On Friday, March 23, 2012, hundreds of people from the five boroughs of New York (Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx, and Staten Island), New Jersey, and Long Island descended upon the Federal Hall National Memorial in the heart of the financial district of Manhattan to declare and demand religious freedom. There was a great mix of old and young, black and white, Catholic and Protestant, Jewish and Muslim that were united in declaring the Obama administration’s HHS Mandate as unconstitutional because it violates our conscience as a religious people.
Among the many great speakers were Janet Morana (co-founder of the Silent No More Campaign), Alveda King (niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.), and Chris Slattery (Expectant Mother Care). The crowd received each speaker’s message with great enthusiasm. Each speaker spoke on the fact that this is not just a Roman Catholic issue but rather an issue that hits at the heart of religious freedom of all denominations and religious organizations. As one speaker said at the rally “this isn’t about birth control, this is about government control.” The reason our founding fathers came to this great country was to find a place where they could practice their religion without the interference of government. The HHS Mandate directly violates this.
The fact that the Obama administration consistently treats abortion as a means of “birth control” is ludicrous on its own, but then to require employers who view abortion for what it is (the murder of a child in its mother’s womb) to provide abortifacient contraception and other abortion-inducing drugs to employees regardless of moral objection is downright absurd. The fact is that the only thing the government is concerned with, other than trying to gain more power, is MONEY.
Many of yesterday’s speakers voiced this concern. No one in the media is reporting on the fact that the United Nations has deemed the “pill” a carcinogen or the proven links that the medical field has made between the “pill” and different types of cancer. If the Obama administration is truly concerned about women’s health, these issues would be on the front of every newspaper and the headline of every major network’s news broadcast. The only reason for not reporting this is the simple fact that the medical industry 
makes too much money off of the sale of the “pill” and its back-up plan — abortion.
The location of the New York City rally was not just a random federal building. In front of the Federal Memorial building sits a giant statue of one of the greatest Americans: George Washington. It is at this location that George Washington took his oath to serve as the first President of the United States and uphold the rights of the people laid out in the Constitution. As I looked at the statue, I couldn’t help but wonder, “What would George Washington think?”