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10 February 2012

Update: Obama bows down to Catholic Church on contraception

The New York Times has the story. So do other newspapers, television news operations, and a million bloggers.

This was a tempest in a communion cup. It would have blown over in a week or two, especially if the President had had the wit and steel to deliver a speech defending his policy and denouncing the bishops as reactionaries who hurt women. Instead, again subordinating principle to a pathological need not to be criticized, he Tebowed to the celibates and said, “Forgive me fathers, for I have sinned. I repent. I recant. Please, now, love me, love me, love me (but not as you would love choir boys).”

Bishops’ contraception tantrum is a tempest in a communion cup

Men sworn to celibacy (except, it seems, when choir boys are available) have little claim to wisdom on issues of human reproduction. That’s why 98 percent of Catholic women ignore their church’s doctrine that artificial means of contraception violate God’s law. On this issue, American Catholics have kicked Pope, bishop, and parish priest out of their bedrooms.

Now the bishops are kicking back. Dismayed that Catholic hospitals and universities, major recipients of federal funds that employ and serve many non-Catholics, are mandated by federal law to provide no-copay contraception as part of their health insurance plans, the Catholic clergy are screaming “religious discrimination” and threatening to ignore the law.

On Sunday, 5 February, Montana’s bishops did their part, issuing letters denouncing Obamacare that were read in church. The Missoulian has the story and the bishops have the letters (Helena diocese, Great Falls diocese).

Democrats ought to be annoyed by the bishops’ bellyaching, not worried about adverse political consequences. It’s a tempest in a communion cup. Kevin Drum, chief blogger for Mother Jones, put it this way:

My position on this is plain: the church hierarchy’s objection to birth control is medieval and barbaric. All those Catholic pundits raising hell over the new contraception regs should spend their time instead raising hell with their own church over a policy that’s caused incalculable pain and misery for millions of women around the globe. Instead, they’re all claiming that although they don’t have any problem with contraception, they think the government should be more sensitive toward those who do. But it turns out there’s practically no one who does. They’re all pointing their fingers toward a group of people that barely exists.

When there’s a societal consensus in a secular country, religious institutions have to accept that, and in America there’s a virtually unanimous societal consensus on contraception. Americans don’t have any problem with contraception. American Catholics don’t have any problem with contraception. And on a public health basis, requiring healthcare plans to cover contraception is common sense. No one — almost literally no one — thinks there’s any problem with it. It’s a non-issue.

And it wouldn’t even be a non-issue, argues the New York Times’ Gail Collins, if we had a rational health care system:

In a sane world, the government would be running the whole health care plan, the employers would be off the hook entirely and we would not be having this fight at all. But members of Congress — including many of the very same people who are howling and rending their garments over the bishops’ plight — deemed the current patchwork system untouchable.

I’m all for a zero-dollar, everyone covered for everything, government run single-payer system, but even if that came to pass I think the bishops would still be raising religious objections, making claims of conscience, and threatening not to pay taxes supporting what the red-robed celibates believe is mortal sin.

They don’t have a political case, not when 98 percent of Catholic women ignore the church’s teachings on the issue, but do they have a legal case? Given a majority of the justices on the Supreme Court are Catholics, that’s an interesting question, and the subject of a fascinating essay by Collins’ NYT colleague, Linda Greenhouse, who observes that “What they [the bishops] now claim is a right to special treatment: to conscience that trumps law. But in fact, that is not a principle that our legal system embraces.”

Believing whatever they want to believe is a constitutionally protected right for Americans. Doing whatever they think their beliefs direct them to do is not. Believing that God requires sacrificing the left testicle of a man’s second son does not exempt a deeply religious (and demented) father from laws that prohibit harming children. There are limits to what may be done in the name of religious conscience. The Catholic church is demanding that the government of the United States of America subordinate secular law to the Vatican’s theology. That’s not conscience. It’s an attempt to establish a partial theocracy.