HHS tells religious believers to go to hell. The public notices.
The
political furor over President Obama's birth-control mandate continues
to grow, even among those for whom contraception poses no moral qualms,
and one needn't be a theologian to understand why. The country is being
exposed to the raw political control that is the core of the Obama
health-care plan, and Americans are seeing clearly for the first time
how this will violate pluralism and liberty.
In late January the Health and Human Services Department
required almost all insurance plans to cover contraceptive and
sterilization methods, including the morning-after pill. The decision
came after passionate lobbying by religious groups and liberals from the
likes of Planned Parenthood, amid government promises of compromise.
In the end, Planned Parenthood won. HHS chose to draw the rule's
conscience exceptions for "religious employers" so narrowly that they
will not be extended to religious charities, universities, schools,
hospitals, soup kitchens, homeless shelters and other institutions that
oppose contraception as a matter of religious belief.
The Affordable Care Act itself is ambiguous about what counts as a
religious organization that deserves conscience protection. Like so much
else in the rushed bill, this was left to administrative discretion.
What the law does cement is the principle that the government will
decide for everyone what "health care" must mean. The entire thrust of
ObamaCare is to standardize benefits and how they must be paid for and
provided, regardless of individual choices or ethical convictions.
To take a small example: The HHS rule
prohibits out-of-pocket costs for birth control, simply because
Secretary Kathleen Sebelius's regulators believe no woman should have to
pay anything for it. To take a larger example: The Obama
Administration's legal defense of the mandate to buy insurance or else
pay a penalty is that the mere fact of being alive gives the government
the right to regulate all Americans at every point in their lives.
Practicing this kind of compulsion is
routine and noncontroversial within Ms. Sebelius's ministry. That may
explain why her staff didn't notice that the birth-control rule abridges
the First Amendment's protections for religious freedom. Then again,
maybe HHS thought the public had become inured to such edicts, which
have arrived every few weeks since the Affordable Care Act passed.
Bad call. The decision has roused the
Catholic bishops from their health-care naivete, but they've been joined
by people of all faiths and even no faith, as it becomes clear that
their own deepest moral beliefs may be thrown over eventually.
Contraception is the single most prescribed medicine for women between
18 and 44 years old, and nine of 10 insurers and employers already cover
it. Yet HHS still decided to rub it in the face of religious hospitals.
Mr. Obama's allies among Catholic liberals are also professing
shock—even the Catholic Health Association's Sister Carol Keehan, who
lobbied for ObamaCare, and Notre Dame's Father John Jenkins, who invited
Mr. Obama to speak on campus in 2009. But if they now claim they were
taken for a ride by the secular left, the truth is that they wanted
to be deceived in the name of their grander goal of government-enforced
equity. The Catholic left was one of ObamaCare's great enablers.
Speaking of scales from the eyes, we're eager to hear from former
Michigan Congressman Bart Stupak, who for a brief moment led a faction
of pro-life Democrats against ObamaCare in 2010. They surrendered when
Mr. Obama gave them the fig leaf of an executive order that will
supposedly prevent federal funds from subsidizing abortions. Mr. Stupak
is now a lobbyist at the D.C. law firm Venable LLP.
This is also a teaching moment for Mitt Romney, who has joined the
calls to defend "the right to worship in the way of our own choice," as
he put it in a Colorado speech on Monday. "This is a violation of
conscience. We must have a President who is willing to protect America's
first right, our right to worship God," he added.
This is fine as far as it goes, but as usual the GOP front-runner is
missing the larger policy and moral issue. The HHS diktat isn't
something unique to President Obama. It is the political essence of
government-run medicine. When politics determines who can or should
receive what benefits, and who pays what for it, government will use its
force to dictate the outcomes that it wants—either for reasons of cost,
or to promote its values, which in this case means that "women's
health" trumps religious conscience.
If Mr. Romney can't make the obvious connection between this
infringement of American values and all the other infringements that are
inherent in government health care, then he needs better political
advisers.
The White House is now trying to cauterize the political damage and saying it is open to some "compromise" on its own contraception decision. But the rule is already final. HHS tried to sell it as a compromise when it was announced, and in any case HHS would revive this coercion whenever it is politically convenient some time in Mr. Obama's second term. Religious liberty won't be protected from the entitlement state until ObamaCare is repealed.
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