The inimitable Mark Coppenger on the HHS mandate: I once heard Frederica Mathewes-Green say that every child born after 1973 was a “survivor.” That was the year that Roe v. Wade declared “open season” on the contents of the womb. But it appears the license to hunt Bambi was not enough. Now the government is making sure you have a rifle. Read the rest here.

How many of you saw the news last week about outraged congresswomen who stormed out of the congressional hearing on the contraceptive mandate? I did. I also saw Nancy Pelosi and a host of others angrily denouncing the fact that there were no women represented on the panel. So they decried the panel as a sham and as a threat to women’s rights. Essentially, they were saying this: This hubbub about the HHR mandate is just a bunch of men trying to deprive women of their contraceptives. Women beware! They’re coming for your contraceptives too! Nevermind that the claim was untrue. These pro-choice politicians found willing partners in the mainstream…

The statement below was put out by the Beckett Fund, and it says that President Obama did not “accommodate” religious liberty concerns in his recent “compromise.” The healthcare law still requires religious groups to pay for chemical abortions and contraception. I want you to notice the names on this list. It is signed by 160 scholars and leaders, and signatories include D. A. Carson, Albert Mohler, Robbie George, Russell Moore, Danny Akin, David Dockery, and many others.

Albert Mohler takes a hard-hitting look at Nicholas Kristof’s cavalier dismissal of religious liberty in the wake of the new healthcare mandate. Mohler’s critique is important because Kristof’s column is emblematic of a sentiment that has become quite common among the American left. For them, religious liberty is no longer an inalienable right, but something that can be abridged when it comes into conflict with the secular state. Neither Kristof nor any other American liberal I know of supports throwing Christians to the lions (yet), but they are laying the intellectual and legal ground for it whether they realize it or not. That is why the President’s healthcare mandate deserves…

Albert Mohler has a must-read article on the unacceptability of President Obama’s so-called “compromise.” He concludes: Only an accounting maneuver hides the fact that we will all be paying for chemical abortions under the President’s prized Affordable Care Act. Added to this is coverage for sterilizations… Anyone who celebrates this “compromise” as a victory is hiding behind an accounting trick. That accounting trick cannot hide the great moral tragedy at the heart of the President’s policy — a policy that leaves religious liberty in peril and Planned Parenthood smiling. This is an important explanation of what happened today, and you need to read the whole thing.

O. S. Hawkins, the President of GuideStone Financial Resources, says that President Obama’s statement on the new healthcare law excludes the Southern Baptist Convention. The Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, and its financial arm provides health insurance to about 60,000 people, including pastors and missionaries (source). Here’s the statement from GuideStone:

Even though the media are trying to sell the new healthcare law as a Catholic issue, it is not. The new law requires all employers to pay for birth control methods that include surgical sterilization and abortion inducing drugs. The only groups who get an exemption are churches. Every other employer must provide this coverage. So this is more than a Catholic issue, it is a Protestant issue, a Jewish issue, an Orthodox issue, and an issue for every other religious group you can think of. But there is one facet of this dispute that has been largely overlooked. This is not just a religious liberty issue for groups, but…