This is how protected beliefs become prosecuted "bigotry"

Sister Mary Ann Walsh, director of media relations for the USCCB, wonders if "late night comics who mock the church ... have set the tone of the government's current salvos against religious freedom", and then warns:

In the effort to redefine marriage, we see the government threatening religious discrimination in the name of--you guessed it--preventing discrimination. The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), passed by Congress and signed by President Clinton, declares that marriage is between one man and one woman. But the Department of Justice, which is charged with defending Acts of Congress like DOMA against constitutional challenge, declared in March that it would stop doing so. In July, Justice went further and started filing briefs that attack DOMA's constitutionality. Most disturbing in this flip-flop is its rationale: DOMA's definition of marriage must be abandoned and then attacked because it is motivated by bias and prejudice, comparable to racism. That is, the Justice Department simply writes off as bigots those with longstanding support for traditional marriage. And if the Justice Department gets its way in court, those considered bigots by the federal government will be marginalized with the full moral, economic and coercive power of the state.

For example, an employer who provides unique employment benefits to the actually married risks being disqualified from government funding - and most other government cooperation - and likely being sued for "discrimination." A government clerk who expresses a conscientious objection to cooperating with same-sex civil union ceremonies risks a pink slip.

In short, this is what happens when the view that marriage is between a man and a woman becomes a violation of the U.S. Constitution. And this is what the Justice Department urges--apparently forgetting that imposing special disabilities on people and groups because of their religious beliefs offends the First Amendment at its core.

Read her entire post, "Looks Like Leno, Letterman Setting Tone at HHS, Justice Department" (Sept. 22, 2011). What was it that Benedict XVI said, quoting St. Augustine, in his first address on his visit to Germany?

"Without justice – what else is the State but a great band of robbers?", as Saint Augustine once said (1). We Germans know from our own experience that these words are no empty spectre. We have seen how power became divorced from right, how power opposed right and crushed it, so that the State became an instrument for destroying right – a highly organized band of robbers, capable of threatening the whole world and driving it to the edge of the abyss.

It's an very bad thing to have your money and property stolen. It's even worse to have your rights stripped away in the name of "tolerance" and under the false pretense of "discrimination". Alas, it seems that the cynical promises of hope and change are proving to be half right and completely wrong.