In order to understand Religious Freedom, you have to understand what is actually being talked about. Those who despise specific religions would have you believe that religious freedom is only about being free to walk into a particular church and celebrating a particular rite or ritual there, no matter how absurd. The problem is that this is simply not the case. This is why the Bill of Rights lumped Freedom of Speech, Religion, and Peaceful Assembly into the first amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
This is because all of these are interlinked. If you truly believe in something, be it food for the poor or transubstantiation, you will, if you are a standard human being, direct your life according to that belief.
Let us say I take the instructions of Jesus seriously: “In so far as you did it to these, the least of my bretheren, you did it to me.” This is a reference to the final judgement in which Christ blesses those who tended the sick, fed the hungry, clothed the naked, and such. If I take this seriously, then I will try to actually do something about Christ’s command. That is just simple common sense. Why would I be a Christian if I didn’t think Jesus was God? If I want a collection of wise good feeling platitudes, I can be a Platonist (if I happen to prefer thinking) or a Fabian (if I prefer feeling). I can go around being a do-gooder without half the rude comments.
The difference between religion and political ideology is that a religion claims that there is a god or two out there who has something to say about how this world works since they (or their divine focus group) made it. You can compromise on the implimentation of ideologies or dogmas, but you must either accept or reject them. In short, you don’t join Christianity for it’s social ideology. You join Christianity because of it’s claim that one Jewish Rabbi was actually God who had become a human being in order to get the message out to us as fully and effectively as possible. And the evidence for this claim is, as far as you can tell, sufficient to verify it’s truthfulness.
When this nation was founded, there was a great deal of dispute among the English speaking peoples as to what the actual message of God was. Since no one was entirely sure – especially in Boston – it seemed good policy to grant as broad a range of belief as possible according to the very sensible presumption that God was more than capable of sorting the whole thing out Himself over time. But it was also understood that religion would provoke social behaviors which would likewise have a direct impact upon the political landscape. In short, because we were going to have this religious exercise, there would be religious movements which would require free speech, free press, free assembly, and redress in order to perform what was believed to be God-given mandates.
This is why it wasn’t the Goverment which fought for the end of slavery, but the Abolitionists. It wasn’t the Government which fought for the rights of Amerinds to receive title deeds to the property they and their ancestors had lived upon for the prior thousand years, but the Churches. Finally it is no coincidence that Martin Luther King was also a Reverend. Religious freedom is so woven into the fabric of the first amendment that if you were to remove it, you would lose all the other freedoms as well.
So what has this to do with the current state of affairs? Well, going back to the idea that Jesus was God, and being that the Catholic Church was founded by him, when Jesus said, “Thou shalt not use contraception nor shall thou abort,” the Catholic Church, believing him God, accepted this as the proper guidepost to their medical social work. When the Constitution prohibited alcohol use, the Catholic Church informed the government that Christ had commanded wine for the Eucharist. The Government naturally understood that the Catholic Church was to be exempt since prohibition applied to worship would be a violation of the free exercise of religion. Today’s government appears to have forgotten that in the midst of the Healthcare Mandate debate.
The Catholic Church was very clear back during the great Obamacare debate that it could not support the legislation should the Church be required to apply popular morality to it’s religious social work. This was on the religious grounds that popular morality did not jive with Christ’s morality. When the Obama administration assured the Catholic Church this would not be the case, the Church withdrew all concerns and that squeezed out a few more votes for the bill. So naturally, when the Administration proved to be disengenuous on that issue, the Church returned to it’s full objection.
At this point, the Church has been lied to once. She is naturally going to be skeptical about any proposed compromise. If the Government will not back down, the Church will, true to it’s point of view, pick God over Congress and we will have a real mess on our hands.