The Biggest Political Mistake of the Month

It is rather strange sometimes what the media covers. There have been endless stories of Romney saying that he "does not care about the poor" when he made clear that he was saying that his focus is not on the poorest in our society since they already have a safety net, but rather on the middle incomes since they are hard hit and get little help. There also were thousands of stories about Newt Gingrich's ex wife and that mess. Both of those are certainly fair game for the media. On the other hand, there has been very little coverage of the order from Obama that Catholic institutions must provide birth control coverage for their employees even if it violates their religious beliefs. Gingrich has talked about it and I have seen a story here or there, but that is about it. Finally, this morning, the subject came up on Meet The Press and we got to see Rachel Maddow go into an all out attack mode trying to deny the validity of the story. Nevertheless, this is a major issue and a very major mistake by the Obamacrats.

Let's look at the facts. The Obama Administration issued regulations as part of the implementation of Obamacare that now require employers who provide health insurance to their workers to include birth control including the so-called "morning after pill" at no cost to the employee. Unlike past regulations, these new ones provide no exception for religious organizations which are morally opposed to birth control or abortion. In other words, Catholic organizations must now provide free birth control pills and morning after pills (which the church equates with abortion) for free to all employees. The regulations do let the church itself off the requirement, but Catholic hospitals, universities and charities get no such exception.

This is a tremendous overreach by the secularists among the Obamacrats. They should know better, but they just do not. Instead, the Obamacrats are trying to force religious people to ignore their faith and to instead follow the dectates of the bureaucratic state.

There always was a perfectly simple way to handle this. An orgainization like A catholic hospital could provide health insurance for its staff which did not include birth control or abortion services and then it could provide the staff with information where such services were availble from other sources. The church had no problem with employing people who used birth control; obviously, millions of Catholics do so every day. The church organizations, however, did not want to themselves provide such services which are views as sins. But the Obamacrats will have none of that. In the world of Obama where favoring abortion is the new religion (just look at what happened to the Susan Koman Foundation this week), it would be heresy to let anyone, even the Catholic Church, follow its own teachings. When the religion of the Obamacrats is the secular/free abortion faith, there is no freedom for any other religion.

The regulation from Obama is clearly an attack on the constitutional guarantee of freedom of religion. It is the same as if the federal government ruled that orthodox Jewish organizations which feed the poor were required to serve only non-kosher food to everyone. It is the same as if the federal government ordered an atheist charity hospital (if there is one) to make prayer books available to each patient. The point is that in America, people are supposed to have freedom of religion. The government cannot just walk in and order a religious orgainization to violate its own faith. But that is what Obama has just done.

I truly believe that this issue is going to get bigger and bigger. I doubt that the Obamacrats will back down on this one, since to do so now would bitterly disappoint the far left. This was an unforced error of major proportions.