By DEXTER DUGGAN
Like the legislative process in the nation’s capital, navigating Washington, D.C.’s, complex street system can be confusing to newcomers. It helps to have a traffic cop to show the way.
However, there’s a problem when Officer Barack Obama at his whim declares streets to be one-way, closed down, or full-throttle through a school zone, and national lawmakers are perfectly willing to help him flout the rules.
The least the lawmakers could do is demand that lawless Obama stay within the marked lanes sometimes. But why bother when the White House and the Republicans’ congressional majority appear to share the same big-items agenda?
In mid-May, Republicans on Capitol Hill were fighting to help untrustworthy Obama pass his controversial Asia-Pacific “free trade” program contrived in utter secrecy.
Earlier in the year, the GOP handed him key victories in funding his illegal “executive amnesty” and confirming to office his new attorney general, Loretta Lynch, after she openly vowed to support Obama’s lawless actions.
As for the Republicans in charge at the Capitol daring to stand up against Obama and for their proclaimed support of innocent life and conscience, well, good luck now and then.
While ecumenical cooperation in the pro-life cause continues to be strengthened as the Culture of Death grows more extreme, the GOP failed to get itself together even when the provocations by the other side were breathtaking.
After the District of Columbia’s liberal City Council approved the tortuously named Reproductive Health Non-Discrimination Act (RHNDA), the issue went before Congress, which has oversight responsibility for D.C.
The proposed law was to require D.C. employers without exception to provide coverage for the Culture of Death’s familiar menu including contraception, sterilization, and abortion, as well as saying employers couldn’t discriminate about whom they hired, even if the new employee was opposed to the core beliefs of the hiring organization.
Thus, a group like Americans United for Life or the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission could be told to hire an energetic spokesman for Planned Parenthood or NARAL Pro-Choice America.
In a story posted May 6, the Baptist Press news service reported: “The House of Representatives acted to overturn the D.C. law, but the Senate failed to do so. On April 30, the House approved in a 228-192 roll call a resolution that disapproved of the D.C. law. The Senate, however, failed to vote on a similar resolution before time for such action expired. . . .
“Congress, which has oversight over D.C. laws, had 30 legislative days to disapprove the measure after the D.C. Council forwarded it to the Senate and House March 6,” the Baptist Press report said. “Had both houses passed a resolution of disapproval, it would have gone to President Obama for his signature. His administration issued a policy statement April 30 that threatened a veto.”
In a May 11 telephone interview, Casey Mattox, senior counsel in the Washington office of the pro-life Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), told The Wanderer that a couple of factors stopped the momentum in Congress.
One was Obama’s veto threat, he said, after which the resolution of disapproval “didn’t go anywhere in the Senate.”
Asked what Obama based his veto threat on, Mattox replied, “He didn’t say very much . . . except to raise the arguments you would expect” about protecting “reproductive health.”
Also, Mattox said, the Council “started making promises” to drop the coverage requirement for anti-life “health care.” The promises “sort of caused Congress to step back.”
A May 4 statement signed by eight representatives of major pro-life organizations with D.C. offices said, “The District now claims to have abandoned this purpose. But despite its promises, the District has only temporarily abandoned its pursuit of this objective through RHNDA. We will hold the District to its promise to permanently abandon this goal through further legislation.”
In a separate fact sheet, the conservative, Washington-based Heritage Foundation said, “On March 3, the D.C. Council passed a supposed ‘fix’ to RHNDA that would prevent the law from being used to mandate coverage of elective abortions — tacitly admitting the legislation contains serious legal flaws, but that temporary legislation only lasts 225 days.
“Six months after enactment, that ‘solution’ will expire and pro-life organizations in the District could, once again, be forced to pay for life-ending procedures in their health plans,” Heritage said.
Attorney Mattox told The Wanderer, “We’ll monitor that,” to make sure the Council follows through on its promise. He added, “We had been raising that concern with them since June,” that the Council could be “facing real legal liability” if they put through an illegal requirement.
ADF stands ready to represent any organization that feels itself acted against illegally, he said.
“I think what’s clear in society these days,” Mattox said, is that proponents of morally permissive practices “are increasingly not just advocating for those . . . but to force people to agree. That’s not the American way.”
The D.C. Council would like to see its anti-conscience law used as an example elsewhere, Mattox said, calling it “a testing point. If they can establish it here, then we’ll see it in other places.”
In a statement emailed to The Wanderer, Penny Nance, president and CEO of Concerned Women for America, said: “RHNDA is an assault on our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of religion, speech, and association, as well as a violation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and other federal laws. Furthermore, RHNDA seems to stand in conflict with Supreme Court precedent established in Hosanna-Tabor vs. EEOC.”
In 2012 the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled against the Obama administration in Hosanna-Tabor, holding “that religious groups should be free from government interference when they choose their leaders,” according to a summary of the ruling by the Becket Fund, which defends religious liberty.
Nance also said in her statement against RHNDA, “The bill’s proponents never identified a single actual local example of the hypotheticals they used to justify this law to the public. RHNDA’s true purpose is not to solve any real problem but to attack the many pro-life and religious organizations that make D.C. their home.
“RHNDA is aimed squarely at the freedom of our organizations to draw our work forces from among those who share our foundational commitment to the sanctity of human life. The District Council has utterly failed to demonstrate why our organizations must be punished for hiring employees who can effectively advance our organizational missions through both their words and deed,” Nance said.
Baptist Press reported that the Southern Baptist Convention’s lead ethicist, Russell Moore, said in a statement that the law “is not about reproductive health or protecting people against discrimination — it is an unjust targeting law designed to steamroll the consciences of pro-life citizens and organizations operating in the District of Columbia.”
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