At the end of this month, members of Congress will face a binary choice. The House and Senate will pass a bill to fund the government past Sept. 30, the last day of the fiscal year. That bill will either permit or prohibit funding for implementation of Obamacare. Members will need to vote for it or against it.

There will be no middle ground.

If the bill permits funding for implementation of Obamacare and a member votes for it, that member will be voting to allow the administration to send tax dollars to health care providers who perform abortions.

That member will also be voting to allow the administration to use tax dollars to force Catholics and others who share the view that abortion is murder – or that artificial contraception and sterilization are intrinsically immoral – to act against their consciences.

Members who knowingly vote for legislation that provides the administration with the money to carry out these attacks on the right to life, the freedom of conscience and the free exercise of religion will be complicit in those attacks.

It will not be as if these members just turned the other way and did not look as the Obama administration facilitated the destruction of innocent life and crushed the freedom of conscience; these members will have knowingly handed the administration the tools it needed to do these evil things.

How do we know that?

The government-run health care exchanges that will sell government-approved health insurance plans will be allowed to sell plans that cover abortion. All health plans sold through these exchanges – and, eventually, almost all health plans in the United States – will be required to cover artificial contraceptives, sterilizations and abortion-inducing drugs.

The federal government will give households earning less than 400 percent of the federal poverty level – currently $94,200 for a family of four – a subsidy to buy health insurance, but only if they buy their policy on the government-run exchange. The Treasury will pay these subsidies directly to the insurance providers.

In all cases – because of the so-called “preventive services” regulation that requires health care plans to cover abortion-inducing drugs – these subsidies paid by the Treasury will go to health insurers who pay for abortifacients that terminate human life in the earliest stages of development.

When Americans receiving the federal subsidy for their health insurance premiums buy a health insurance plan that covers doctor-performed abortions, the Treasury will pay tax dollars directly to a health insurance company that pays abortionists to kill unborn babies.

The administration will point to accounting gimmicks to claim that paying an insurance company tax dollars specifically to fund a health insurance plan that expressly includes coverage of abortion is not a federal subsidy for abortion. But the administration’s arguments will be logically and morally indefensible. The fact will remain: The administration will take dollar A out of the Treasury and give it to insurance company B to pay for a plan in which the insurance company promises to pay doctors to abort babies.

A congressman who votes for a federal funding bill that permits funding of Obamacare will be voting to give the administration the authority to take that dollar out of the Treasury and give it to insurance companies specifically to pay for plans that promise to pay people to abort babies.

Then there is the attack on religious liberty and freedom of conscience.

The Department of Health and Human Services has issued an Obamacare “preventive services” regulation that requires virtually all health care plans in the United States to cover, without any fees or co-pay, sterilizations, artificial contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs. Many Americans conscientiously object to subsidizing some or all of these things. The Catholic Church teaches that all three are intrinsically immoral.

More than a year ago, the U.S. Catholic bishops unanimously approved a statement declaring this regulation an “unjust and illegal mandate” and “violation of personal civil rights.”

“The HHS mandate creates still a third class, those with no conscience protection at all: individuals who, in their daily lives, strive constantly to act in accordance with their faith and moral values,” said the bishops. “They, too, face a government mandate to aid in providing ‘services’ contrary to those values – whether in their sponsoring of, and payment for, insurance as employers; their payment of insurance premiums as employees; or as insurers themselves – without even the semblance of an exemption.”

Congressmen who vote to fund implementation of Obamacare will be declaring to the world that they think they are going to gain something from that vote that is more valuable to them then preserving the freedom of conscience and the right to life.

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