Bishops Open ‘Religious Liberty’ Drive

[SecularMotion]

BALTIMORE — The nation’s Roman Catholic bishops opened a new front in their fight against abortion and same-sex marriage on Monday, recasting their opposition as a struggle for “religious liberty” against a government and a culture that are infringing on the church’s rights.

The bishops have expressed increasing exasperation as more states have legalized same-sex marriage, and the Justice Department has refused to go to bat for the Defense of Marriage Act, legislation that established the definition of marriage as between a man and a woman.

“We see in our culture a drive to neuter religion,” Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan of New York, president of the bishops conference, said in a news conference Monday at the bishops’ annual meeting in Baltimore. He added that “well-financed, well-oiled sectors” were trying “to push religion back into the sacristy.”

Archbishop Dolan also came prepared to answer questions about the sexual-abuse scandal at Penn State University, which has reminded so many observers of the Catholic Church’s own abuse scandal. He said that the accusations against a former university football coach were a reminder that sexual abuse is a universal problem that affects most institutions.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/15/us/bishops-renew-fight-on-abortion-and-gay-marriage.html?_r=1&hp

[cleanhippie]

1. We will see more and more of this as religions recognize their impending irrelevancy.

Everyday, more and more people are waking up to the fact that one religious sect should not have the power to influence everyone, not just non-believers, but non-believers of other faiths.

The ONLY way to have true religious freedom is to keep our government and our laws FREE from religion.

[atreides1]

2. The only reason that the Church has Rights

Is because all Americans have them...the only thing these Papists want to do is to go back in time when the church controlled the heads of state and were nothing more then blood sucking, money grubbing leeches.

F**k them and anyone like them!

[HopeHoops]

3. So what are they going to do - an "occupy Hillcrest" protest?

For those who are not familiar with the Baltimore area, one of the major reproductive health/abortion providers in that area is called "Hillcrest".

[queenjane]

4. Tax the crap out of them

Then they won't have slush funds to try to impose their Dark Ages theocracy on those of us living in the modern world

[LeftishBrit]

5. The saddest, most infuriating paragraph is:

'The bishops are struggling to reclaim the role they played in the 1980s and into the ’90s as a nationally recognized voice on the moral dimension of public policy issues like economic inequality, workers’ rights, immigration and nuclear weapons proliferation. Since then, however, they have reordered their priorities, with abortion and homosexuality eclipsing poverty and economic injustice'

So the only two real sins are homosexuality and abortion - it evidently doesn't matter that much if babies are killed by poverty *after* they are born! Evidently, plenty of camels will need to go through needles' eyes.

Also, it seems to me that the religious right nowadays, unlike social conservatives of a generation or two ago, are not very concerned to fight those 'sins' which involve everybody. In the past, social conservatives at least paid lipservice to a preoccupation with opposing adultery, divorce, alcohol, gambling, pornography, etc., etc. Whatever one might think of these attitudes, they involved activities engaged in by the population as a whole. The current Religious Right are more preoccupied with the gay minority first of all, and then with actions that affect women specifically.

[NMMNG]

6. Typical bigots

They think "religious liberty" includes oppressing others and being allowed to force their religious dogma on everyone.

[rurallib]

7. “We see in our culture a drive to neuter religion,”

hear, hear!
Three cheers

[MarkCharles]

8. Their "religious liberties" are not in jeopardy; they are free not to be gay, and

free not to have abortions, (and since I think the Bishops are all men, they CANNOT have abortions anyway).

[dtexdem]

9. Close, it's actually a religious liarty drive ...

on the parts of some of the worst powerful liars on the planet.