Reblogged from Lefty on the Left:
Whenever somebody is looking to promote an idea that the religious groups in this country at large don't agree with, have you ever noticed a pattern? The pattern that these groups will have their members come out of the woodwork and claim "religious freedom." It is such a clever line, and through it, all kinds of hatred and bigotry are able to be defended.
I’ve looked through the ABC article that the HuffPost article links to and I see no mention of religious freedom. Focus on the Family appears to be objecting on the grounds that the legislation supports anti-bullying programs that also support same-sex marriage. I’m not familiar with the legislation or the anti-bullying programs so I won’t judge the merit (or lack thereof) of Focus on the Family’s argument.
Bullying for any reason is unacceptable. Anti-bullying programs are a matter of debate, though. For one, we should always ask if a particular anti-bullying program is actually effective. Opposing an ineffective program does not imply that one supports bullying.
The blog post you linked to has several blatant falsehoods. One is that the health care mandate has no conflict with religious freedom; I’ve covered that (as well as the economic argument against the mandate’s insanity) in my blog post “On Health Care Mandates” so I won’t go over it again here. The most egregious one is that Hitler was guided by his “Roman Catholic beliefs” to kill Jews. While it is true that Hitler and Reichsfuhrer-SS Himmler (whose SS ran the concentration camps) were both raised as Catholics, both drifted away from the Catholic faith (Himmler especially). Reinhard Heydrich was also a notorious figure of the Holocaust and he too left Catholicism. In all three cases Wikipedia specifically mentions that these men opposed Catholicism by the time they committed their crimes.
The entire argument that the Nazis were somehow motivated by “Roman Catholic beliefs” is also directly contradicted by the fact that Catholic priests and friars like St. Maximilian Kolbe were also persecuted. In Kolbe’s case, he was taken to Auschwitz for providing shelter for Jews against the Nazis. At Auschwitz he willingly gave up his life by volunteering to die in place of a fellow prisoner who had a wife and children. You can read more about this on Kolbe’s Wikipedia article or elsewhere.
The Roman Catholic Church is opposed to capital punishment so yet again it makes no sense to say that any “Roman Catholic belief” could have possibly guided Hitler and the Nazis to kill Jews.
Frankly, such libel by the linked author against the Roman Catholic Church is itself bigoted (or at least ignorant) and no different than blaming “the Jews” for economic woes and for losing World War I (as Hitler and the Nazis did).