Many Mainstream Media Outlets Ignore Religious Freedom Rallies on June 8

Life Site News reports that tens of thousands of citizens attended more than 150 rallies for religious freedom across the country on June 8--a second wave of demonstrations that filled courthouse squares, federal buildings, and university centers from New York to Los Angeles with the Founding Fathers’ views of liberty and conscience.

Early reports showed hundreds of people attended each major rally, holding yellow balloons that say “Religious Liberty” and waving signs that read, “Stop the HHS Mandate.” But many of the nation's media outlets chose to ignore this outpouring of public sentiment in favor of First Amendment rights.

Scores of rallies across the nation occurred on this date, because it marked the 223rd anniversary of James Madison’s introduction of the Bill of Rights. Constitutional limits on government power figured heavily in the observance.

In Washington, D.C., Michele Bachmann and Lila Rose expounded upon the Constitutional liberties enshrined in the First Amendment. Jill Stanek spoke in Chicago. The San Francisco rally was emceed by Dana Cody of the Life Legal Defense Foundation. In Montana, a crowd gathered outside the officers of U.S. Senator Max Baucus, a Democrat who supports the mandate.

Attendees in Miami heard Archbishop Thomas Wenski say the HHS accommodation is no compromise, because “compromises are not usually arrived at unilaterally.” He said a fundamental principle of health care is that it “shouldn’t kill anybody.” 

LifeSiteNews.com U.S. Bureau Chief Ben Johnson told a crowd of hundreds he was “astounded” as a journalist when he saw that “the best and brightest minds of Washington” decided “the most important aspect of the health care bill…was that every American, including post-menopausal women and gay men, needed access to birth control.”

Citing the history of Eastern Europe he said “light and transient offenses against our religious liberty never remain light and transient offenses,” but are usually the opening salvos of a greater war “to deny all our religious liberties. “It’s a test of our strength and our resolve, an attempt to set a binding precedent, and it’s an attempt to weaken our resources against the more serious assaults that are to come,” he said.
“We know that nature abhors a vacuum and that every inch that is yielded by the Church will be filled by a rushing, virulent secularism.” Quoting Patrick Henry’s “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” speech, he said, “We must fight, I repeat it sir, we must fight!”

Nick Thomm, the proprietor of StopHHS.com and an organizer of the local rally in Ann Arbor, noted the media blackout. “We cannot rely on the secular media to keep this issue alive before the American people in a way we would recognize as fair and accurate,” he said.