Bishop Lori said that his brother bishops are greatly concerned by recent attacks on religious freedom. In his testimony, he outlined several recent “threats to religious liberty” in the United States.
Bishop Lori criticized regulations issued in August by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to require coverage of sterilization and contraception, including abortifacients, in nearly all private health insurance plans. He explained that the religious exemption included in the regulations is too narrow to apply to most Catholic organizations.
The bishop also called attention to new requirements for contractors who work with human trafficking victims. Due to these regulations, he said, the bishops’ Migration and Refugee Services, which previously worked with the government to aid victims of trafficking “will be barred from participation in the program because they cannot in conscience provide the ‘full range’ of reproductive services – namely, abortion and contraception.”
Likewise, Bishop Lori noted, the State Department’s U.S. Agency for International Development is increasingly requiring contractors to provide contraception in relief and development programs across the world. Doing so, he explained, will exclude organizations such as Catholic Relief Services from “helping to prevent and treat AIDS in Africa and other developing nations.”
The bishop also criticized the federal Department of Justice for not only failing to defend the Defense of Marriage Act but also “filing briefs actively attacking DOMA’s constitutionality, claiming that supporters of the law could only have been motivated by bias and prejudice.”
He said the Department of Justice has further undermined religious liberty in the “ministerial exception” case, Hosanna Tabor v. EEOC, which is currently before the Supreme Court. He said that the department “needlessly attacked the very existence of the exception, in opposition to a vast coalition of religious groups urging its preservation through their amicus curiae briefs.”