The "War on Religion" and the Contraception Debate | Sojourners

The "War on Religion" and the Contraception Debate

There likely was little Sabbath-ing for politicians and journalists this weekend, as the debate over health policy raged across the campaign trail and in the television studios.

In a fiery comment piece in The Los Angeles Times, David Horsey reported that at CPAC, Mitt Romney pledged that he would “reverse every single Obama regulation that attacks our religious liberty and threatens innocent human life in this country.”

Speaking on Face The Nation, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell stated that the contraception controversy is an issue of religious freedom.

Republican Presidential Candidate Rick Santorum laid out his position on the situation very clearly on Meet The Press.

Former Senator Santorum argued that the contraception mandate “trumped…deeply held convictions” of Catholics and that the mandated provision of birth control was “morally wrong” in the opinion of many Catholics. His remarks come a few days after he suggested that the United States was heading down a worrying path:

“They [progressives] are taking faith and crushing it.,” he said. “Why? Why? When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights, then what’s left is the French Revolution. What’s left is the government that gives you rights, what’s left are no unalienable rights, what’s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you’ll do and when you’ll do it. What’s left in France became the guillotine. Ladies and gentlemen, we’re a long way from that, but if we follow the path of President Obama and his overt hostility to faith in America, then we are headed down that road.”

White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew spent much of his Sunday talking on news programs about the mandate, setting out the Obama Administration’s position.

Earlier last week, former Presidential candidate Rick Perry said that the contraception debate proved that he was right to accuse Obama of a ‘war on religion’, although others have argued against the use of such language.

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