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By DEXTER DUGGAN

This is totalitarianism.

The domineering state orders the Church to buckle under, bow down, and worship death. Heavy penalties await those who dare say no.

Sounds like orders coming from Communist Moscow or National Socialist Berlin in the 1930s.

But these orders come from Washington, D. C., in 2012.

Barack Obama’s self- enchanted thugs lay it on the line.

Neither Catholics nor others have a choice. They must fund abortion- causing drugs, sterilization, and artificial contraception through the nationalized government medical program.

Catholics must live in constant mortal sin to be good, obedient Americans.

This is an election year. Obama truly has lost his mind.

He needs every vote he can get next November. So he tries to pump up enthusiasm among the small gangs of radical pro-abortion extremists while turning Catholics of every shade deeply against him. In the pew and in the pulpit. From traditionalist Catholic bishops like Nebraska’s Fabian Bruskewitz to traditionallyliberal clerics like California’s Roger Cardinal Mahony.

“You might as well be forcing a Southern Baptist minister to run abordello on church grounds,” said an editorial posted January 24 by the conservative Investor’s Business Daily. It was headlined, “ Is Obama trying to replace the Pope?”

A government that already thinks itself all- powerful simply hands down the order, no matter how unconstitutional, weird, or unjustifiable.

The newspaper said, “ Obama’s intolerance here goes against both religious and secular legal protections within U.S. law. For 50 years, for instance, the federal government has respected the religious objections of Amish Americans, exempting them from having Social Security numbers.”

The Los Angeles Archdiocese’s retired Mahony wrote at his blog on January 20: “ I cannot imagine a more direct and frontal attack on freedom of conscience than this ruling today. This decision must be fought against with all the energies the Catholic community can muster.”

Puzzling over Obama’s crazy political timing, Catholic League President Bill Donohue told talk host Glenn Beck on January 30, “ Why he’s doing it in an election year, I have not a clue.”

Beck said that if the Obama administration will do this to Catholics in an election year, what will it do to non- Catholics in a nonelectionyear? Donohue said this is getting the camel’s nose under the tent, so all hospitals will have to do abortions.

In a January 31 interview, Tom Messner, a visiting fellow at the conservative, Washington- based Heritage Foundation, told The Wanderer that the Obama administration issuing this edict in an election year is “ a real headscratcher.”

The administration “ may be just so committed to increasing access” to these services that “ it doesn’t care about the fallout, or they may have underestimated how seriously” some people regard this, Messner said.

If the administration tries to gauge public sentiment by believing the left- wing “ mainstream media,” that spells trouble enough.

For getting close to a full halfcentury, those media have lied and misled about abortion, falsely insisting for decades that the U. S. Supreme Court in 1973 legalized permissive abortion for the first three months of pregnancy — when in fact the court legalized it throughout pregnancy.

Whenever something about abortion is so horrible that people would recoil from the facts and demand legal change, these media lie and cover up the facts so the horrors can continue. Whenever public sentiment protests the Culture of Death, these media would rather not know.

Encouraged by these media in the 1970s, the Democratic Party was emboldened to start dumping its pro-life leaders and policies. No one would care, the media- stupefied Democrats believed.

But the damage was done. Traditionalist Democrats turned instead to the party that welcomed them. “ Reagan Democrats” were born in big bunches. The Democratic Party struggled for years to figure out how to undo this damage.

However, rather than repudiating the pro- death cause that was to blame, these media and their pet Democrats plunged ever deeper into the swamp. To do otherwise would be to admit error, and that would be too embarrassing. Don’t bandage the bloody spot. Rip it wider with razors.

In a few decades, the United States has gone from being told to “ tolerate” permissive abortion to being told that dissent from the Culture of Death is intolerable.

LifeSiteNews. com headlined a January 27 story: “ Birth- control mandate meant to squeeze churches out of health care, says congressman.”

The story quoted New Jersey pro- life Republican Cong. Chris Smith: “We will have a situation where our faith- based hospitals will be on fire sale because they cannot participate. They know that the Catholic Church and other churches are not going to capitulate. So they expect them to say, ‘Well, we’re out. We’re going to have to sell the hospitals.’ The threat is very, very real.

“ There’s a coerciveness about this administration unlike any I’ve seen before,” LifeSiteNews. com quoted Smith.

Where are the “ mainstream” media on Obama’s edict, askedconservative columnist and blogger Michelle Malkin. “ Mostly AWOL, as usual,” she said.

His remarkably totalitarian, unprecedented assault just isn’t much to work up a sweat about, these media think.

“ The agenda is not increased ‘ access’ to health- care services,” Malkin said. “ The ultimate goal is to shut down health- care providers — Catholic health- care institutions employ about 540,000 full- time workers and 240,000 part- time workers — whose religious views cannot be tolerated by secular zealots and radical social engineers.”

“ It’s a religious autonomy issue,” the Heritage Foundation’s Messner told The Wanderer. “ It seems the bishops are united on this point.”

In a January 31 blog post at Heritage’s “The Foundry,” Messner wrote: “ A remarkable page in the history of American conscientious objection is being written by citizens throughout the United States who are standing up and saying, ‘We cannot — we will not — comply with this unjust law’.”

James C. Capretta, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, posted atNational Review Online

on January 30: “ The central purpose of Obamacare — and the reason it was and is so strenuously opposed by so many Americans — is to transfer all of the critical decisions about how American health care operates to the federal government. Despite what the president contends, it is a federal takeover. The federal bureaucracy is now in the driver’s seat.

“ And,” Capretta continued, “ with the federal government now calling all of the shots, it is a foregone conclusion that a decidedly secularist and utilitarian point of view will be pervasive in everything that is done. It is simply beyond the capacity of the modern federal government to even consider arguments questioning the wisdom of governmental policies promoting free and abundant contraception.”

Fay Voshell wrote atAmerican Thinker on February 1: “ For the truth of the matter is that the U. S. government’s intrusion into religious organizations, if not halted at this stage, will continue to press even harder for even more sacrifices of conscience. The next step on the part of the government will almost certainly force all religious institutions to provide access to health- care insurance that provides coverage of surgical abortions.

“ The administration’s demands are only the first salvo in what is bound to be a continuing battlebetween the federal government and churches if Obamacare continues its trajectory and is not dismantled,” wrote Voshell, who holds a degree from Princeton Theological Seminary.

She added: “ If the push to force the churches into positions compromising . . . rules of faith and practice succeeds, and the church capitulates, there is absolutely no church or church institution the government will not seek to controlcompletely.”

A Terrible Mistake

In his National Review Online

article, Capretta cautioned that Obama’s administration may pull a stunt shortly before the election and broaden the conscience exemption, to win gullible voters.

But, Capretta said, “ The hard truth is that the federal government cannot be trusted today with these kinds of decisions, and there’s no prospect of that changing anytime soon. That’s a big reason why Obamacare should never have been allowed to pass in the first place.

“ Just the sight of Catholic leaders’ being forced to go begging before federal officials ought to be enough to convince most Americans that handing over so much power over such sensitive matters to the federal government was a terrible, terrible mistake,” he said.

Which brings up the reminder that the U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops was strongly in favor of passing Obamacare, as long as abortion was excluded.

Why a Godless government program should be expected to respect morality is a good question. But the bishops’ liberal bureaucrats have led them down political blind alleys before.

Another major example is the bishops pressing year after year to have Congress grant U. S. citizenship and the vote to tens of millions of illegal immigrants, who are expected to vote overwhelmingly for Obama’s Democratic Party Culture of Death.

Surely the bishops’ failure to educate Latinos about their moral and political responsibility to reject this abhorrent political path cannot be ignored.

An administration trying to throw shackles around the churches does so after being empowered into office with the help of many Latino votes.

If one day the bishops themselves are led away in chains with other Catholics by a government like Obama’s, perhaps they finally will regret the political tragedy they helped create.