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" You may have missed it with everything else that&amp;#039;s been going on, but we&amp;#039;re in the middle of the Fortnight for Freedom, the Clan of the Red Beanie&amp;#039;s highly undignified dive for moral and political credibility, which extends from St. John Fisher and St. Thomas More back on June 21 until July 4, when we all celebrate the day when Jesus and time-travelling Pope John Paul II helped Thomas Jefferson and St. Paul write the Declaration of Independence From Ladyparts. Needless to say, this is an embarrassing exercise in authoritarian propaganda that has as much to do with actual Christianity as Mitt Romney has with zoroastrianism: Our liturgical calendar celebrates a series of great martyrs who remained faithful in the face of persecution by political power \u2014 St. John Fisher and St. Thomas More, St. John the Baptist, SS. Peter and Paul, and the First Martyrs of the Church of Rome.  Holy Mother of God, what a bunch of drama queens. They&amp;#039;d cut off their own heads if it weren&amp;#039;t two-for-one night in the Vatican wursthaus. Some people are having themselves a real hootenanny with it, though. Over at NRO Online, Kathryn Jean Lopez, who makes Bernadette Soubirous look like Lady Gaga, is finding herself transported to something that seems very much like the kind of religious ecstasy that you can pick up at Manger, Bath, and Beyond. Seems old K-Lo got herself over to a panel that had been called in anticipation of the Supreme Court&amp;#039;s health-care decision to discuss what the upshot of everything will be as regards the continuing beheading of bishops by Barack Obama for the crime of not letting their insurance companies give free birth control to the Presbyterian charwomen in their employ. She also had a chat with this Tom Farr guy, who has not yet been beheaded, probably because he has a really fine priest-hole dug out in the backyard, next to the bird bath. LOPEZ: You&amp;#039;re hosting a forum today on conscience and Jeff Fortenberry&amp;#039;s legislation. What about his approach is important? FARR: His bill, which has been endorsed by members of both parties, is designed to ensure that no health-care law can override the rights of conscience which have played so large a role in American history. Even if the Court overrides the health-care law tomorrow, and thereby removes the issue of the HHS mandate from the table for the moment, the decision will probably not touch the reasoning behind the mandate, i.e., that &amp;quot;protected&amp;quot; religious institutions must be narrowly defined as those that serve only their own believers, and that &amp;quot;unprotected&amp;quot; religious organizations (hospitals, colleges, soup kitchens and, arguably, your average church or parish) must either get into line - provide the mandated coverage \u2014 or get out of business. Arguably, my Aunt Fannie. Nobody \u2014 not even the Kenyan Muslim Diocletian in the White House \u2014 is suggesting that &amp;quot;your average church or parish&amp;quot; has to do anything of the sort. And the choice is not provide the coverage or go out of business. It&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;provide the coverage&amp;quot; or lose some of the advantages you gain under the same secular laws you insist on defying elsewhere. Naturally, there are other attractions along the midway. Bishop Fulton Sheen, the great TV bishop of my misbegotten youth, is one step closer to having his own day on the calendar. (I always thought he was a little spooky myself, and I wondered if he ever came out in the daylight.) The Calendar of Saints, however, is going to start running into the same quality-control problems the Baseball Hall of Fame has, if this keeps up. Then there&amp;#039;s this half-fascinating, half-nutty piece of work from George Weigel, JP the Deuce&amp;#039;s official posthumous tubthumper, about the opening of the Secret Vatican Archives. Make no mistake. I would sell your grandmother to the Somali pirates for a half-hour in there, and I know actual historians whose price would be higher than that. I&amp;#039;m on that website as soon as this post is done. (Catholic Pro Tip: Beware of American laypeople who refer to Rome as &amp;quot;La Citta.&amp;quot; They want to be Curial bureaucrats without the fuss and bother of taking the vows the actual Curial bowsers ignore the first time a well-turned altar boy or a nice plate of bolognese goes by.) Some of the documents \u2014 written on such various materials as parchment, vellum, paper, and birchbark (the medium for an 1887 letter from the Ojibwe Indians to the pope, &amp;quot;the Great Master of Prayer, he who acts in Jesus&amp;#039;s stead&amp;quot;) \u2014 bring to mind epic moments and historical turning points across ten centuries: the handwritten records of Galileo&amp;#039;s trial before the Inquisition; Pope Alexander VI&amp;#039;s bull Inter Cetera (which might be translated, &amp;quot;Among Other Things&amp;quot;), dividing the New World between Spain and Portugal; the 1530 petition from dozens of members of England&amp;#039;s House of Lords, asking Pope Clement VII to annul Henry VIII&amp;#039;s marriage to Catherine of Aragon so that the Tudor king might marry Anne Boleyn; Gregory XIII&amp;#039;s calendar of 1582 with the &amp;quot;missing ten days&amp;quot; in October, an excision that rectified the inaccuracies of the earlier Julian calendar; a letter from Mary Queen of Scots to Sixtus V just before her execution; Polish king John III Sobieski&amp;#039;s 1683 letter to Innocent XI, reporting his victory over the Turks at the Battle of Vienna; letters from Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln to Pius IX during the U.S. Civil War. Of course, none of this stuff has any more to do with the Christ of the Gospels than the Fortnight of Freedom does, but it makes for great reading. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a14655/happy-fortnight-of-freedom/>