Ho, ho, ho! Just in time for Christmas, the American Civil Liberties Union has launched a new salvo against people of faith. Even as billions around the world celebrate the birth of Christ, joyless, abortion-obsessed secularists never take a holiday.

On Wednesday, the ACLU sent a letter to federal health officials urging the government to force Catholic hospitals in the U.S. to perform abortions in violation of their core moral commitment to protecting the lives of the unborn. They’re counting on sympathetic Obama rationing czar Donald Berwick – a recess appointee whose radical views on wealth and health redistribution were never vetted by Congress – to dictate which religious principles hospital operators can and cannot follow.

The ACLU reiterated its call for a federal probe – read: fishing expedition – of Catholic hospitals nationwide that refuse to provide “emergency” contraception and abortions to women. In practice, of course, every request for abortion is an “emergency” to the left.

The Catholic Church makes clear that it is morally permissible under certain circumstances to treat directly the cause of the mother’s medical condition, even if those efforts unintentionally and indirectly cost the baby’s life. But Catholic health providers must never directly trade one life for another.

Civil liberties activists have a particular vendetta against devout Phoenix Catholic Bishop Thomas Olmsted, who recently revoked the Catholic status of a rogue hospital that performed several direct abortions, provided birth control pills and presided over sterilizations against the church’s ethical and religious directives for health care. “It would be unfaithful to pretend the institution is still Catholic,” Olmsted concluded.

“The dioceses cannot be permitted to dictate who lives and who dies in Catholic-owned hospitals,” the ACLU’s lawyers fumed in response.

But shall it be left to the ACLU and Obamacare bureaucrats to determine the Catholicity of a Catholic hospital?

And shall it be left to litigious secularists to sabotage the First Amendment rights of religious-based health care entities with impunity?

No.

The ACLU now seeks to unilaterally rewrite a federal emergency medical treatment law passed by Congress in 1986 to mandate that all hospitals provide abortions. But for more than three decades, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, federal law has firmly established strong conscience protections for individual health care providers and hospitals who are reluctant or unwilling to “counsel, suggest, recommend, assist or in any way participate in the performance of abortions or sterilizations contrary to or consistent with” their “religious beliefs or moral convictions.”

As the Washington-based Becket Fund, a public interest law firm that defends the free expression of all religious traditions, pointed out to the feds: “The ACLU has no business radically re-defining the meaning of emergency health care,‘ just as it has no business demanding that religious doctors and nurses violate their faith by performing a procedure they believe is tantamount to murder. Forcing religious hospitals to perform abortions not only undermines this nation’s integral commitment to conscience rights, it violates the numerous federal laws that recognize and protect those rights.”

According to the Catholic Health Association, Catholic health care facilities form the largest not-for-profit health service sector in the United States – serving one out of every six patients in America and providing 15 percent of the hospital bed capacity in the country. Moreover, Catholic health care institutions employ about 540,000 full-time workers and 240,000 part-time workers.

If the abortion lobby gets its way, faithful Catholic hospitals and Catholic medical professionals who follow their consciences and adhere to canon law could see their federal funding yanked. And radical social engineers may well force the shutdown of countless Catholic hospitals at a time when Obamacare costs and consequences are already wreaking havoc on the health industry.

Fewer jobs, less access to health care, less freedom and more lives lost: Merry Christmas from the ACLU.

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