In response to President Obama’s announcement that religious organizations will not be exempt from Obamacare’s requirement that all health plans cover certain abortion-producing drugs, sterilization procedures and contraceptive devices by 2013, Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said, “in effect the president is saying we have a year to figure out how to violate our consciences.” America’s Catholic leadership is learning that providing “free” government health care comes with strings. Too often a commendable concern for people’s welfare makes them — and most of the rest of the population for that matter — blind to the costs.
The hammer has now fallen and the choices will be agonizing, and not only for Catholics.
The new Department of Health and Human Services regulations — by a Catholic HHS secretary no less — will narrowly interpret a “religious employer exception” as applying only to organizations primarily serving people only of the same denomination such as at religious services.
Since Catholic charitable, hospital and educational organizations serve all religions, they will not qualify. These institutions must choose between refusing to help people of other faiths, denying health care coverage to their employees, or violating their consciences. The government says to be good Americans they must violate their consciences.
The Catholic hierarchy is mostly begging the president or the courts to expand the definition of exempt organizations to include them. That is not enough since the definition could be narrowed again with another big Democratic congressional majority, a re-elected President Obama or new justices.
How about exempting nonreligious organizations with similar moral concerns? The Obama rule is a general threat of state control of conscience that demands a more fundamental reaction.
Interestingly, the bishops had just returned from visiting Pope Benedict XVI when he warned them that U.S. Catholics must become concerned with the “grave threats” facing them from an aggressive radical secularism in many aspects of their daily lives.
Benedict was informed that the vast network of Catholic social services for adoption and foster-care placement are being forced by state and local governments to violate their consciences by placing Catholic children in same-gender homes as a result of anti-discrimination, civil union and marriage equality laws.
Bishops in some states have either shut down adoption programs or have lost their government contracts to provide community services.
Abortion especially offends the Catholic conscience, as it does for many Christians, orthodox Jews and others. While there are national laws denying direct funding for abortions, organizations like Planned Parenthood that perform abortions do get tax-supported funding that allows them to shift other resources to other projects.
Even liberals were shocked. The Rev. John Jenkins, who hosted President Obama as president of Notre Dame University, called the HHS regulation an “unnecessary government intervention” that puts him in the “untenable position” of dropping coverage for 5,229 employees and a $10 million fine every year to follow his conscience.
Liberal favorite Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony said he “cannot imagine a more direct and frontal attack on freedom of conscience.” St. Petersburg, Fla., Bishop Robert Lynch even suggested “civil disobedience.”
As Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn notes, the institutions that are targeted by the Obama regulations threaten “the institutions closest to [Catholic] hearts — those serving Americans in need, such as hospitals, soup kitchens and immigrant services.”
Regardless, if the president is re-elected, Obamacare will go into effect and become the law of the land. All good Americans would then be obliged to obey it no matter how many consciences are violated. Or would they?
Bishop Edwin O’Brien of Baltimore was blunt: “We cannot — we will not — comply with this unjust law.”
Donald Devine is editor of ConservativeBattleline Online and senior scholar at the Fund for American Studies. President Reagan appointed him as director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management from 1981 to 1985.
