Sibelius Doesn't Know or Care About Religious Freedom

Obama and Sibelius

Obama administration Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sibelius testified before the House Education and Workforce Committee April 26, where she was grilled by Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-South Carolina) on the Obamacare mandate which requires religious employers to cover contraceptives, sterilizations, and abortion-inducing drugs.

Sibelius asserted that the HHS mandate was designed to ensure good health care for U.S. women and struck an appropriate balance between religious liberty and the importance of supplying "preventive health services." Gowdy, who has also served as a solicitor for South Carolina’s Seventh Judicial Court, asked Sibelius if she is familiar with the three legal tests used to balance competing issues, the third being “strict scrutiny” in the case of “fundamental rights” like religious liberty.

Thomas Peters of CatholicVote.org wrote on his blog that the exchange made two things “very evident very quickly.”

First, “[how] ignorant Sebelius actually is about the history of religious liberty in this country.” And second, “how uncaring she is about the whole concept of religious liberty to begin with.”

“A third thing becomes very apparent observing this exchange: hubris,” he added. “It’s not just that Sebelius clearly doesn’t know the first thing about religious liberty, and doesn’t care about preserving it — she also comes across as believing it is beneath her to know or care about it.”

Watch the Gowdy-Sibelius exchange here.