Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments as follows:
The Obama administration will not extend a religious exemption to Catholic non-profits who don’t want their insurance carrier to provide for abortion-inducing drugs, but it has decided to grant a religious exemption to an Indian tribe so they can kill bald eagles. The Northern Arapaho Tribe threatened to sue the government for violating its religious liberties when they were denied a permit to kill the eagles; federal law prohibits killing a bald eagle. Now the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has decided to grant the tribe a permit to kill two bald eagles.
We live in strange times. It is legal to kill a human being in utero through term—for any reason. Moreover, the president of the United States thinks it should be legal to allow a baby born alive as a result of a botched abortion to die on the doctor’s table unattended. But we can’t kill eagles that are bald. However, the Northern Arapaho can kill the birds by insisting on their religious rights. Yet when Catholics demand their religious rights, they are punished, largely because they oppose killing unborn babies.
It should be noted that not only is it illegal to kill one of these birds, it is illegal to “disturb” them (see 16 U.S.C. 668-668c). But disturbing babies in the womb—e.g., when an abortionist jams a pair scissors into the kid’s head in a partial-birth abortion—is somehow acceptable. The only time these people object to disturbing babies in utero is when a doctor is required to show a woman contemplating an abortion a picture of her child via sonogram.
What if the Indians kill three of these birds? Can they file suit claiming the quota system is unconstitutional? Lucky for them they don’t have to worry about PETA—they’re too busy killing 95 percent of the cats and dogs in their possession [click here for the latest evidence].
