I agree with much more in E. J. Dionne’s Washington Post column today than I usually do (yes, that’s quite a low bar), but I would like to highlight his gross distortion of what is at stake in the battle over the HHS contraceptive mandate.
Dionne complains that “Republican presidential candidates want to take a disagreement over whether and how contraception should be covered in plans issued under the new health-care law and turn it into a war against religion itself.” That bland description obscures what the actual disagreement is about. It’s not about whether and how contraception should generally be covered in health-insurance plans. It’s about whether employers who have religious objections to providing such coverage — including of contraceptives that also operate as abortifacients and of sterilization — should nonetheless be compelled to.
The HHS mandate, both in its original form that has now been made final as a rule and in its supposedly-to-be-modified-in-some-vague-way-somewhere-down-the-road version, is a patent violation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. There simply is no good reason why the Obama administration insists on dragooning employers to facilitate the provision of services they object to on religious grounds, when it could so easily arrange for those services to be provided directly to affected employees.
Obama’s support for the mandate is, to be sure, not “a war against religion itself.” But it is an attack on faithful Catholics and on other Americans who have religious objections to facilitating access to contraceptives, abortifacients, or sterilization. And, as law professor Michael Stokes Paulsen explains, the
whole point [of the attack], it seems, is to override religious objections to such a policy to the maximum extent politically possible, out of an intense ideological commitment to contraception and abortion as “preventive health care.” It is vital, the ideologues say, to prevail over religious objections precisely in order to advance, and permanently entrench, this particular ideology and, further, to vindicate the power of government to impose such policies on everyone. Religious objections must be overcome, in part for the sake of overcoming religious objections.
No American president has ever before waged such an attack. As Paulsen points out, perhaps the best precedent is the tyrant Antiochus IV Epiphanes’ 2nd-century B. C. decree that all Jews should be forced to publicly eat pork.
Dionne faults Mitt Romney for stating that the Obama administration has “fought against religion.” Again, to be sure, the Obama administration has not fought against all religions. (I suspect that Rev. Jeremiah Wright feels secure.) But it would be churlish to read Romney’s charge so broadly. What the Obama administration has been doing is fighting against traditional religious beliefs and believers.
The HHS mandate is part of a very ugly broader pattern. Take, for example, the Obama administration’s extraordinary claim, rejected unanimously by the Supreme Court in the Hosanna-Tabor case last month, that the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment afford religious organizations no protections against governmental interference in choosing their faith leaders. Consider also the Obama administration’s initial sabotage of the Defense of Marriage Act and then its outright abandonment of its duty to defend DOMA — all part of a broader effort to stigmatize supporters of traditional marriage as irrational bigots. Add to that the Obama administration’s reduction of religious freedom to a privatized right to worship. And its ideologically driven decision to discontinue funding a Catholic program for victims of sex trafficking. And so much more.
In a recent NRO essay, my Ethics and Public Policy Center colleague George Weigel lamented that liberal Catholics, so eager “to play court chaplain to overweening and harshly secularist state power,” have abandoned their own “intellectual patrimony: the truth of religious freedom as the first of human rights.” Dionne, alas, provides a paradigmatic example.
"What the Obama administration has been doing is fighting against traditional religious beliefs and believers."
You are doing exactly what Dionne accused you of doing, and don't even seem to realize it. Hilarious.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYou seem not to realize that I am explaining that Dionne is wrong to defend Obama against charges that Obama is hostile to the religious liberty of many Americans.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWell, I'm confused too. Right at the start of the post you say Dionne's summation of the Right's objections is inaccurate. But he seems to sum up your argument pretty well.
Dionne: “Republican presidential candidates want to take a disagreement over whether and how contraception should be covered in plans issued under the new health-care law and turn it into a war against religion itself.”
Whelan: "Obama’s support for the mandate is, to be sure, not “a war against religion itself.” But it is an attack on faithful Catholics and on other Americans who have religious objections to facilitating access to contraceptives, abortifacients, or sterilization."
What is the difference between a war on religion and an attack on the faithful? Beyond semantics? Or are you saying that Dionne is right that the right sees the mandate as a war on religion, but wrong to disagree with that conclusion?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseHere's the part of Dionne's piece you quoted:
"“Republican presidential candidates want to take a disagreement over whether and how contraception should be covered in plans issued under the new health-care law and turn it into a war against religion itself.” "
That's exactly what you are doing. Obama isn't doing a single thing that is hostile to any religious person's liberty. He isn't forcing anyone to use contraception who doesn't want to. He isn't forcing the church to pay for contraception. You and others are bending and twisting both the rule in question and interpretation of the various laws surrounding it's legality in order to suit your argument.
And your attempt is failing. I think you guys are mostly angry because you are losing this battle - publicly. Obama has outflanked the GOP on this issue and his numbers are rising versus all of his contenders during the very same time period that those on this site predicted he would begin to be harmed by them. He's beating all his challengers in polling in heavy Catholic states like PA and OH - once again, exactly contradicting the predictions of both columnists and posters on this site. I believe that - in the long run - legal challenges may overturn the HHS ruling. But in the short run, it's fair to say that the public simply hasn't bought the frame you are pushing.
And it's a disastrous argument for the GOP in an election year, when female voters were already predispositioned to vote for the Dems. Just disastrous. Way to go.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseHas Dionne cured himself of his impish lisp and his propensity to shoot spittle at the camera?
It would make for better listening if he'd hurry up and do so already.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWow, so Dionne argues that Obama is not attacking religion because he is not attacking "all religions".
By that measure, Nero did not persecute religion because he only persecuted Christians, while leaving Jupiter-worshippers alone. Neither did Henry VIII, since he did not persecute those bishops who subordinated their religion to his desire to screw around.
Obama is engaged in persecuting Catholics who believe that their duty to their religion supercedes their duty to the NY Times. So yeah. He's attacking religion. No religion is worthy of the name whose adherents put it second to thoroughgoing subservience to Barack Obama.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseSince providing contraceptive coverage in health care plans isn't even close to a critical health care need, the point of this mandate is to further extend the acceptance of unlimited state power.
Women (as well as men) can employ a variety of contraceptive efforts from the costless to the physically invasive. No methods work perfectly. Nothing in law prohibits the exercise, by either genders, to seek these solutions of their own free will and find them in the market. What the mandate does then is establish not only the supremacy of the state being able to dictate an advantage for a particular group of people (sexually active females) they can also dictate this without regard to any other concerns (religious) or gender fairness (male contraceptives aren't dictated).
This is purely a political power play that directly benefits the designs of liberals to extend the reach of the state. I give Obama credit; he said he was going to "transform" America and, if he succeeds with getting these kinds of wholly unnecessary dictates accepted by the public as well as the courts he will have succeeded, massively. What bureaucratic dictates will the public or courts be able to reject if something so personal, so ripe with religious content and so personally easily financially managed is sustained?
Slippery slope meet Obama "transformation".
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAlways looking for the bright side: perhaps we should take heart in the fact that the regime and its supporters cannot confront our arguments as they exist -- Dionne and Miller (other post) have to distort the objections and misrepresent the principles at stake.
I'm sure their careers have profited much from the inattentiveness of their readers. Obama himself may not have much traditional leadership skill, but give him a few straw-men to manipulate and that guy can work a room!
Okay, not funny. Deception in the service of statism is not funny.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe year Obama was first elected to the Senate (not yet president) from Illinois, I was singing in a Catholic choir (in California). Back then, as now, I kept track of certain political issues simply because I had the spare time.
On the Sunday following Obama's victory, the priest (speaking from the pulpit) congratulated Obama, it supposedly being a victory over bigotry (recall obama's opponent). Huh? Even then, Obama was clearly anti-religious, having used his Chicago church connection only for personal advancement, and was determined to implement anti-religious, radically leftist policies. This was obvious to me, even then; I am not swayed by a "baritone voice" or a smile.
I walked out on the sermon. From the choir! Either that priest was a fool (very unlikely, knowing the priest) or something else was going on.
Ready for the punch line? Here it is:
A couple of years later, after that priest retired, he came out as a gay man. Active, apparently.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWhat Mr. Dionne charges is what Republicans would do if they were smart. What Mr. Whelan explains is what Republicans are doing, which is not so smart. This is about much more than religious freedom. The government cramming contraception down the Catholic church's throat is the canary in the coal mine. This is really about a government telling all of us what we must purchase and our employers what they must provide. Whether it is contraception, cosmetic surgery or anything else, it's none of the government's business. Republicans would be a lot better off if they trained their fire not on the religion issue but on the freedom issue.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseHow about training fire on both? The two issues in religious freedom (religion & freedom) overlap. But it's also true that the two appeal in different degrees to different folks. My humble vote is to highlight the twin truths that the HHS mandate is attacking both freedom generally and religious freedom in particular.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThank you. Exactly right.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe concessions Mr. Whelan makes appall me. The progressives, statist virus has infected NR.
E. J. is a Catholic In Name Only. I suspect that outside the manipulation of the Catholic Church's real social justice teaching, to support socialism for the masses, while he retains his undesired privileged, that he does not believe in most or all of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. He is more interested in getting Caeser to do God's work, then doing God's work himself. As Pope Benedict XVI said “Wherever politics tries to be redemptive, it is promising too much. Where it wishes to do the work of God, it becomes not divine, but demonic.”
The programs advocated by E. J. CINO are social crack designed to control the masses for the ilk like E. J. CINO and his class of faux sophisticated elites.
People like Mr. E. J. CINO are foremost in my prayers, especially during Lent, when real believing Catholics, celebrate Jesus' death and resurrection as exemplified in the Real Presence on the Altar.
“Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi, Lex Vivendi” (What you pray is what you believe is what you live)
“Dei Gloriae, Hiberniae Honori” (To the Glory of God and the Honour of Ireland).
“Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision.” G. K. Chesterton
“Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right to do what we ought.” Lord Acton
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseGreat post. And comparing the HHS mandate to the mandate of Antioches Epiphanes is right on target. Unfortunately, the Administration and its defenders seem to be very successfully casting this as a debate about contraception rather than a debate about liberty and freedom of conscience and religious freedom. Even that term "HHS contraceptive mandate" in your first paragraph sort of yields the "framing" of the debate to the pro-mandage folks. To whatever extent the general public sees this as a debate over contraception, we lose the political struggle even though we may win on the intellectual merits.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIt would be reasonable for liberals to now deal with the decision by a federal judge that a pharmacy or pharmacist cannot be required to stock or to sell the Plan B abortifacient pill. If, as the judge has ruled, a law is unconstitutional that requires that the drug be dispensed against objections based on conscience, it would seem to be a fortiori unconstitutional to require that a religious institution provide insurance coverage for drugs to which they object as a matter of conscience or require that they ascertain that the coverage is provided. In one relevant case, the Supreme Court ruled that the government can universally ban the use of peyote or LSD even though some intend to use it for religious purposes and presumably in keeping with their religion and conscience. The Court wanted a standard that applied to all uses. In another relevant case in seeming tension with the LSD case, the Supreme Court ruled that one cannot ban religious animal sacrifice while allowing slaughter of animals for food, hunting, and pest eradication. In the Plan B case, the judge seemed to adapt the animal sacrifice decision and he found that one cannot allow pharmacies and pharmacists to have secular-based waivers from dispensing other drugs (e.g., expense in stocking; fear of theft) and then not allow religion-based or conscience-based waivers from dispensing Plan B drugs. "The most compelling evidence that the rules target religious conduct is the fact the rules contain numerous secular exemptions," the judge said. "In sum, the rules exempt pharmacies and pharmacists from stocking and delivering lawfully prescribed drugs for an almost unlimited variety of secular reasons, but fail to provide exemptions for reasons of conscience."
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