"They oppose the government's attempt to coerce them into facilitating the practices they preach against"

 If you haven't been keeping up with President Obama's efforts to require religious organizations who oppose contraceptives and abortifacients to distribute them, you need to. You don't have to be Catholic--or even religious--to be alarmed by this, as James Taranto explains:

 After President Obama made a symbolic concession to religious liberty last week, the Times once again employed scare quotes to sneer at the entire idea. This time it was in the very first phrase of its Saturday editorial:

In response to a phony crisis over "religious liberty" engendered by the right, President Obama seems to have stood his ground on an essential principle--free access to birth control for any woman. . . .

Nonetheless, it was dismaying to see the president lend any credence to the misbegotten notion that providing access to contraceptives violated the freedom of any religious institution. Churches are given complete freedom by the Constitution to preach that birth control is immoral, but they have not been given the right to laws that would deprive their followers or employees of the right to disagree with that teaching.

In truth, no one denies that individuals have "the right to disagree with that teaching," and the religious institutions that object to the mandate do not claim the authority to police their employees' private lives or opinions. Rather, they oppose the government's attempt to coerce them into facilitating the practices they preach against.

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This columnist likes birth control a lot. To our mind, it is one of the greatest conveniences of modern life. As we are not Catholic, we don't share the church's moral objections to abortifacient drugs or sterilization procedures. But as we are American, we care a lot about religious liberty, and about liberty more generally. Thus we view the birth-control mandate as a particular outrage and ObamaCare more generally as a monstrosity.

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Religious liberty--no scare quotes for us--is one of America's basic principles, the first freedom in the Bill of Rights. The separation of church and state protects religious minorities, and nonreligious ones, from the coercive imposition of religious law. It is also a bulwark against a secular government's impositions on private conscience.

Taranto quotes from Albert Mohler's excellent piece about this issue, then adds:

Albert Mohler is a Baptist. This columnist is an agnostic. But we're with Mike Huckabee, another Baptist, who said last week: "We're all Catholics now."

During Obama's candidacy in 2008, I wrote a post called "Three Things that Prolife Obama Supporters Must Do." Here was the third:

Should Obama become President, monitor his actions on this issue and base your re-election decision on what you see. Certainly, you should keep an eye on his Supreme Court nominations, but he will also have a chance to select federal judges. These positions last long after a President leaves office, and they have a huge impact on what kind of “culture of life” we see in our country. What kind of life-ethic legislation from Congress will he sign or veto? Also, watch for his selection of Attorney General, whose Department of Justice impacts how laws are enforced that advance abortion or limit it. Watch for his choice for Secretary of Health and Human Services, who oversees all kinds of programs that could either encourage or discourage the frequency and availability of abortion. Keep up with his foreign policy. President Reagan established the Mexico City Policy which bans the flow of aid to agencies that provide or promote abortion. President Clinton refused to follow this policy, so watch what President Obama will do with that. In short, a United States President has a major influence on whether our country makes advances or setbacks on creating a culture of life--much more than you may have realized. So, if you help put Obama in the White House and he proceeds to ignore your pro-life convictions until he needs your vote in the next election, refuse to give it to him.

Well?