FIC Blog

In the matter of President Obama’s attempt to force Catholic institutions to provide and pay for abortifacients, contraceptives and sterilizations, Family Institute of Connecticut Action has focused on the policy implications, not the politics, of the federal government issuing a mandate forcing people to violate their religious beliefs. (You can view our campaign to win Sen. Lieberman’s support here and my speech at yesterday’s religious liberty rally here.)

Fr. Dwight Longenecker suspects the HHS Mandate is an Election Year ruse:

This is part of a political ploy in election year. The HHS Mandate was a set up. It wasn’t about women’s health. It wasn’t about contraceptives per se. It was a way to set the Catholic Church against the Obama administration and then, by November, to portray the Catholic Church and the Republican party as being in an anti-contraception alliance.

Fr. Longenecker believes that President Obama would happily grant everyone an exemption after the election, the HHS mandate having already served its real purpose of aiding his re-election.

I would not go that far. The Obama Administration–and more importantly, the pro-abortion constituencies that would be quickest to cry “betrayal” if the administration reverses course–really believe in the mandate and either don’t believe or don’t care that it violates the First Amendment.

That said, Fr. Longenecker is on to something. Government-controlled health care and gays in the military were failed trial-balloons in the Clinton era that became political realities under President Obama. So, too, is the federal government’s attack on the Catholic Church.

In 1997, in a little-noted parallel to today’s headlines, then-Vice President Al Gore gave a speech on the Roe v. Wade anniversary singling out Catholics as the cause of the nation’s high abortion rate. The late-90’s political atmosphere was not sufficiently anti-Catholic enough for Gore to mention us by name. Rather, he focused on pro-lifers who oppose contraception–by definition, a group limited almost entirely to orthodox Catholics.

I think that speech was the first time I ever realized Al Gore was a liar. He claimed to have spoken to pro-life leaders who said they would like to work with him but that an anti-contraception minority of their own membership would not allow it. After his speech, every major pro-life leader stated publicly that Gore never spoke to them. No pro-life leader ever claimed to have been the person or persons Gore was citing.

There is a line that runs from Al Gore’s 1997 Roe v. Wade speech, through the mainstream media’s weird desire to falsely portray Republican presidential candidates as wanting to ban contraception, to the HHS mandate. Fr. Longenecker is correct. The administration and its allies are deliberately exploiting the Church’s unpopular position on contraception to make her the enemy, tie the Republican Party to her, split allies on the right and win re-election. I would only add that Democratic administrations have toyed with the idea since at least the late 90’s. As with so much else, things that were mere pipe dreams of the cultural Left in the Clinton era have now become reality.

There is another sinister political aspect to the HHS Mandate. In 2009 when President Obama, over the objections of 60 bishops, was given an award by Notre Dame, George Weigel had this reaction to his speech:

What was surprising, and ought to be disturbing to anyone who cares about religious freedom in these United States, was the president’s decision to insert himself into the ongoing Catholic debate over the boundaries of Catholic identity and the applicability of settled Catholic conviction in the public square. Obama did this by suggesting, not altogether subtly, who the real Catholics in America are.

At the time, I did not understand what Weigel was talking about. I do now.

When the HHS Mandate met with a firestorm of protest, the President responded with a meaningless “accommodation.” He did not reach the “accommodation” by speaking with the Bishops, the legitimate locus of authority in the Catholic Church. Instead, he crafted it according to what would satisfy Sr. Carol Keehan, the president of the Catholic Health Association who had helped him pass ObamaCare into law. One dissident nun was given more authority to set policy for the Catholic Church in the United States than its own Bishops. To borrow Weigel’s language, President Obama took it upon himself to decide for Catholic Americans who our real Pope is.

We have seen this sort of thing before. We saw it here in Connecticut in 2009 when the judiciary committee attempted to strip Catholic bishops and priests of authority over their own parishes. And we have seen where this strategy ends: in China’s “patriotic” government-controlled Catholic and Protestant churches.

There are so many issues at stake in the HHS Mandate. There is the unprecedented attack by the federal government on the First Amendment rights of all of us. There is the horror of America’s 39-year-long Roe v. Wade regime reaching its natural end in a law that makes all of us morally complicit in the unspeakable crime of abortion. There are the other dangers of increased state control over our lives that will become more evident as ObamaCare’s provisions are implemented.

Add to all these dangers the unprecedented situation of a President of the United States who seeks to make the Catholic Church an enemy of the Republic and to take it upon himself to decide who will and will not speak for the Church. Such struggles have occurred elsewhere throughout history but never in this country.

Archbishop Dolan warned President Obama five months ago that his policies would “precipitate a national conflict between church and state of enormous proportions.” But that seems to be exactly what the President wants.