Goddy godbotherers lying for god again. Nicholas Senz at the Federalist kvetching about “religious liberty” again. Today the grievance is a report from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights which includes the accurate observation that

“The phrases ‘religious liberty’ and ‘religious freedom’ will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia or any form of intolerance,” said Chairman Julian Castro. He added, “today, as in past, religion is being used as both a weapon and a shield by those seeking to deny others equality. In our nation’s past religion has been used to justify slavery and later, Jim Crow laws.”

Yes, and?

And it’s time to obfuscate, deny and lie, that’s what.

Archbishop William Lori, archbishop of Baltimore and chair of the U.S. bishops’ Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty, responded with no minced words, “shocked” at the claims being made.

Oh look what Senz did there, the sneak – he concealed the fact that he meant chair of the US Catholic bishops’ committee. He concealed that he meant Catholic archbishop of Baltimore. It’s as if Catholicism were the state religion here, but it isn’t. Lori isn’t some universal archbishop or some American archbishop – he’s a specifically Catholic one. He’s not a bishop of all of us, he’s just a bishop in his particular sect. Catholic bishops don’t have any jurisdiction over us. They’d like to, but they don’t.

The thought that religious institutions are inherently bigoted is absurd, he said. “Can we imagine the civil rights movement without Rev. Martin Luther King, Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel?” he asked.

That too is dishonest. It’s misleading. It implies that Juan Castro said religious institutions are inherently bigoted, but that’s not what he said at all.

And then we get to the real whopper.

“We do not seek to impose our morality on anyone, but neither can we sacrifice it in our own lives and work,” he said.

Isn’t lying a sin? I know cruelty isn’t, but isn’t lying? It’s certainly one of the Ten Don’ts.

Like hell they don’t seek to impose their morality on anyone. They do seek to impose it on everyone, via buying up all the hospitals and hospital networks, and ordering them to obey the bishops’ terrible Ethical and Religious Directives. It’s on that basis that they order Catholic hospitals not to perform abortions even when the woman will die without one.

I stopped reading at that sentence, because I can only take so many goddy lies at one time.