Introduction
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
—The First Amendment (Emphasis added)
America was founded with religious freedom recognized as a primary right. The state can neither compel people to belong to one faith, nor to persecute a faith because of what they believe.
Vatican II Document, Dignitatis Humanae, speaks of religious freedom in this way:
2. This Vatican Council declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom. This freedom means that all men are to be immune from coercion on the part of individuals or of social groups and of any human power, in such wise that no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs, whether privately or publicly, whether alone or in association with others, within due limits.
The two stances are remarkably similar – the State does not have the authority to force a person or a group to do what they believe is morally evil.
Unfortunately, the modern stance of the US Government and the political elites is one which seeks to compel the Catholic Church and the institutions affiliated with her to participate in behaviors she finds contrary to what she believes to be right.
CREDO: Right Belief and Right Practice
Doctrine is what is professed by the Church as believed, and denial of the doctrine is to deny what we believe to be true. A person who denies the Trinity cannot be said to believe what the Catholic Church believes, even if he or she is a part of the Catholic Church. Indeed, throughout the centuries, holy men and women have been martyred because they would not deny what the Church professes to be true and would not agree with what the Church teaches is false.
This point must be understood. Even under the threat of punishment, we cannot go against what we believe.
In the Catholic view, we can know of God through Divine Revelation and through reason. Through reason, we can grow in understanding about why the commands of the Lord are as they are and understand what reasonably follows from what we believe.
We believe God is all powerful, all knowing and perfectly good. From this we recognize that His moral law is not based on an imperfect understanding of human nature and is not arbitrary (it isn't a case of "whatever God feels like is good"). God is perfectly good and His moral law reflects His goodness. God's law also reflects what is good for persons. He does not command us to do what is harmful for ourselves and does not forbid what is good for us.
Because our Lord has made it clear that to love Him is to keep His commandments, we who profess to love the Lord must obey Him. It isn't a matter of merely following rules legalistically. When you love a person, you act in a way which has the good of that person in mind. The beloved can forgive actions done which are offensive. However, a habitual contempt for the good of the beloved demonstrates a lack of love.
We believe that right practice (orthopraxy) depends on right belief (orthodoxy). For example, a person who believes people are nothing more than cogs in a machine to serve a higher purpose will treat persons differently than those who believe people need to be treated with dignity and cannot have this dignity taken away for the sake of expedience.
From this we can see that Catholics – at least those with a proper understanding of the faith – believe that to love God is to behave in a way that is in keeping with what He commands, and that to act in opposition to His commands is not only to treat God wrongly but also are harmful to ourselves.
Non-Catholics may disagree with us and claim we have a wrong understanding about what God intends. However, it cannot be denied that under the Constitution, Catholics and Catholic institutions are free to act according to what we think right. We harm none by refusing to take part in abortion, homosexual "marriage" and other things we believe to be against what God commands. We do not violate anyone's rights. Rather, those who come to a Catholic group and insists we accommodate their demands against what we believe violate our rights – especially when they take us to court to force us to act against our faith.
Moreover, we do have the right as American citizens to seek to reform our nation and to reach out to others to teach them why our beliefs are true, just as every other American citizen does.
The US Government and Political Elites Are Behaving In A Way That Contradicts the Constitution and our Inalienable Rights
Now, our rights are being infringed upon. A Catholic individual, a Catholic school, a Catholic hospital are no longer protected when it comes to living according to what our conscience demands. Catholic institutions are told that they must take part in things we call evil or cease to function. Moreover, members of the political elites are speaking out against us, claiming our beliefs are harmful and must be opposed.
Governor Andrew Cuomo, when asked about the arguments against homosexual marriage, replied, "There is no answer from the opposition. There really isn’t. Ultimately, it’s, ‘I want to discriminate.’ And that’s anti-New York. It’s anti-American." He has also been on record as saying, "The laws would have to be paramount, and would have to be paramount to your religious beliefs."
That's chilling. Either Cuomo misspoke or he is saying that law trumps religious belief. I have found no evidence of the former (no clarifications or retractions). If it is the latter, then it is Cuomo who is anti-American, because it is he who violates the First Amendment, not us.
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D.-Fla.), chair of the DNC, describes beliefs that the informed Catholic holds protecting the personhood of the unborn as, "an extreme and radical step." She says that it is, "divisive, dangerous, and destructive laws which would cripple a woman’s right to choose, limit access to birth control, and put the lives of women with difficult pregnancies at risk."
There is no respect for our rights here. Instead the motives for our beliefs are characterized as being motivated by hatred and by wanting to deny women their "rights." Essentially the constitutional guarantees of our religious freedoms in America are being undermined, and the political elites are misrepresenting our motives to permit their violations of our freedom.
In the name of "fairness" we are treated unfairly. Apparently all people are free to live out their lives in accord to what they believe to be right – unless those beliefs are religious beliefs which say certain actions are immoral.
Absolutes and Relativism
I've gone over this theme before, but it is important: If there are no absolutes, then there is nothing wrong with Catholics living as we do without interference. However, if there are absolutes, and we Catholics are in the wrong, then we are justified in demanding that proof be shown to us that we are in the wrong and how this truth is known.
But if our accusers want to do this, they must be honest. We are not "homophobes" because we believe homosexual acts to be wrong. We are not "misogynist" or "anti-women" because we oppose abortion and contraception. We believe that both homosexual persons and unborn infants must be treated as human persons with the rights belonging to all persons.
We condemn the view which says a person with homosexual tendencies may be treated as less than a person, but this does not mean we must support and promote homosexual acts as being morally acceptable acts.
Extremism, By Nature, Is Not the Norm
Our accusers must be honest and recognize that the extremist does not represent the Catholic position. The person who assaults persons with homosexual tendencies and the person who shoots abortionists does not act in accord with the Catholic faith, but AGAINST the Catholic faith. So it is either ignorance or dishonesty to label such persons as being inspired by our beliefs – such a person clearly overlooks the prohibition against murder for example.
The extremist, by definition, is: "a person who holds extreme political or religious views" according to the Oxford English Dictionary. To label the Catholic position as extremist, is to declare a knowledge of what the norm is. The norm is the standard and the further one deviates from the norm, the more extreme it is.
So to call us "extremist" means the accuser claims to know the truth (eliminating the claim of relativism) and then is obligated to prove their claim of what is the truth that we deviate from.
Our Guilt is to be Proven, Not Assumed
The fact is the US Constitution lists freedom of religion as part of the Bill of Rights. If one wishes to argue that the Catholic faith is an ideology which is harmful to others, then it falls to that person to prove the charge. Our rights cannot be taken away until we are proven guilty of a crime for we are innocent until proven guilty. Yet people like Cuomo assume our guilt is proven and the state can compel us to act in a way our religion forbids.
We are accused of hatred and bigotry as our motives for opposing homosexual "marriage." However, nobody actually looks to see if these are our motives. In fact we explicitly reject this accusation as slander.
Our detractors dismiss our reasons and our faith, ipse dixit, as being without merit – but they cannot be bothered to learn our reasons. They merely assume that because our views reject theirs we must be motivated by hatred.
Is it reasonable or just to condemn us out of ignorance? Is it just to lump us together with those who commit crimes without investigating whether we share their beliefs and motivations?
Not only is it unjust, it is actually bigotry. The same sort of bigotry which assumes all Hispanics are "Illegals," that assumes all Jews are "misers" and all Blacks are "dishonest." An entire group is accused of possessing a trait on account of a few people who fit that trait.
Conclusion
The Constitution of the United States gives us freedom to live as we feel obligated to live in the Freedom of Religion. Yet today, the government and political elites would deny us our rights and would compel us to do things we have believed to be immoral far longer than the United States was a nation. Not only do they infringe our rights, but they refuse to listen to our defense, insisting we must be motivated by bigotry because we believe their views to be wrong.
Americans will need to ask serious questions about justice and who is really being deprived of it. The charge of being "anti-American" and the charge that we are dangerous because we consider homosexual acts to be immoral and personhood to begin at conception are unjust charges.
However, since the freedom of religion is enshrined in our Constitution, the charge of "anti-American" and "dangerous" does not apply to us, but rather to those who would restrict our rights to practice our faith and operate institutions according to our faith.
Postscript: Can This Apologia Be Applied Against Us as Well?
Some may argue that we do not practice what we preach, that we demand rights for ourselves and deny them to others. We would reject this as a false charge. We do not argue that homosexual persons should be denied the rights due all human persons. We do not demand they be denied the rights they possess in the Constitution. Rather we say certain actions are not rights to be recognized (abortion, homosexual "marriage") but the demand of recognizing a self-gratification now in vogue by misusing titles.
Homosexual persons can of course marry a person of the opposite gender. But if our beliefs (that marriage is between a man and a woman) are true, then the whole concept of Homosexual "Marriage" is an oxymoron.
On the other hand, religious freedom is not a self-gratification in vogue, but a right which the Constitution recognizes that all people are entitled to. Denying us this right is not denying us a privilege but denying us what is our due.
In other words, we deny nobody their rights by saying homosexuality and abortion are wrongs and refusing to accommodate these wrongs by having our religious institutions take part in them. But people who do force us to accommodate what we believe to be wrong or else close up our institutions are denying us our rights.
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