Under Obama, ‘Religious Freedom’ Is Redefined As ‘Freedom Of Worship’

The Obama Administration is relentlessly attacking the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom by redefining it in narrow terms as “freedom of worship.”

In other words, the Obama regime is willing to grant Christians the right to worship in their churches, but not express religious convictions or beliefs in the workplace or any other place outside of the confines of the church.

This is most obvious in the Obama Administration’s attack on religious freedom in Obamacare’s abortion mandate for businesses and non-profit religious institutions.

As Heritage Foundation author Sarah Torre notes:

Perhaps the most egregious example of this whittling away of religious liberty is Obamacare’s anti-conscience mandate. The legal showdown over the now famous rule entered a new round last week. The federal government continued its fight to force the Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic charity dedicated to caring for the elderly poor, to cover abortion-inducing drugs and contraception in violation of their faith. While the Supreme Court stopped enforcement of the mandate against some family businesses, non-profit religious organizations like the Little Sisters remain in danger of devastating fines for not complying with the coercive rule.

Unfortunately, the Obama administration’s HHS mandate is hardly the only assault on religious freedom and the right of conscience in the United States.

Obamacare is finding new ways to force individuals and families to pay for health plans that cover elective abortions. The law’s lack of transparency about abortion coverage, coupled with a mandatory abortion surcharge, is so serious an affront to conscience that it has led at least one family to file a federal lawsuit.  The health care law also only includes limited protections for medical professionals who decline to participate in, perform, or refer for abortion because of their moral or religious beliefs.  Those loose protections, coupled with the administration’s weakened guidance on federal conscience regulations, could endanger the ability of doctors, nurses and hospitals to continue working in accordance with their values.

Religious freedom is America’s First Freedom and it is the reason that the Pilgrims left their homes in Europe to come to the New World.

Religious freedom is what inspired the founding of the United States and why it is listed first in the First Amendment to our Constitution.

Learn more about our legacy of religious freedom by ordering a copy of “The Pledge: One Nation Under God” by RFC Chairman William J. Murray.

Read the rest of Sarah Torre’s commentary at CNSNews.com.