“We all need to be courageous for, and to stand up for, what’s right and true,” he told the approximately 500 people who gathered in front of the city hall steps.
“We have a right to our consciences, and to live our lives in accordance with our religious beliefs,” the archbishop said as he joined other speakers opposing what has come to be known in Catholic circles as the HHS mandate.
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At issue is the controversial U.S. Health and Human Services mandate requiring coverage for contraception, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs in employee health insurance policies.
The mandate has been decried as an assault on religious liberty because many, if not most, religious institutions would be required to cover procedures the Church believes to be immoral, and also because individual business owners would be required to provide the coverage in violation of their beliefs.
“Faithful Catholics in business and health care will find their rights trampled upon” if the mandate is allowed to stand,” Archbishop Vigneron said.
The Dearborn rally was the third major local rally against the HHS mandate this year, following earlier ones in March and June in downtown Detroit. Similar rallies were held on the same dates in some other Michigan cities and in many cities around the nation.
While there is a religious “accommodation” in the HHS mandate, it is drawn so narrowly that it would probably only apply to parishes, but not to many of the active outreach ministries addressing people in need.
Based on the Obama administration’s prior comments, the exemption does not consider “religious” such Catholic institutions as schools, hospitals and charitable agencies.
“Government has no right to declare that the good works we have undertaken are no longer religious,” the archbishop said, adding that neither does it have the right to re-define religious liberty as just the freedom to worship — which many critics have said is the effect of the narrow religious accommodation.
“Most importantly, I don’t need an ‘accommodation’ — what we need is recognition of the right to religious liberty,” he declared.
The archbishop was referring to a proposed — but not codified — “compromise” from the Obama administration that would force insurance companies to provide the objectionable services instead. But many Catholic leaders have called that approach a shell game, saying it wouldn’t address the problem because insurance companies would in turn recoup the costs through higher premiums, which religious employers would then have to pay. In addition, the compromise does nothing to address the conscience concerns of private employers.
Archbishop Vigneron told the gathering the struggle for religious liberty must be pursued through every branch of the government — judicial, legislative and the executive: “This rally is a public call for our readers to recognize religious liberty,” he said.
Other speakers at the rally included a Lutheran minister, an Anglican priest and the host of a popular Evangelical Protestant radio program. A political science professor from the University of Michigan-Dearborn and the director of a Detroit crisis pregnancy center also addressed the gathering.
Robert Muise, a Catholic who is co-founder and senior counsel of the American Freedom Law Center, spoke of the need to defend the First Amendment.
“We know through salvation history what happens to a nation, what happens to a people, that turns its back on God. Today we have many domestic enemies to our Constitution, no doubt many enemies to our Judeo-Christian values. But the bottom line is, we must be more committed to protecting our freedoms than our enemies are committed to destroying them,” he said.
Muise, whose center filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the mandate last February on behalf of Priests for Life, said the mandate “plainly violates the free exercise clause of the First Amendment, but it also violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a federal law that was passed in 1993 that prohibits the federal government from passing any law that substantially burdens the right to free exercise of religion.”
He echoed the remarks of other speakers about the broad impact of the struggle. “This is not just a Catholic issue, it is not even just a religious issue — it’s an American issue, because when any American loses his fundamental rights under our Constitution, all Americans lose,” Muise said.
