Following the decision of the Obama Administration’s HHS department to dispense with religious liberty and force religious groups to violate their consciences, it seems the Bishops are roused from their slumber. It seems. I am not so sure. They may still be asleep.

Many Bishops have been speaking out and calling for Catholics and Christians of all stripes to contact the Obama administration and demand a revision to the conscience clause in the mandate. If that is their argument, they have already lost. They might win the battle, either through the courts or the election year largess of the emperor, but the war is lost.

In order to win the argument they must change the argument. In order to change and win the argument, the battle, and ultimately the war, the Bishops need to understand that they were wrong, completely wrong. They were wrong when they supported the health care bill in the first place.

Back in 2009, the Bishops made a show of demanding ‘amendments’ that would stipulate that no government funds would go to abortion. Given that stipulation, the Bishops Conference was completely on board with compulsory government run health care. They were completely on board with a government that can mandate that you buy something and mandate what it is you buy. In essence, the Bishops helped hand the bullets to the firing squad, and now they are shocked—shocked—when the guns now point at them.

Lesson number one of appeasement, you cannot just give away a little of your liberty. When faced with the firing squad, you should not just hope that they aim low.

Once you accept the government can tell you what health care to buy, you are only arguing over degrees of tyranny. That is the wrong argument. When you support the government being able to force people to buy something and force the sellers to sell only what the government wants, even out of some false sense of compassion, you support tyranny. When you support such things, you reject the liberty of the individual to say no. So, when that tyranny inevitably turns against you, you have forfeited the right to complain.

If the Bishops merely seek or accept the extension of conscience clause in the mandate to cover Catholic hospitals and schools, they are only asking the firing squad to shoot at somebody else first, and they may. But they will eventually turn the guns back on us. If we seek or accept the extension of the conscience clause, will be fighting this battle every few years and we will eventually lose. We. Will. Lose.

The only way to avoid the firing squad is to disarm them completely. Obamacare and the mandate must be repealed, destroyed, burned, and the ashes of its political proponents scattered as an object lesson to anyone in the future who might entertain another go at such tyranny.

For generations, many Bishops of the U.S. have been partners, cheerleaders, and enablers of the soft tyranny of big government now turned hard. The Bishops need to awaken from their slumber and realize that they have been part of the problem. They need to call for, fight for, and be unrelenting in the drive to repeal every vestige of the tyrannical scheme known as Obamacare and the mandate. Anything less and you will know they have already gone back to sleep.