Yes, Virginia, there is a religious war going on. It is for the soul of America. And traditional Christianity is besieged.

In a January visit to the Vatican, American bishops were warned by Benedict XVI that “radical secularism” posed “grave threats” to their Catholic faith. Your religious freedom is being circumscribed, said the pope. The U.S. government may seek to force you to collaborate in what are “intrinsically evil practices.”

No sooner had the bishops returned home than President Obama instructed them that, under Obamacare, all Catholic schools, hospitals, orphanages, nursing homes and homeless shelters must provide the “morning after” pill, contraceptives and sterilizations for all employees, Catholic and non-Catholic alike.

The Church was given 18 months to comply.

Should Obama’s order stand, the Church will be forced by the state to adopt practices that it has always taught are immoral and to engage in acts it believes are intrinsically evil.

Welcome to Obama’s America.

Last week, the Komen Foundation, which funds breast cancer research, sought to extricate itself from the country’s culture wars by severing ties to America’s No. 1 abortion provider, Planned Parenthood.

As professor Robert George writes, in 2010, Planned Parenthood sold 300,000 abortions at $500 each, earning $164 million. Nine of 10 pregnant women who come into its clinics are sold an abortion.

Moreover, the organization is “under congressional and criminal investigation … for allegations including failure to report criminal child sex abuse, misuse of health care and family planning funds, and failure to comply with parental involvement laws regarding abortions.”

In the 1950s, such an institution would be regarded as organized crime and its officers and employees would be up on felony charges or sitting in a penitentiary. We live today in a different America.

Thus, the media-political-cultural elite came down on Komen with both feet, berating the foundation for abandoning women suffering from breast cancer, until Komen caved and restored the $650,000 it contributes annually to Planned Parenthood, though that sum is not one-tenth of one percent of PP’s annual budget.

The Komen officer who advised the foundation to sever ties was cashiered on Feb. 7.

Also on Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals overturned, two to one, the democratic decision of a majority of Californians who voted in 2008 to outlaw homosexual marriage.

The people of California, said the Jimmy Carter judicial appointee and the Bill Clinton appointee, violated the 14th Amendment, which mandates the equal protection of the law.

That the Congress that took office in 1865, the year Richmond fell, meant to elevate homosexual unions to the same moral plane as matrimony when it enacted the 14th Amendment is an absolute absurdity.

What has happened to America in half a century seems, to many raised in that other America, like something out of Orwell.

Can it be that Californians must now wait on the U.S. Supreme Court—make that Justice Anthony Kennedy, the swing vote—to tell them whether they can or cannot write their own marriage laws?

How did it come to be that we Americans must all wait for nine judges on the Supreme Court to tell us whether homosexual marriage is or is not a constitutional right?

Where did justices get the power to decide whether laws enacted by the people or their elected representatives will be allowed to stand in this republic? Where did these nine justices get the right to be sole and final arbiters of what the Constitution and the laws say and do not say?

As law professor and author William Quirk muses, in introducing the new book “Judicial Monarchs” by William Watkins, Jr.:

“‘Notes of the (Constitutional) Convention do not record Ben Franklin standing up and saying: ‘I’ve got a good idea. Let’s find nine really bright people and turn over most of our important decisions to them.’ Would the Convention authorize an institution that defines its own powers?”

Not the convention our Founding Fathers attended.

Yet since the Warren Court came into being six decades ago, the Supreme Court has usurped that power—to remake America. And the American people have meekly submitted to its tyrannical rule.

The justices used the Ninth Amendment to declare homosexuality and abortion constitutional rights, though both were crimes when the Bill of Rights was adopted. They used the First Amendment to purge Christianity from our public schools and public life and reduce our cradle faith to the same level as Santeria and Scientology.

Now the radical secularists in Obama’s entourage are so puffed up with success, so confident the future belongs to them, they have crossed the line between church and state to impose their values directly on Christian institutions.

This time they have overplayed their hand. Traditionalist Christians and their allies have been given a glorious opening to inflict a stinging defeat and humiliation on these arrogant intruders on God’s turf.

On this one, Obama ought to be forced into a public retreat.

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