How Does It Serve the Community?

I assume that pretty much everybody knows that portions of Obamacare are looked on by many people as a serious infringement of their religious rights.  This delights many, I am sure, who take pleasure when people of faith are poked in the eye, particularly when it's Catholics whose eyes are being poked.  Some of that is simply because many people in our secular society do not understand what the concept of moral or immoral acts means to us.  In the Secular Church and the Church of What's Happnin Now there's not much room for the idea that to us an immoral act is one that separates us from God, possibly forever.  For all the different pictures of hell that exist, at its core is the absence of God.  And with the absence of God, there is the absence of all that we humans know as good:  friendship, love, affection, beauty.  All that's left is a howling, bleak emptiness that is eternal, and the full knowledge that we could have chosen not to be there.

Even if one doesn't care about another faith's views of the spiritual ramifications, I'm not clear on why people don't care about the societal ramifications - the impact on our communities. 

The news (at least the conservative news) recently pointed out that The Little Sisters of the Poor have concerns about being able to remain in the U.S. after the full force of Obamacare laws come into effect.  Like all Catholic charities, their mission is to people of all faith and no faith, in their case specifically care of the elderly.   Like most Catholic charities, the sisters both serve AND employ, which is why they are affected. Under the HHS mandate the fine for those who stop providing health insurance to their employees is $2,000 per employee and the fine for those who provide insurance without contraception/abortion coverage is $100 per day per employee.  Those sisters, along with many other religious organizations, are now being forced towards a choice:  limit their care and employment to only those of the same faith, or cease their activities in the United States.

I'd really like to know how requiring religious charities to limit their services and their employment rolls to people of their own faith or end their services completely serves the community, large or small. 

And what does it say about the United States when so many people have such disdain of religious views other than their own that they would rather deprive the needy and vulnerable of care than fight for the rights of those who have given that care so faithfully for so long?

"To enter a house of the Little Sisters of the Poor today is to recapture what Dickens experienced. Elderly men and women with no one else to care for them are given exquisite attention; the dignity of every resident is honored, no matter how difficult that dignity may be to discern amidst the trials of senility and disease. The Little Sisters of the Poor and their residents are living reminders that there are no disposable human beings; that everyone is a someone for whom the Son of God entered the world, suffered and died; and that we read others out of the human family at our moral and political peril."George Weigel, 2009