We face a major crisis with our own government ignoring the First Amendment of the Constitution and legislating to religious groups how they must abide by a practice that violates a major tenet of their religion.

Here we have an article that I will be blogging around.  it is a good article as far as it goes. It lacks some finesse in the history department and lacks some definitions.  However, as a starting point for our discussion it is useful.

God desires that we live according to His will because we have chosen to do so freely.  Free will naturally grows from this plan of God’s that we are to love Him.  Love, as has been said before, is not love if it is coerced.  Freedom is ESSENTIAL for true love to flourish.

ALL the virtues God desires to see in us are similarly based in our freedom.  Without free will, the ability to decide for ourselves as individuals, there can be no growth in virtue.  Free will is essential. So God, knowing our weakness and inability to freely choose the good due to our fallen nature, gives us grace which guarantees our free will is fully free.  God wills this freedom because His desire is for our decision to love, serve and obey Him be free and not coerced in any way.

We are not born knowing what God would like from us.  We have to be taught to recognize God’s will so that we can choose it.  That is why God gave us the Catholic Church which is charged with the task of preserving the full deposit of Faith.  We can go and study that deposit and learn what God would like us to do.  Once we have learned that God wants us to do a particular thing, then we are to use our free will to choose to do it or not.

For example, God tells us to do charitable works.  It is a command.  We know He wills that charitable works be done with diligence.  God does not coerce.  He offers grace in limitless supply to enable us to overcome concupiscence (that is the flaw in our nature that inclines us to vice rather than virtue). The grace is not withdrawn if we reject it, the free gift remains ours, whenever we wish to avail ourselves of it.

http://wdtprs.com/blog/2012/02/hugh-hewitt-interviewed-sen-santorum-about-pres-obamas-attack-on-the-church-santorum-scores-big/