedictorians' graduation ceremony prayers and the like, so when we hear the state telling the church how to run its ministries, many don't even flinch. Yet this is a violation of the true meaning of the Wall of Separation which was meant to keep the government out of the church and not vice versa. President Obama legislates his beliefs in precisely the same manner Queen Elizabeth I did half of a millennium ago. What is amazing is that we hear so little from the usual suspects who are so opposed to "legislating morality." If this is not a text book example of this phenomenon, nothing is. After all, this has gone way past a simple debate on whether contraception is right or wrong. The Obama administration is not arguing that it is good to provide these services. They have decreed that it is wrong not to provide it, no matter what you personally believe. As we approach the elections in November, one of the questions Americans need to ask themselves is, "are we comfortable with our government telling our churches what's right and wrong? ========================================================== To support our efforts please click here or mail your gift to American Decency Association (ADA), PO Box 202, Fremont, MI 49412. American Decency Association is a member of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability.

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