Speak out on attacks on religious freedom

President Barack Obama's health care provision compels religious related organizations to offer insurance plans that facilitate contraception, sterilizations and abortion inducements. It has led to Catholic bashing and to suggest everyone must incorporate majority opinion into their lives regardless of religious convictions. This rings of a dictatorship of the proletariat as enunciated by Marx and Engels in their manifesto, which teaches that majority rule “abolishes all eternal truths, abolishes all religion and all morality.” If majority opinion or the Supreme Court or the president should legalize slavery, must I support the cost and keep of slaves? Enough!

The tenets of Catholic Christianity derive from the eyewitness testimony and teachings of the apostles with guidance from their successors, the bishops. Catholic Christianity is not a democratic invention nor is it a whimsy to be diluted or compromised by majority opinion.

This attack on individuals and their religious convictions is nothing new. Martin Niemöller, a German Lutheran minister, frequently made the following remark after his release from Dachau prison in 1945.

First, they came for the Communists,

and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews,

and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for the trade unionists,

and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Catholics,

and I didn't speak out because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me,

and by that time no one was left to speak out.

Lyle Strathman

Mount Vernon