BIG NEWS: Catholic Health Association tells HHS “NG on Accommodation”

◼ Sharpening an election-year confrontation over religious freedom and government health insurance rules, the nation’s Catholic hospitals on Friday rejected President Barack Obama’s compromise for providing birth control coverage to their women employees. - The Anchoress

In a letter to the federal Health and Human Services department, the hospital group said the compromise initially seemed to be “a good first step” but that examination of the details proved disappointing. The plan would be “unduly cumbersome” to carry out and “unlikely to adequately meet the religious liberty concerns” of all its members, the group said.

◼ Obama has managed to unite conservative Catholics and Evangelicals as never before because he has been the most hostile president to religious liberty in American history, according to Focus on the Family Vice President for External Affairs Timothy Goeglein. - Red Alert Politics...

Panelists at the Faith and Freedom Conference in Washington said Friday that people of faith should resist the Obama administration’s HHS mandate and other policies infringing on religious freedom even if it means going to jail.

“What is at stake here is our God-given right of freedom of religion and our right to follow our conscience,” said Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Public Policy Commission. “If we are all willing to stand up and fight then we win.

“If we are all willing to go to jail nobody’s going to have to.”

...Deal Hudson, former director of President George W. Bush’s outreach to Catholics, argued that the Obama administration has defined the definition of a religious institution so narrowly that only a convent of cloistered nuns that only serves Catholics would be exempted from the HHS mandate.