Baptist ethicist on mandate: We’d rather go to jail, pay fines

The Obama administration’s mandate that health insurance plans cover contraceptives that can cause abortions harms not only Baptists and other religious adherents but all Americans, two Southern Baptist ethicists told a congressional panel Feb. 16. Because Southern Baptists believe in a free church in a free state, “tens of thousands of us, maybe hundreds of thousands of us, would be very willing to spend nights in jail for the sake of the preservation of religious liberty,” C. Ben Mitchell told the committee. “It’s not just our coffers that are at risk. It is our very freedom.”