Ramesh makes a good point regarding the polls. I would like to add that what I saw of the wording of the polls that Dems say favor them, certainly looked suspect. The wording was very friendly to the mandate and did not frame the debate as I've seen it framed elsewhere. Maybe the wording of Rasmussen is biased, but the polls in Dems favor were biased as well.

There's alot of conjecture as to why the President made such an obvious unforced error during an election year. One is hubris. That is, he and his team believe that they have the election already sown up (due to a very weak GOP field). From his internal pollng, the President claculated that he lost about as many from the middle that he could lose. This HHS stunt will solidify his Left base, and more importantly, his deep pocketed Far Left donors. These donors have been begging the President to pick a fight with the Church for some time.

Yet, others believe that this is all part of his long term plan. Once HHS sets the rules there is no going back. Many in the Democratic party believe he will win this fight because so many Catholic women use birth control despite the Church's stance that use of contraception is a Mortal Sin. That is, those Catholics who backed ObamaCare will continue to do so out of pure self interest, and partisan politics. And in the process, this will split the Church even more along partisan lines, which in the long run benefit Progressives. A weakened Catholic Church is a good thing, in thier eyes.

The other and more mainstream view is that the President committed (for whatever reasons) a huge unforced error, which will re-ignite the entire ObamaCare debate during what will be a very contenstious campaign. Instead of splitting the Church, the HHS rules are splitting the Democratic party.If the debate rages into spring and summer, and the President loses even more high level Catholic support, the President could in fact lose the election. The President's political ambitions in this case are best served by quickly and quietly dropping the HHS rules and press on. If he does that, the entire issue will be forgotten within a month. But, as someone asked recently,"When has the President ever backed down over something so big?" If he does back down, he will ignite a firestorm of protest by about every large Progressive group in the nation, and create problems inside of his base that he doesn't have now. In short, he cannot back down. Once he crossed the Rubicon there is no going back.

There is also a way to use this as a method for attacking Obamacare generally. There are lots of people who disagree about the position of the Roman Catholic Church on contraception etc. The biggest problem with Obamacare is that it prevents everyone from trying to reach a health care solution that makes sense for them. In this case, it prevents the Roman Catholic Church from following its morals. It will also prevent lots of other solutions. My family, for example, has specific health care needs (expensive eyeglasses and preventative asthma medicine). With a MSA, we can take care of those known needs while also having a high deductible insurance policy for unanticipated medical expenses. Under Obamacare and its logical extensions through regulation, we will get what some panel of bureaucrats says we get, not what makes sense for us. The same will be true for everyone.

Objectively wrong according to the Catholic Church, not according to everyone.

Here I am, actively defending your right not to have your own beliefs interfered with by the government. I will also stipulate that disputes among members of a religious group are neither my business nor the government's.

Therefore, please do me the courtesy not to claim (or appear to claim) that your moral beliefs are binding upon non-adherents of your religion. That is a step too close to arguing that the government should step in and enact them into law for everyone. And there you would be doing the same thing to me that you don't want done to you. That would be a violation of the Golden Rule, a moral law which I think we both accept.

It is sad Democrats are defending their position on polling and not on principle.

Non-Catholics, include almost all of the MSM, dont have a good bearing on this issue. It is one thing to say that 98% of all catholic women use some form of contraception as using that stats to buttress your support without taking into account how many respect the churches position but cant live up to it. Being catholic is innately cultural as well as religious for many of us. Talk to a Catholic neighbor or friend who is not practicing and find out how many still believe in being married in the church or by a priest or have their kids baptized and go through first communion. Find out how many have gone through pre-cana.

As Ramesh stated, when one side is divided on the issue and the other split, the split side has a problem. When one side is making the case that is a religious issue and they joined by leaders of other faiths in the debate then you have a real problem shrugging the charges of being anti religion,

I agree that this is not a winning political issue for democrats, as it seems to be angering a lot of people, but I'll admit that I don't see what the big deal is.

Every catholic woman I know has used birth control at some point. There is no requirement that people use birth control in the mandate, only that it be covered.

Given the cost of a birth, and covering another person after the birth, I doubt very much that anyone is saving money by not covering contraceptives.

I know that lots of Catholic universities and hospitals already provide contraceptive coverage.

I just don't get what everyone is so mad about.

Huh, I could have sworn that the right-wing wants government to forbid gay marriage and gay adoption. They also want government to prohibit physician-assisted suicide, to require schools to teach creationism, and to abolish unions.

Regrettably, there are some "conservatives" who would recast Cloudbuster's formulation (see above) as of the right of the minority to be catered to in suppressing the liberty of the majority. The most charitable interpretation I can make, based on discussions with some of them, is that they persuade themselves that nobody actually disagrees with them on these matters--hence there will be no interference with anyone else's freedom. This is such an appealing way to eliminate cognitive dissonance, that the illogic of the position (requiring people to do what they all agree with anyway) is considered trivial.