Despite the fact that his organization is named “Priests for Life” and its national director is an ordained clergyman, Fr. Frank Pavone says the pro-life Catholic group does not qualify for the Obama administration’s narrow definition of a religious organization. Thus, the organization would be forced to pay for all contraception, including abortfacient drugs, under Obama’s controversial birth control mandate.

This morning, the New York-based pro-life group filed suit against the Obama administration, saying the new mandate violates its First Amendment rights.

The lawsuit, filed in California court, seeks injunctive relief from the HHS rules.

Since Priests for Life is a private association registered as an independent 501(c)(3) non-profit educational corporation, it does not qualify for the Department of Health and Human Services religious exemption – which covers only churches and religious orders. A press release from the organization says it “therefore must comply with these conscience-violating mandates, decrees, and punitive measures.”

Priests for Life says it must begin implementing the contraceptive rule by this August. Religious institutions other than churches have until August 2013 to comply.

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Bishops in the House of Lords are a “key voice” for social justice and the poor, the Church of England’s governing body heard today.

The Bishop of Leicester, the Rt Rev Tim Stevens told General Synod that aside from the Lords spiritual, the voices speaking up for the poor before Parliament were “few and far between”.

He said there was a “great opportunity” for bishops to speak up on the “scandal” of widening inequalities in society after the Lords spiritual helped to defeat the Government’s plans to introduce a £26,000 cap on benefits.

The bishop said: “Members of Synod may have noticed in recent weeks members of Lords spiritual being heavily involved in some of the fundamental reform agendas going through Parliament – health and social care, legal aid, welfare reform.

“There have been many conversations behind the scenes with ministers this week. Such is the political mood that those voices prepared to speak unequivocally and sometimes unpopularly for the poor are few and far between.

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One of the most influential evangelical leaders in the United States says Christians should go to jail rather than comply with the Obama administration’s mandate to provide all contraception, including abortion-inducing drugs, in their health care plans.

Dr. Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), told LifeSiteNews.com “we will not comply” with the Dept. of Health and Human Services’ mandate requiring religious institutions to cover abortifacient products such as Plan B, Ella, and the IUD.

“We want the law changed, or else we’re going to write our letters from the Nashville jail, just like Dr. King wrote his from the Birmingham jail,” Dr. Land said.

Dr. Land wrote an op-ed on Tuesday with Barrett Duke, vice president for public policy and research at ERLC, calling his fellow Southern Baptists and evangelical Christians throughout America to oppose any infringement on the First Amendment.

“The Obama administration has declared war on religion and freedom of conscience,” they wrote. “We consider this callous requirement by the Obama administration to be a clear violation of our nation’s commitment to liberty of conscience and a flagrant violation of our constitutional protection to freedom of religion.”

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The Obama administration’s decision to take on the Catholic Church at this stage of the political cycle is either very brave or very stupid. As Jon Swaine reports this morning, the President’s overhaul of healthcare includes a provision that religious charities, universities and other groups must now provide contraception in staff insurance packages and failure to do so will result in hefty fines. More than 150 Catholic bishops have spoken out against the change, with one accusing Obama of waging a "severe assault on religious liberty". According to Alexander Sample, the Bishop of Marquette, "we Catholics will be compelled to either violate our consciences, or to drop health coverage for our employees and suffer the penalties for doing so.” With 70 million Catholics in the United States, this looks like a kamikaze mission by the White House. Why have they done it? David Brooks in the New York Times has a persuasive theory:

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Government uses rare parliamentary procedure to annul seven adjustments to reform and prevent further challenges from peers

 The coalition has raised the stakes over its welfare bill by overturning seven key Lords amendments passed to soften the reforms, and taken the rare step to direct peers they have no constitutional right to challenge the Commons' decisions further.

On most bills, the Lords can send amendments back and forth in what is known as parliamentary ping pong. The coalition, deploying a rarely used parliamentary device, claimed "financial privilege" asserting that only the Commons had the right to make decisions on bills that have large financial implications.

It argued that the Lords amendments collectively cut billions of planned savings. A similar tactic could also be used to throw out likely Lords amendments to the legal aid and health bills.

It is for the Speaker on the advice of clerks and the coalition to decide if financial privilege should be applied.

MPs backed the government's plans for a £26,000 annual cap on overall household benefits including child benefit, overturning a defeat in the Lords. The Lords amendment, which was led by Church of England bishops, was overturned by 334 votes to 251.

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Dr John Sentamu, the archbishop of York, (pictured) has told David Cameron, the prime minister, not to legalize gay marriage*. He said (in an interview in the Telegraph yesterday):

“Marriage is a relationship between a man and a woman … I don’t think it is the role of the state to define what marriage is. It is set in tradition and history and you can’t just [change it] overnight, no matter how powerful you are … We’ve seen dictators do it in different contexts and I don’t want to redefine very clear social structures that have been in existence for a long time and then overnight the state believes it could go in a particular way … "

Dr Sentamu rightly alludes to the actions of "dictators" when referring to David Cameron's plans, for the following reasons:

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Church of England bishops this week have placed themselves in a difficult position. By leading opposition to the benefits cap of £26,000 they’ve taken a highly divisive position. They risk alienating churchgoers and stand accused of interfering in party politics. It is all very well to hark back to the days when the Church of England was regarded as a more effective opposition than the Labour Party to Margaret Thatcher’s far more modest reforms and cuts.

With news that Britain’s debt stands at one trillion pounds, albeit with public spending beginning to come under control, it is clear that there is much more pain to come for all of us. The Bishop of Ripon and Leeds, John Packer, was wrong in tabling this amendment in the first place. It is not just that I disagree with him. A clear case can be made for the fact that the medium- and long-term effect of these changes will be to bring inflationary housing rents down and that the pain felt by some families will be temporary. Yet in reforming welfare, the government also needs to demonstrate to the long-term unemployed that work pays better than benefits.

We do no favours to some families, trapped in welfare dependency, by pretending that living on the dole can be a way of life. It is simply an unsustainable position both for these families and workers who must sometimes wonder whether work really pays.

Bishop Packer was wrong to table this amendment because he has crossed a line from warning about the possible consequences of government policy to interfering in the political process. I do not believe that this is the role of Bishops. The fact is that when they cross this line, they become political leaders, rather than moral leaders.

The onus is now on Bishop Packer to make an economic and social policy argument about where he believes welfare savings can be found and how reform can be accomplished.

Let me add that I do not believe the five bishops in the House of Lords on Monday evening were wrong to vote against the government nor to make a moral argument that children will be the first to suffer from the benefits cap. It is in the active step of opposition by tabling an amendment that Bishop Packer has stepped across the line.

A senior Roman Catholic has challenged the Home Secretary about the Government’s plans to redefine marriage.

Archbishop Peter Smith of Southwark noted that civil partnerships already offer same-sex couples virtually all the rights of marriage.

He pointed out that when he met with Home Secretary Theresa May earlier this week she seemed unable to say why marriage should be redefined in light of that.
 
He said: “I suspect the Government hasn’t really thought out why the definition of marriage should be changed.”

The Government will launch a consultation about redefining marriage in the spring.

Archbishop Smith met Mrs May alongside William Fittal, secretary general of the Church of England.

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Though he ceased to be Archbishop of Canterbury nearly a decade ago, Lord Carey, as a life peer, is entitled to express his opinions on issues of national importance.
 
But the point of debate in Parliament is that we listen to each others views before making up our minds.
 
Many Peers last Monday were persuaded to support the Bishops’ amendment by the power of the arguments they heard.
 
This makes it all the more disappointing to me that Lord Carey was not present to hear them.
 
Yet much of what Lord Carey had to say this week accords with the views of the Bishops.

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Archbishop Peter Smith of Southwark met the Home Secretary Theresa May yesterday to talk about the Government’s plans to introduce same-sex marriage.

The archbishop told The Catholic Herald that he wanted to clarify why the Government believed such legislation was needed.

He said he could not see the point of it given that civil partnerships already offer broadly the same legal rights as marriage.

But during their 40-minute meeting, he said, Mrs May seemed unable to answer that question. “I suspect the Government hasn’t really thought out why the definition of marriage should be changed,” he said.

He said that a steering committee of the bishops’ conference was to meet on Wednesday to plan how to campaign against the Government’s plans.

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Newt Gingrich won the Republican presidential primary in South Carolina with the strong support of evangelicals. According to exit polls, two-thirds of voters described themselves as evangelical or born-again Christians, 44 percent of which voted Gingrich. Their support turned the first Southern primary from a close race to a runaway victory for Gingrich.

[...]  Gingrich won, in part, because he was able to win over both religious conservatives and those for whom religion is less important in the voting booth. Voters who said the religious beliefs of candidates mattered “a great deal” backed both Gingrich (45 percent) and Santorum (32 percent).

Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith has accused bishops who oppose plans for welfare changes of failing to show concern for ordinary people.

He said they should think of those who pay taxes while some unemployed people live in large houses at public expense.

Bishops are leading opposition to the reforms in the House of Lords.

In an interview with the Sunday Times, Mr Duncan Smith admitted his plans for a £26,000 household benefit cap could face defeat in the Lords on Monday.

He said the bishops were not doing poorer people any favours.

He said: "The question I'd ask these bishops is, over all these years, why have they sat back and watched people being placed in houses they cannot afford? It's not a kindness.

"I would like to see their concerns about ordinary people, who are working hard, paying their tax and commuting long hours, who don't have as much money as they would otherwise because they're paying tax for all of this. Where is the bishops' concern for them?"

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The citizens of several countries are pushing back against President Obama’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender foreign policy imperative. Leaders in El Salvador launched a website on “Obama’s Corrupting Foreign Policy” and are asking the U.S. Senate to reject Obama’s nominee for ambassador to their country.

President Obama announced in December that the promotion of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) behavior is a top foreign policy priority, even for the U.S. military overseas. At the same time, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a high-profile speech at the UN equating LGBT status with religion. The State Department told oambassadors worldwide to recognize “gay pride month,” and it released a list of “accomplishments” including the fact that a U.S. ambassador had published an OpEd promoting the LGBT agenda on behalf of the United States .

Mari Carmen Aponte, a temporary ambassador to El Salvador, published an essay conflating disapproval of homosexuality with “brutal hostility” and “aggression” by “those who promote hatred.” It is Salvadorans’ “responsibility” to become advocates for LGBT issues and “to inform our neighbors and friends about what it means to be lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender,” she wrote. The OpEd ran in a major Salvadoran newspaper in June, igniting a firestorm by offended citizens.

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Labour’s Roy Hattersley has criticised his own party’s ‘shameful’ gambling legislation, introduced when Labour were in Government, as Britain’s biggest casino opens.

The new casino is open 24-hours a day, seven days a week, in East London.

Lord Hattersley criticised the casino for portraying itself as simply another form of family entertainment and he highlighted some of the “battle-hardened gamblers” who were at the venue.
 
Labour’s 2005 Gambling Act, which came into force in 2007, ushered in a comprehensive deregulation of gambling, including allowing advertising and online betting for the first time.

Lord Hattersley, who held a Labour seat in Birmingham for over 30 years, commented: “Gambling corrupts. And there is no reason to believe that most of the British public want it to spread like a plague through our towns and cities.”

And he warned that “nurturing the ‘something for nothing’ culture that lies at the heart of gambling” was helping to create “a worryingly detrimental effect on this country”.

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It used to be said that the church shouldn’t stick its nose into politics. It seems to be accepted now that there is a legitimate role for church leaders to make political noises, though it is still thankfully off-limits to make party-political interventions.

The interesting thing is that it is now more usual for politicians, and indeed courts, to interfere with theology. I have a book coming out in February that looks at this phenomenon (We Don’t Do God by George Carey and Andrew Carey, Monarch). My view is that at a time when the doctrines of Christianity have less influence than ever before, secular doctrines are now being imposed upon us all.

The Labour MP Chris Bryant argued in The Independent on Monday that the Church’s attitude to homosexuality is simply absurd and should be abandoned (Chris Bryant: The Church of England needs to forget its silliness about homosexuality’, 14 October 2012).

The church’s teaching, he argued, “condemns people to a life without the joy of sexual intimacy – and all to placate a theology that is as misplaced and out of date as Christianity’s one-time advocacy of slavery. “Is it too much to hope that one day the Church of England will get this silliness out of its system,” he concluded.

Mr Bryant’s views should certainly be heeded by the Church but we should not be bounced by political or legal pressure. David Cameron has also taken to lecturing the churches on gay marriage, as have other MPs. On Monday, The Independent’s leader column suggested that since the Church of England was established it should adopt secular doctrines on issues like homosexuality.

Politicians, and it has to be said some judges, want a ‘tame’ Christianity that is palatable to the tastes of the metropolitan power elite. In The Lion, the witch and the wardrobe, that great apologist
CS Lewis rejects the notion that Aslan is a ‘tame’ lion. By this he means that Christ is not a comfortable or predictable figure, but constantly challenges us. And it follows that his disciples should not allow the State to domesticate the Christian faith.

This may lead to many more church and state clashes in the years ahead. There will also be legal challenges for the Churches if they are to maintain their distinctiveness in society. It is too soon to say where this will lead. The Roman Catholic Church has already had to abandon a long-standing role in providing adoption services under pressure from the state and it seems likely there will be further marginalisation of Christianity.

This year’s great difficulty will surround the government’s clear determination to legislate in favour of ‘gay marriage’. There is speculation about a substantial rebellion by Conservative MPs. The consultation begins in March and Christian people should ensure that their voices are heard. We
must continue to contribute to society in a loving and gracious manner. We should not be tempted to withdraw or disengage in a fit of pique. It is more important than ever that Christians constructively seek to make a difference and earn the right to be heard.
 

The Republican Party’s remaining presidential hopefuls gave a fiery and rousing performance at the Myrtle Beach Convention Center Monday night that featured a first of the debate season: a standing ovation for a participant’s answer.

In the heavily evangelical state, the issues of religious freedom, family, abstinence education, and the rights of the unborn provided many of the forum’s highlights.

Reviving the theme of a prominent television ad, former Texas Governor Rick Perry stated, “This administration is at war against organized religion.” He said, “Catholic Charities cannot take money [from] the federal government…because this administration doesn’t agree with the Catholic Church on the issue of abortion.”

In September, the Obama administration denied millions of dollars in federal grants to the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops, because its top-rated program to assist victims of sexual trafficking will not refer women for an abortion. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee held a hearing on the issue in December.

Perry also slammed the administration for “going after churches” when it asked the Supreme Court to reject the “ministerial exception,” which allows religious organizations like Christian schools to appoint their own ministers. The Supreme Court unanimously rejected the administration’s argument last week.

“If that’s not a war on religion, I don’t know what it is,” Perry said to thunderous applause. “And this administration is out of control.”

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Nick Clegg has pledged the Government will not backslide on its promise to legalise gay marriage despite a revolt by Conservative MPs who oppose the plan.

The Deputy Prime Minister told the Tory rebels that they were wrong to claim that bringing in civil marriage for gays and lesbians would weaken the institution of marriage and said the reform would be driven through Parliament.

Mr Clegg spoke out yesterday after The Independent revealed traditionalist Tory MPs are plotting to derail the proposal in the Commons. Tory insiders believe 100 MPs could oppose it.

The Liberal Democrat leader insisted: "There is absolutely no question of the Coalition Government abandoning our commitment to legalise gay marriage. I wholeheartedly reject the idea that making civil marriage open to same-sex couples somehow devalues the institution of marriage. I would argue the opposite – it makes it stronger." He said Lynne Featherstone, the Lib Dem Equalities Minister, had been driving this agenda and would launch a consultation exercise in March.

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