Chuck Colson and Timothy George have this open letter in the current issue of Christianity Today:

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ:

As you probably know by now, Obama Administration has refused to grant religious organizations an exemption from purchasing health insurance that covers abortion-inducing drugs, surgical sterilization, and contraception.

The Catholic bishops in America have responded quickly, decrying the Administration’s decision for what it is—an egregious, dangerous violation of religious liberty—and mobilizing a vast grassroots movement to persuade the Administration to reverse its decision.

We evangelicals must stand unequivocally with our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters. Because when the government violates the religious liberty of one group, it threatens the religious liberty of all.

Many bishops have already declared that they will not obey this unjust law. The penalty for such a move would be severe. Catholic hospitals, universities, and other organizations would be forced to pay punitive fines ($2,000 per employee) for refusing to purchase insurance that violates the teaching of their church.

For some institutions, it would spell the end of their existence—and their far-reaching service to the public and the needy.

But Catholic institutions aren’t the only ones affected by this mandate. Prison Fellowship, for example, which employs 180 people, could not purchase insurance for its employees that covers abortifacients. Nor could the world’s largest Christian outreach to prisoners and their families afford the fines we would incur.

Three years ago, when we co-authored the Manhattan Declaration, we predicted that the time would come when Christians would have to face the very real prospect of civil disobedience—that we would have to choose sides: God or Caesar.

Certainly for the Catholics and for many of us evangelicals, that time is already upon us.

We do not exaggerate when we say that this is the greatest threat to religious freedom in our lifetime.

Read the rest.

One of my friends (who falls left of center, politically) sent this along to me.  It’s a witty ditty, but I can’t quite tell which side Phil Ochs is singing for:

A Danish TV crew was at SAMP this morning, both the 9 & 10.45 am services. They did a profile story one of our members.  The story is to about integrating faith and life and how faith can influence a voting decision.

The station is a European CNN and CBS affiliate.  The story will be a part of their prime-time newscast and will be seen across Northern Europe.

They were interesting folks.  And, they were fascinated about the general faithfulness of Americans and as noted above, the significant role faith plays in the American electorate.

Video from MSNBC via Real Clear Politics

Ineptocracy (in-ep-toc’-ra-cy) – a system of government where the least capable to lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers.

Seriously.

Recognizing the serious threat turkey fryers pose to the national security of the United States the Department of HOMELAND SECURITY has issued a warning via Twitter to all Americans.

Linked to the tweet was this ominous video:

Gotta love living in a nanny state.

An upcoming Supreme Court decision might give government, rather than religious organizations, the final say on who counts as a religious minister.  Here’s an interesting article from the Witherspoon Institute:

Civil authorities, James Madison noted, are particularly incompetent judges of religious truth. The First Amendment Madison helped shepherd through the First Congress thus explicitly protected establishments of religion from governmental meddling. History, however, has repeatedly shown the difficulty of drawing bright lines between the sacred and the secular, and the Supreme Court has long faced the delicate task of adjudicating disputes between the two. One such dispute currently pending before the High Court will decide the degree to which the religion clauses of the First Amendment insulate the employment decisions of religious organizations from federal anti-discrimination statutes . . . .

One of those voices is that of the Obama Administration, whose Department of Justice filed an opposition brief encouraging the Court to reject the ministerial exception outright. During oral arguments, Acting Deputy Solicitor General Leondra Kruger insisted that the “insight of the ministerial exception” is merely that it will sometimes take an “extraordinarily compelling governmental interest” to justify interference with a religious organization. Churches and other religious groups, Kruger conceded, have certain associational rights under the First Amendment, but she provocatively claimed that the “basic contours of the inquiry” in religion cases were no different than in any other case involving associational rights. Kruger’s argument thus minimized the importance of the religion clauses of the First Amendment to the rights of religious organizations, and, as Justice Antonin Scalia maintained, the government’s contention here was “extraordinary.” Right “there, black on white in the text of the Constitution are special protections for religion,” Scalia noted. “And you say it makes no difference?”

Read it all - and keep an eye on this case.

China’s one-child policy is an epic disaster. Why, then, does it have so many cheerleaders?  An interesting article from The Weekly Standard:

A few weeks ago Vice President Joe Biden made, by his standards, a minor squall when he visited China and held forth on the country’s One-Child policy. Biden didn’t endorse One-Child, exactly, but said that he would not “second guess” it. He wasn’t the first Westerner to look favorably upon the regime. Tom Friedman once mused that One-Child “probably saved China from a population calamity.” The Associated Press lauded it recently as a “boon” to Chinese girls. Others believe One-Child to be so admirable that it ought to be replicated on a global scale. Financial Post columnist Diane Francis, former Planned Parenthood director Norman Fleishman, and Ted Turner—among others—have all said that the entire world ought to adopt China’s One-Child policy.

Read it all.