Geoge Weigel on defending religious freedom

Via the excellent CERC (Catholic Education Resources Centre):

Religious freedom in full also means that communities of religious conviction and conscience must be free to conduct the works of charity in ways that are commensurate with their conscientious convictions. This is neither the time nor the place to discuss the problems that have been posed by tying so much of Catholic social-service work and Catholic health care to government funding – save, perhaps, to note that these problems did not exist before the Supreme Court erected a spurious "right to abortion" as the right that trumps all other rights, and before courts and legislatures decided that it was within the state's competence to redefine marriage and to compel others to accept that redefinition through the use of coercive state power. What can be said in this context, and what must be said, is that the conscience rights of Catholic physicians, nurses, and other health-care professionals are not second-class rights that can be trumped by other rights claims; and any state that fails to acknowledge those rights of conscience has done grave damage to religious freedom rightly understood. The same can and must be said about any state that drives the Catholic Church out of certain forms of social service because the Church refuses to concede that the state has the competence to declare as "marriage" relationships that are manifestly not marriages.

The defense of religious freedom by the younger generation will be the work of a lifetime. But it must begin sooner rather than later, for the threats to religious freedom in our country are great, and are likely to get greater before they abate. At stake is nothing less than the long-term integrity of the American experiment in ordered freedom.