I am angry. Very angry.

My government has demanded (not “requested”) that I violate my conscience. On Jan. 20, Kathleen Sebelius, head of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), announced that all institutions — schools, hospitals, clinics, etc., (even those conducted by religious groups opposed to the measures) — must cover in their insurance plans contraceptives, sterilizations and abortifacients.

This policy was endorsed and approved by the president.

The policy allows a “religious exemption,” but one which is so narrow that it would cover very few people — only those whose administrators and beneficiaries were all of the same religion.

The exemption would cover convents and monasteries, but not Catholic grade schools, high schools, colleges, universities, hospitals, clinics, orphanages, food kitchens or even businesses run by faithful Catholics.

These institutions hire people of other faiths to help them in their mission and they serve people of other faiths as well as Catholics.

So the institution must offer insurance plans that provide medical procedures that are immoral.

The Catholic Church teaches that abortions and the use of artificial means to avoid conception are always wrong.

I, as a Catholic, may not engage in wrong actions — nor cooperate in encouraging others to do so. “Forcing persons to cooperate in actions they judge to be evil is evil.” (E. Christian Brugger)

Following a great uproar that included even liberal Catholics and non-Catholics, the president announced an “accommodation” for Catholics that would, he said, put the onus for providing free contraception, sterilizations and abortion-inducing drugs on the insurance companies themselves, rather than the institutions.

Of course, since no company would ever really provide these for “free,” this amounts to a shell game, and the uproar has not abated from faithful Catholics and those of other faiths who recognize this for the assault on religious freedom that it is.

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