“When the American people can no longer publicly express their obligations to the Creator,” Father Neuhaus wrote, “it is to be feared that they will no longer acknowledge their obligations to one another – nor the Constitution in which the obligations of freedom are enshrined.”

He wrote that 17 years ago, and the fulfillment of his prophecy is evident coast-to-coast, as legislatures, executives, and courts in states like Massachusetts and California increasingly exercise political gymnastics to exempt themselves from the laws of their state constitutions and the expressed will of their citizenry – most of whom overwhelmingly and consistently oppose fabricating same-sex relationships into “marriages.”

It’s evident in the numerous judicial rulings that deny religious groups equal access to the public facilities enjoyed by other members of the community.

It’s evident in the efforts to force doctors, pharmacists, and other professionals to submit their conscience to the convenience of a “customer.” It’s evident in increasingly forceful efforts to silence those who would publicly express their deepest religious convictions…in a school art project, a classroom debate, or outside an abortion clinic.

“To contend for the free exercise of religion,” Father Neuhaus wrote, is to contend for the perpetuation of a nation ‘so conceived and so dedicated.’ It is to contend for the hope ‘that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.’”

No serious historian can contend that our nation was “so conceived” as to promote the termination of life post-conception. Nor can any citizen with Madison’s sense of “duty” believe that our nation will ever enjoy a “new birth of freedom” while the births of so many of the next generations are being casually obliterated.

Neither freedom nor life will ever be sacred, as long as either one is expendable.

That is why, in the words of Father Neuhaus, a great champion of freedom, “We shall not weary, we shall not rest, in the fight for life.”

That is why, in the courtrooms and the legislatures, in classrooms and newsrooms, at altars and ballot boxes, the battle goes on.