Given the choice between religious freedom and sexual expression, President Obama picked sexual expression. The Executive Order announced Friday and signed Monday contains no exceptions for faith-based contractors. It makes you wonder how long we can try to dodge bullets before our religious freedom is little more than a faint memory.

We dodged a bullet (for now at least) when the Senate voted on Wednesday [July 23. 2014] not to consider S. 2578. The bill, entitled “Protect Women’s Health From Corporate Interference Act of 2014,” is, as Ed Whelan of the Ethics & Public Policy Center noted, more appropriate named “The Religious Freedom Deprivation Bill.”

The bill is designed to overturn the affirmation of religious freedom in the U. S. Supreme Court’s Burwell v. Hobby Lobby decision. The Court told the government that it cannot force closely held corporations to pay for abortion causing “contraceptives” in their employee health insurance plans when the corporations’ owners have religious objections. This bill would undo that decision.

Then it gets worse. Beyond contraceptives, abortifacients, and sterilization, the bill specifies that there will be no religious exemptions from providing any “item or service” mandated “under any provision of Federal law or the regulations promulgated thereunder.”

As William Saunders and Mary Drury write at lifenews.com, “Effectively, this writes a blank check to the Obama Administration (or future administrations) to force employers to pay for insurance coverage of any drugs, devices, and services—even if that employer has a religious or consciences objection.” “Any” could include abortions including late-term abortions and physician-assisted suicide.

The bill overturns Hobby Lobby, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA), and the First Amendment. As Bishop William Lori and Sean Cardinal O’Malley of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote to the Senate before the vote, “In short, the bill does not befit a nation committed to religious liberty. Indeed, if it were to pass, it would call that commitment into question.” Let me suggest that the fact that the bill was proposed calls the commitment to religious liberty of a majority of our senators into question.

It was close: 56 to 43 with 60 needed to take up the bill. Find your senators here.

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