She gave other examples of this intolerance. The American Civil Liberties Union is suing Catholic hospitals, as well as immigration services of the U.S. Bishops Conference, for not providing abortions. The National Abortion Rights Action League has sponsored legislation to force pro-life pregnancy centers in California to tell patients about abortion and contraceptive options.
These groups may just claim that they are "pro-choice" and in favor of women's access to these products and procedures, but "something deeper is afoot," Eberstadt said. These antagonists are "not only despisers," she added, but "they are, and act like, affiliates of a rival faith."
This "faith," is the belief that an autonomous individual should have access to sex, contraception, and abortion and that no entity, including religious charities, should deny them this right.
If these forces win and religious charities must close, the cost would be steep, particularly to the poor people these charities serve, Eberstadt continued. They "cannot be replaced, not overnight, not by government agencies," she insisted, and their particular love of the poor rooted in Christianity cannot be replicated by the state.
"How is disrupting these supply lines even remotely in the interest of public humanity?" she asked.
How can Catholics respond to these attacks? We must go on the offensive, the speaker stressed. "We need to point out that people who attack charities," she said, "are subverting the public good."
"It's wrong to lay siege to pregnancy centers," she said of efforts to make pro-life pregnancy centers tell clients about abortion options. "It is wrong to hold desperate immigrants hostage at the Southern border" to comply with secularist demands of access to abortion contraception, she said of the ACLU lawsuits against the U.S. Bishops Conference.
"The attacks on religious charities prove that they do not stand on the high ground," she said. One faith is "hurting the poor. The other side is doing the opposite," she concluded.