“Piercing” In the House of the Dead

Depends on what you mean by “obstruction of justice”

Oh, let us count the ways, shall we? The Civil Rights Movement was an exercise of political pressure that used for its philosophical underpinnings certain religious themes and rhetoric. (And "the light of the Gospels"? Well, partly, but, in his strategy of nonviolent resistance, which was the actual work of the movement, King was a student of Gandhi, who liked Christ, but didn't trust Christians.) It was dedicated to gaining for African Americans the rights that they already were promised as American citizens, and guaranteed by the Constitution, rights that had been systematically curtailed and eliminated by the secular law. The movement sought to restore rights that already existed, to give back that which has been stolen. This current exercise is a demand by a certain religious institutions to have its private theological beliefs written into an exemption in the secular law, to grant the Roman Catholic hierarchy special rights under that secular law. (Native tribes tried this with peyote, which has been a sacrament to them for longer than bread and wine has been to Christianity, and they got nowhere.) The Church is seeking the right to deny people certain goods and services, as well as the protection of the secular law, under private theological prohibitions, and to do so whether or not the people in question actually are members of the church at all. The bishops want the freedom of conscience necessary to discriminate against their employees of other faiths. If you are that Presbyterian charwoman, you must abandon what your freely developed conscience tells you about birth control and adhere to the teachings of the Roman Catholicism, or you must pay for the Pill yourself, or find another job. The bishops are not merely claiming their own right to conscience here, but a right to dictate to other people what their consciences should abide. This is the equivalent of, in 1965, a claque of Baptists demanding their right not to serve black people in restaurants because of their beliefs in the Biblical basis for white supremacy. This is a lot of things, most of them bad, but it has absolutely nothing to do with what Dr. King was about.

Charles P. Pierce, A Call to Awaken the Bishops' Conscience