The White House held a conference call this afternoon with “senior administration officials” to discuss the recently issued HHS contraceptive mandate. On the call, these officials basically reiterated the same talking points Jay Carney offered on Tuesday: The HHS decision was made after “careful consideration” which in their estimation strikes an appropriate balance “between religious beliefs and access to important preventive services.”
One senior administration official did address the matter of coverage for abortifacients, insisting that the mandate did not include coverage for, as they put it, “drugs that cause abortion.” This is false.
Take the example of ella (ulipristal acetate), which the mandate covers. It’s true that since ella has not been adequately studied as a human abortifacient, the FDA hasn’t approved it as an abortifacient. The FDA does point out that since it’s pretty good at causing abortions in rats and monkeys, doctors should apprise their patients of potential fetal hazards: The primary fetal hazard being death. So when the senior administration official said the mandate didn’t cover “drugs that cause abortion,” what she seems to have meant is that it doesn’t cover drugs that are FDA-approved as abortifacients.
The other questions the administration officials had time to field were mostly about technical details of implementation rather than the substance or justification of the rule. There were no questions about why the administration decided to weigh the merits of “religious beliefs” against “preventive services” instead of weighing coercive bureaucratic rule-making against inviolable First Amendment rights of free exercise. (Obviously, they didn’t have time to take my question.)
Perhaps the most telling moment in the call came when one official conceded that the administration has no idea how many people this exemption is expected to “help.” In other words, in all HHS’s “careful considerations,” there was no comparison of the “benefit” (however marginal) of this exemption versus possible alternatives.
It mattered not at all whether this narrow exemption, when compared to a more robust exemption, expanded coverage to one more woman or one million more women. Coverage simply had to be expanded as a matter of principle. Whoever meets the requirements of the narrow exemption, and decides to take advantage of it, should be grateful they are allowed even that. (Remember when then-senator Obama insisted that capital gains taxes should be raised, regardless of the effect on revenue, “for purposes of fairness”? The same logic applies here.)
Overall, the administration’s defense of the HHS mandate has been an exercise in condescension. In their eyes, the “religious exemption” wasn’t carved out so the government could protect constitutional rights while it addressed what it saw as a compelling interest — those rights, we are told, are not even at issue. In the eyes of this administration, the “exemption” is a benevolent, even gratuitous, concession. HHS even allows a whole year for certain cultural laggards (read: Catholics) to bring their “religious beliefs” up to speed. Is that not generous?
Recently, I warned that Democrats were in danger of becoming seen as the Party of Irreligion. Between its recent showing in Hosanna-Tabor and this HHS nonsense, the Obama administration seems intent on accelerating that trend. That doesn’t bode well for Democrats or religious freedom.
— Stephen P. White is a fellow in the Catholic Studies Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. and the coordinator of the Tertio Millennio Seminar on the Free Society.
The entire idea of the Government mandating any employer provide any form of coverage is offensive.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseEmployer sponsored insurance coverage was only brought about because of government-controlled wages in the 30s and 40s. They needed some non-wage method to entice workers to their firms over their competitors. Government creates the problem, then instead of unmaking it, they continue to pile on forever and ever, Amen.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"Recently, I warned that Democrats were in danger of becoming seen as the Party of Irreligion."
becoming?
God bless,
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseDan Hoffman
Why is Mr. White surprised that the Democrats are the party of Irreligion? The modern left was conceived and developed by radical atheists who hated religion in general and Christianity in particular. This was before they showed any great concern for the downtrodden masses.
People forget that the left's goal is not only to bring about monetary equality, but it is to uproot and destroy existing culture and thereby bring about heaven on earth. Of course, the existing culture is heavily influenced by the Judeo-Christian ethic.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseHello Stephen,
I caught Rick Ungar making this same argument today over at Forbes, of all places. I pointed to him out that the reg does, in fact, cover "emergency contraception" drugs like ella, and he was forced to modify his position, grudgingly.
Thanks very much for making the point here again. Some of these drugs *do* act as abortifacients in certain circumstances, regardless of whether the FDA has certified them as such. That does not detract from our concern over being forced to fund contraception. . . but the reality is that general public outrage will increase if the conversation is moved from "contraception" to "abortifacient."
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseCan we talk about the politics of this independent of the morality and constitutionality (which, clearly, the President and his HHS are on the wrong side of.)
Is it possible, boys and girls, that this allegedly brilliant political machine known as the Obama organization is really, really, REALLY bad at politics, in fact? They seem to be on a tear to alienate literally every voter group, and not just those, like Catholics in this case and Jews in the case of Israel policy, who once were reliably Democrat in their voting. Do you drive a car? Then the Keystone Pipeline and the Gulf moratorium were specifically aimed at making your life more expensive. Do you use a bank? Ditto Dodd-Frank and the rest of the details of all the nonsense financial "reform" they've promoted and enacted. Do you get sick? Obamacare. Do you want to go to college? The educational loan "reform" is guaranteed to put you deeper in debt as tuitions rise to soak up all the new "free" money you'll borrow to do it. Do you want to be SAFE from those you think are "gun nuts"? Good! The Obamas kept guns that would have otherwise been bought by people hunting and protecting their homes away from them by giving them to murderous drug lords who, by the way, want to addict your children even if they don't shoot you while doing so!
I'm no conspiracy nut. I have ignored as hyperbole the claims by people like Beck that Obama is out to intentionally destroy America as we know/knew it. But gosh are these people the most tone-deaf political operatives in the history of democracy, or what? They seem to make every policy decision on every subject based on how many people they can alienate and how many voters they can activate against them.
So let's not let the current internecine warfare inside the Republican primary process distract us from the if-truth-in-advertising-applied-to-campaigns factual slogan of the Obama Administration in this election year: "Obama: Convincing you to vote for anyone else every single day!"
Yes, this policy is unconstitutional and unAmerican and wrong and evil and immoral. But it is also really, really, REALLY politically stupid. Clearly, so are those who made it.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"...are these people the most tone-deaf political operatives in the history of democracy, or what?"
What we see is an administration that is dominated by far-left ideology, in which such ideology often trumps nitty-gritty political concerns. It seems to be a sort of Chicago-style political gangsterism blended with a variety of fanatical left-wing ideologies, the latter of which provide these people with a feeling of moral superiority, which leads them into what you see as politically harmful decisions. Yet the members of such an administration also know that they have powerful media in support of them, which helps ameliorate some of their political missteps. And, the administration can bank on a very large number of ignorant voters.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYeahbut....my question basically is this: Is their ideology what makes them bad politicians or is it their thought, that you put forward, that since they own the media they can always prevail? In other words, are they stupid...or arrogant...or both? Because you see, calling it Chicago-style is a mistake: IF there was one thing Capone & his heirs were about it was the bottom line. The thuggery was about winning and keeping control, whereas these guys, riding a wave of "history" and Bush/war fatigue and running against an awful, weak opponent, took control, I suggest, for reasons that had nothing to do with their official PR promotion of political genius. My point is that said "brand" of Obamanauts-R-Political-Geniuses is a fraud. They were lucky, not good, and they are proving it every day as they get more arrogantly and audaciously worse at retail political calculation. To put it another way: Chicago knew Al Capone. Al Capone was a paisan of Chicago. And President Obama & Co. are NO Al Capone....or Mayor Daley...or even Rahm Emmanuel.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI might seem to be giving a facile answer to you, Hope E. Changey, but it really seems to me that Obama et al demonstrate a combination of arrogance and stupidity, so I guess you're right in suggesting "both." I've never agreed with the pundits who say, "well, Obama does some really bad things, but he's still a brilliant guy." Where is this brilliance actually demonstrated? He seems to me to be intellectually very limited, in more ways than just needing a teleprompter. He doesn't demonstrate a curiosity about the world around him, or about what really works in the real world. Rather, he continually seems to fall back on what his ideological preconceptions tell him. I don't think he necessarily has a low IQ, but he seems very blinkered by ideology, and by the more general "bubble" or arrogance that we have fairly often heard about his administration from insiders.
And I'm not the first one to say this: I think that Obama and his ilk have been able to get away with so much foolishness for so many years, in the bubbles of academia and a leftist-dominated local government, but now that they are in a situation of divided government, they are subjected to some checks and balances to much more of an extent, along with the exposure that this entails. And operatives like Axelrod know how to attack political opponents, and they knew how to sucker in a lot of gullible voters in 2008 with a weird sort of Cult of Personality and narcissistic appeal, but maybe they don't really know much about how the rest of America ticks.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"There were no questions about why the administration decided to weigh the merits of “religious beliefs” against “preventive services” instead of weighing coercive bureaucratic rule-making against inviolable First Amendment rights of free exercise."
Well stated. With all this talk of access to "women's reproductive health care," we're obscuring the larger issues. One of the larger issues is by what right the federal government dictates to any employer what kind of health insurance he provides his employers or that he provide health insurance at all. Another is by what right the federal government dictates to any individual what kind of health insurance he carries or that he carry health insurance at all. Let's try to not get bogged down in the minutia.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse