Southern Baptist leader: If Obama mandate isn’t changed, Christians will go to jail
NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE, February 8, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) — One of the most influential evangelical leaders in the United States says Christians should go to jail rather than comply with the Obama administration’s mandate to provide all contraception, including abortion-inducing drugs, in their health care plans.
Dr. Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), told LifeSiteNews.com "we will not comply" with the Dept. of Health and Human Services’ mandate requiring religious institutions to cover abortifacient products such as Plan B, Ella, and the IUD.
Dr. Richard Land
"We want the law changed, or else we’re going to write our letters from the Nashville jail, just like Dr. King wrote his from the Birmingham jail," Dr. Land said.
Dr. Land wrote an op-ed on Tuesday with Barrett Duke, vice president for public policy and research at ERLC, calling his fellow Southern Baptists and evangelical Christians throughout America to oppose any infringement on the First Amendment.
"The Obama administration has declared war on religion and freedom of conscience," they wrote. "We consider this callous requirement by the Obama administration to be a clear violation of our nation's commitment to liberty of conscience and a flagrant violation of our constitutional protection to freedom of religion."
Dr. Land told LifeSiteNews he hopes Baptist ministers will "preach from the pulpit just how serious and dangerous this initiative by the Obama administration is," and "encourage their parishioners to contact their congressmen and their senators and the president and let them know how deeply unhappy they are with this decision, and they want…legislation guaranteeing that it won’t happen again."
"It is now in the providence of God," Dr. Land said. "Our responsibility is to stand and say, ‘We will not comply with this. We want the law changed, or else we’re going to write our letters from the Nashville jail, just like Dr. King wrote his from the Birmingham jail.’ We will not comply."
Dr. Land, who earned a Doctorate of Philosophy from Oxford University, has been named by Time magazine as one of .The Twenty-five Most Influential Evangelicals in America."
President Obama’s recess appointment of Chai Feldblum to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) provided an insight to the president’s views, Dr. Land said. Feldblum has said whenever religious rights come into conflict with sexual rights, that sexual rights must prevail. .That’s exactly what’s happening in the Health and Human Services contraceptive and abortifacient directive,. he said. .They are saying that a woman’s right to have free contraceptive services and free abortifacients trumps the deeply held religious convictions of Catholics and Baptists and others. That’s a war on religion..
Several of the Obama administration’s actions have convinced observers the president harbors an aversion to Christian values. "I do know hostility to religious conviction in the public square when I see it, and I see it in the Hosanna case," in which the Obama administration attempted to narrowly define the ministerial exemption in hiring, Dr. Land told LifeSiteNews.com. He called the Obama administration .radically secularist. on his weekly radio program.
The op-ed he co-aut****d came exactly one week after Dr. Albert Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said evangelical Christians may be required to face imprisonment over the issue. Dr. Mohler said in his daily podcast, "You at least have to admire the courage of the Roman Catholic bishops in saying they are willing to go to jail rather than to comply with this. How many evangelical presidents and pastors and leaders would be willing to do the same?."
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