From The Week via Yahoo! News:
The Catholic mega-lawsuit is a 2012 nightmare for Obama
Dozens of religious organizations sue the administration over a contraception mandate. Not exactly what the president was hoping for heading into November
On Monday, the Catholic Church offered a formal response to the Obama
administration's refusal to extend the religious exemption to the HHS
mandate on contraception, sterilization, and abortifacients to Catholic
hospitals, charities, and schools. In a coordinated move, 43 Catholic
institutions — including several dioceses — filed lawsuits in federal
courts over the alleged infringement of freedom in religious practice
that the mandate imposes on its organizations. The lawsuits serve notice on Barack Obama that he can expect the Catholic Church to fight him throughout the summer and all the way to the November election.
The lawsuits could not have come at a worse time for Obama and his
campaign. Until recently, Catholic bishops had held out some hope of
convincing the White House and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to expand
the exemption in the mandate that covers only churches. A negotiated
restatement of the mandate to cover all organizations run on behalf of
churches would have sidelined the issue and put the U.S. Conference of
Catholic Bishops back on the sidelines, nominally opposed to ObamaCare
but in favor of government-run universal health care in general.
Instead, Obama has yet another ally-turned-opponent, just as the general
election fight heats up.
This fight could not have come at a worse time for Obama and his campaign.
This exemption is the crux of the fight for the mandate's opponents, as
it offers a breathtakingly arrogant position that claims authority to
define religious expression. According to the administration, the First Amendment protection
against laws that "prohibit the free exercise" of religion only applies
to churches themselves, not the affiliated or subordinate organizations
that provide services to their communities. That distinction rewrites
more than two centuries of American law and would force churches to
violate their doctrine in matters that government defines as public policy.
This case involves forcing Catholic organizations to provide free access
to birth control, but if this mandate stands as precedent, it might not
stop there. The president of one organization that filed a lawsuit made
clear the stakes involved for religious liberty in a statement
accompanying the news release of the court actions: "For if we concede
that the government can decide which religious organizations are
sufficiently religious to be awarded the freedom to follow the
principles that define their mission, then we have begun to walk down a
path that ultimately leads to the undermining of those institutions. For
if one presidential administration can override our religious purpose
and use religious organizations to advance policies that undercut our
values, then surely another administration will do the same for another
very different set of policies, each time invoking some concept of
popular will or the public good, with the result these religious
organizations become mere tools for the exercise of government power,
morally subservient to the state, and not free from its infringements."
The identity of this declaration's author points out the extent of the
political danger in which President Obama finds himself. That statement
did not come from an ultraconservative Catholic institution or cleric,
but from a man who extended a personal invitation to Obama — and
received considerable criticism from his fellow Catholics for having
done so. Father John Jenkins asked President Obama to speak at the
University of Notre Dame's commencement ceremonies in 2009, a
controversial move at the time due to Obama's support for abortion and
Planned Parenthood. Notre Dame is seen within the Catholic Church as a
politically liberal institution, and perhaps particularly so under
Jenkins' governance. Notre Dame's inclusion in this first wave of
lawsuits sends a clear signal from the bishops that it has united
Catholics across the political spectrum against this infringement of
religious liberty.
And the unity goes beyond the Catholic Church. The Family Research
Council, a group that tends to speak mostly for evangelical churches, announced its support
for the legal assault on the HHS mandate within a few hours. FRC
President Tony Perkins cheered Cardinals Timothy Dolan and Donald Wuerl
"for championing this most fundamental freedom in court." Perkins has
been a frequent critic of the Obama administration, and the FRC is
deeply conservative, so their unity with Catholics on this point isn't
exactly a surprise. But what should worry Obama is that his actions have
pushed Catholics into the arms of Perkins and the FRC just a few short
months before the presidential election, and that the lawsuits and those
that follow will further solidify that alliance.
Catholics, unlike their evangelical Christian brothers and sisters, are normally not
a monolithic voting bloc. Catholics accounted for 29 percent of the
vote in 2008, according to CNN's exit polls, and Obama won a nine-point
victory in that bloc, 54 to 45. This demographic includes a significant
number of Hispanic voters, a group Obama hoped to win by promising yet
again to pursue immigration reform, having failed to deliver even a
coherent proposal for it while Democrats held overwhelming majorities in
Congress in 2009 and 2010.
Instead, parishioners attending church every week will hear constant
updates on the lawsuits and their status. They will hear appeals from
the bishops asking Catholics to pressure the White House into retreating
on the mandate. Homilies from the pulpit are likely to echo arguments such as this from Cardinal Wuerl, noting that Mother Teresa's charitable AIDS hospice in Washington, D.C., wouldn't qualify as a religious organization
in Obama's mandate. How many priests will ask from the pulpit for their
congregations to consider the absurdity of government regulations that
would have forced Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity to
provide free sterilizations and abortifacients? I would bet the number
will be more than just a few.
Obama and his team could have avoided all of this simply by allowing the
exemption to apply to all religious organizations and not just the
churches themselves. Now, however, it's probably too late; the damage to
their relationship with the bishops has been done, and a retreat now
would make Obama look considerably weaker. Instead, they will have to
fight the bishops and the heretofore sympathetic Catholic organizations
in court all the way past the general election, while trying to convince
the parishioners that Obama is, to quote an old joke, more Catholic
than the Pope.
