A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics

Trump Makes Major Moral Restitution Repealing Obama Policies October 9, 2017

President Donald Trump has reversed two immoral Obama-era policies that instituted in formal governmental practice acts hideous to Catholics and all souls striving after virtue. Both of these policies were intended to further Obama’s religion of sexular paganism at the expense of Christianity as a cultural force, and even more so at the expense of the good of millions of individual souls.

The two policies affected, both of which were ludicrously unconstitutional, were the HHS Mandate forcing Christians opposed to contraceptive use to purchase insurance coverage for its “free” provision (and even forcing celibate Catholic religious orders to do the same!), and the vast expansion of decades old civil rights provisions to include protection from bias on the basis of sex to include those suffering from mental illness and their 875 different, wholly made up “genders.”

First, on the HHS Mandate, Trump has approved broad exemptions for faith-based groups:

The Trump administration announced broad new exemptions to the Health and Human Services’ contraceptive mandate on Friday, that aim to give relief to religious nonprofits and others with deeply held religious or moral convictions regarding contraception.

A senior HHS official told reporters on Thursday that the exemptions are intended to provide full protection for those with religious beliefs and moral convictions. Religious-liberty protections are central to American values, the official explained.

The HHS official told reporters that, on issues of grave moral concern to Americans, where the issue of human life is at stake, policy needs to ensure that religious believers are not “punished” by the federal government. Such policy reflects authentic “tolerance” of divergent viewpoints, he said.

In a May 4 executive order “promoting free speech and religious liberty,” President Donald Trump promised relief from the HHS mandate to the Little Sisters of the Poor, who were present at his May announcement in the White House Rose Garden. Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C., were also present for the announcement, which came during a National Day of Prayer ceremony.

“I want you to know that your long ordeal will soon be over,” Trump told the Little Sisters present at the White House. Their lawsuit against the mandate dates back to 2013.

The HHS policy announced today adds broad religious and moral exemptions to the mandate.

The HHS contraceptive mandate originated in the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which ordered that “preventive services,” be covered in health plans. In 2012, the Department of Health and Human Services mandated that cost-free coverage for contraceptives, sterilizations and abortifacient drugs be included in health plans. [In essence, imposing dogmas sacred to the sexular pagan left onto Christians who regarded such coverage as anathema, just like having to participate in a pseudo-sodo-wedding by baking someone a cake.  This was always about demonstrating religious superiority, whether the Left wants to acknowledge it or not.]

………Catholic theologians and ethicists argued in an amicus brief at the Supreme Court that the accommodation would be considered “either formal cooperation in wrongdoing, or impermissible material cooperation in serious wrongdoing, and would therefore be gravely wrongful.” [Can’t we just say sinful?]

Yes, the Trump administration – or deep state apparatchiks within the executive branch – continued enforcing Obama’s draconian interpretation of religious exemptions until the policy was formally changed.  It’s taken too long, but at last one of the most egregiously unconstitutional executive actions of the Obama administration have been repealed.  If only Republicans in Congress could get their act together and ban this Mandate, all of it, properly, legislatively, but I won’t hold my breath.

Also announced last Friday, where news coverage is the slowest, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, in one of his better moments, also directed that his department will abrogate Obama’s expansion of various civil rights acts to include so-called transgenders:

In a reversal of federal policy that pleased marriage advocates and angered LGBTQI groups, the U.S. Department of Justice issued a memo interpreting the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as not intended to apply to transgenders.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions wrote to the country’s federal prosecutors that on “all pending and future matters” the DOJ will go by what Congress originally intended and not add unforeseen deviances when enforcing laws regarding equal treatment on the basis of “sex.”

At issue is the word “sex.” A section of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 criminalized discrimination based on “sex.” Gay activists say that now includes sexual orientation and transgenderism. Strict originalists say the writers of the law clearly intended “sex” to mean male and female……..

……….Sessions went on to explain that the Obama administration overstepped its bounds in ascribing unimagined modern categories to a 52-year-old anti-discrimination law.  Specifically, the former president officially interpreted civil rights legislation to include homosexuality and transgenderism……….

[However, it’s not all good]……….The DOJ offered further assurances that it will enforce modern laws giving special protected class status to gays.

Thus giving them special protections, rights, and privileges – in essence, elevating an affinity for same-sex sodomizing to an elite class above the normal rank and file.  The Left has succeeded in doing this to most all the elements of its coalition, and this manifests in such a broad way that to hold leftist views and to subscribe to leftist philosophy is, in many ways, to have many rights and privileges denied others.  Or, probably more correctly, to not be leftist is to open oneself up for penalties, abuse, denigration, and general second-class status.  The sense that tens of millions of Americans have, that they have become hard-working stooges funding their own tormentors among the self-anointed “better” classes, was one of the largest factors driving Trump’s successful candidacy.  Since the Left will never stop itself from behaving as a new but wholly unworthy aristocracy, Trump will almost certainly have a second term if he wants one.