In Speech, Hatch Blasts Washington Democrats for Ongoing Attacks on Religious Freedom Sen. Orris Hatch blasted Washington Democrats’ ongoing attacks on religious freedom protections by forcing religious institutions to provide preventive health services, including birth control,
Constitution. Not once. As members of the United States Senate, we take an oath to support and defend the Constitution.
But to hear members of the Administration and some members of Congress talk, it is clear to me that providing abortion-inducing drugs, sterilizations, and the morning-after pill to women is more important than the First Amendment that we are sworn to the nation and our constituents to defend.
I do not shock easily, but the cavalier attitude of the President, his administration, and many in Congress to this frontal assault on religious liberty is truly shocking. There was a time when both parties, liberals and conservatives, could come together on the matter of religious liberty. But not any longer.
And I think it is because for many liberals religion, and the right to practice it freely, are not the foundation of our nation’s liberties. Rather, they are viewed as a threat to our nation’s liberties.
They don’t understand religious people. I guess we should have seen this coming when the President ran for the White House in 2008, and he referred pejoratively to those Americans who cling to their Bibles.
But the fact is, it was people who clung to their Bibles who were at the forefront of some of our nation’s greatest civil rights struggles and have been most committed to advancing the cause of personal liberty. And they are at the forefront today, serving as a solemn witness of the importance of religious liberty, threatening civil disobedience against the President’s unconstitutional abortion mandate that would force them to violate their most cherished moral beliefs.
Instead of treating these powerful witnesses to our Founding ideals with the respect that they deserve, they are looked at with contempt. This morning, one of my colleagues, referred to a panel testifying about this assault on religious liberty as full of dudes.
Her suggestion was that the all-male composition of this panel somehow serves as proof that the objection to this abortion mandate is due to hostility to women. Give me a break.
Let me tell you who these so-called dudes were.
The Roman Catholic Bishop of Bridgeport, Connecticut.
The President of the Lutheran Church — Missouri Synod.
The Graves Professor of Moral Philosophy at Union University.
The Director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University And the Chair of the Ethics Department at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
These men — who my colleague refers to as dudes — came to Congress to testify about the grave impact that this Obamacare rule poses to religious freedom.
My colleague from California does not mention these other names, because they are inconvenient.
She does not mention Margaret Brining, Mary Keys, and Nicole Garnett of the University of Notre Dame.
She does not mention Harvard’s Mary Ann Glendon, or the University of Chicago’s Jean Bethke Elshtain, or Maria Garlock of Princeton University.
She does not mention Helen Alvare of George Mason University or Maria Aguirre of The Catholic University of America.
