Be afraid... be very afraid

Did you read that a "christian" leader said to disobey the courts?

The latest kerfuffle was Dr. Dobson and the issue was about telling pro life clinics that they were required to refer women for abortion.

of course, his organization already has opposed the abortion mandate of Obamacare, so we know how this issue will be framed.

But now Canada has decided killing oneself (or getting an inconvenient grandmom or handicapped relative killed by saying they want to die) is a civil right, and at least one Catholic hospital there has drawn a line in the sand.

the ultimate result could be that theses hospitals lose all their federal funding there, since Canada has socialized medicine.

And guess what could happen with Obamacare?

The culture wars are in full swing, and it is not just about abortion, nor about letting someone else the freedom to do things that the Imperial court says they have a right to do: It is now morphing into coercion.

Luckily, a few Catholic bishops in Alberta have stood up against Baby Trudeau's brave new world, but alas not all the bishops there, and I suspect the same thing will happen in the US when some court passes these laws and a president promotes them by presidential decree via administrative decrees instead of having Congress decide what is the law.

So what should docs do?

Of course, this is not new: I resisted doing abortions nearly 50 years ago in medical school, and almost got failed out of the school. What saved me in those days was the Civil Rights act of 1964, which forbad discrimination against religion.

However, the way the president is changing executive orders to make these laws mean something that was never in the original law, one worries what kind of loophole could be found by a president Clinton...

And of course, the law does not protect institutions.... for at least 40 years, Catholic hospitals have been sued to insist they do tubal ligations since they were often the only hospitals in remote rural areas. So far, the ACLU types have lost, but it's only a matter of time.

Except the next step will be ordering religiously run hospices and hospitals to kill patients, and one suspects there will be a hidden screening out of medical students and residents who are pro life.

Question: can the government or king demand you do something contrary to the law of God, or obey an unjust law?

Martin Luther King thought differently.

“One may well ask: How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” wrote King. “The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘an unjust law is no law at all.’

Catholics have been through this before.

In a lot of these issues, pious Muslims are on the same side as the Christians.

Alas, the Islamophobia of conservatives is playing into the hand of those trying to remake the US (and use US pressure to change the world).

But that's another story for another time.