Over the Easter weekend, the Sunday talk shows turned to the subject of religion in America and the role of faith in government. The focus was on the Obama Administration’s contraception rule that allows women who work for religious employers to receive contraception directly through insurers.
• Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, appeared on Face the Nation and called Obama’s proposal “a radical intrusion of government bureaucracy into the internal life of the Church.”
• State of the Union had Ralph Reed, the former director of the Christian Coalition, who said Obama’s policies on contraception show “totally insensitivity to if not outright hostility to the religious beliefs of millions of Americans.”
• Newt Gingrich, a GOP candidate and Reed contemporary, skewed the notion of religious liberty on Fox News Sunday when he said that “government should not force its values on any religious institution.”
But perhaps Pastor Rick Warren, who also appeared on This Week, was prescient about the current debate in 2009 during his inaugural invocation for President Obama, when he said: “Help us, oh God, to remember that we are Americans. United not by race or religion or by blood, but to our commitment to freedom and justice for all.”
We hope those words inspire more Americans and more of our leaders to follow the Constitution and civil liberties as they make policy decisions.
ACLU Liberty Watch 2012 is the voice for the Constitution in the this year’s presidential election. Follow us on Twitter: @ACLULW, or 'Like' us on Facebook: Facebook.com/ACLULibertyWatch.
