The personal and political harms of capitulating to the HHS mandate

From the Homiletic & Pastoral Review essay, "Conscience Matters", by Sister Renée Mirkes, OSF, PhD:

What harms will follow if employers act against their conscience by capitulating to the HHS regulation?

Personal harms:
To require an individual, or institutional employer, to act contrary to their conscience is to strike at the heart of whom they are by:

Violating their personhood which, by nature, tends to the true and the good, being only fulfilled by doing good, and avoiding evil;
Deforming their inner moral self (character) with the vicious effects of bad choices;
 Interrupting all the stages of their ability to act humanly, including the capacity to understand the moral principles of human nature, to reason from these principles, to judge according to them, and, to choose and carry out these conscientious judgments in concrete acts;
Compromising their freedom for excellence and its dynamic quality of virtue that follows from their natural openness to truth, goodness, and happiness;
Denying them the right to freely exercise their prudent conscience, an inalienable requirement of human dignity.

In sum, to coerce employers to provide immoral health services to their employees, or to prevent them from following their religious convictions in the workplace, so radically defaces their dignity, freedom, and moral integrity as to imperil their quest for integral human happiness and a life of grace.

Political harms:
To deny employers' liberty of conscience:

Violates what national, and international, human rights proclamations recognize as the basic civil right of every human being: "the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion," including the freedom to "manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance;" 2
To the extent that laws of the state fail to give a primacy of place to the free exercise of the conscientious judgments of its citizens, the state has overreached its authority, arrogating to itself the right to decide what is good and evil and, failing in the process, to secure the fundamental rights of individuals against unjust encroachment by government and the majority view.

As a prophylaxis against these personal and political injuries, the U.S. bishops will not rest until HHS exempts the religious/moral objection of any self-insured religious employer, religious and secular for-profit employer, secular non-profit employer, and religious insurer.

Read the entire essay at www.HPRweb.com.