Catholic and Baptist leaders are collaborating to ask national legislators to support a bill that would offer conscience protections to healthcare workers across the country.“While Catholics and Southern Baptists espouse different theological views, we are united by the belief that Congress must act to help preserve our freedom of religion and conscience,” Archbishop William E. Lori of Baltimore and Russell Moore of the Southern Baptist Convention wrote in a June 21 letter to members of Congress.
The letter was released on the first day of the 2013 Fortnight for Freedom, a two-week period of prayer, education and action leading up to the Fourth of July, which encourages greater respect for religious liberty both in America and abroad. The religious leaders explained that the proposed legislation “would address threats to religious freedom and rights of conscience that have become particularly grave in the field of healthcare.”
“As many people are being forced – and many others will soon be forced – to either follow what the government compels or suffer for their faith, now is the time to pass legislation that protects our God-given freedom,” they stressed.
Archbishop Lori and Moore noted that under current law, healthcare professionals “do not even have a right to go to court to defend their God-given rights of conscience,” and they subsequently often face “pressure and threats to take part in the destruction of innocent life.”
“The Health Care Conscience Rights Act would address these serious problems in ways consistent with our federal government’s long history of bipartisan consensus on respect for rights of conscience,” they said. Archbishop Lori further expressed his support of the bill in a statement by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, saying that the “right to live out our faith in the public square – in our churches, our schools, and our places of employment – is too important not to defend.”
