Divider-in-Chief (17 page)

At this point, it seems the administration had given up trying to satisfy the church hierarchy. In fact, as it deliberated with outside groups over the compromise, the White House shut out the USCCB while allowing in and giving regular updates to liberal Catholic critics, including Sister Keehan.

Richard Doerflinger, the U.S. bishops' chief lobbyist on life issues, confirmed that the conference had not received the relevant documents regarding the accommodation until after it had been publicly announced.

By shutting out the bishops, Obama made crystal clear who was a friend and who was foe.

The
New York Times'
Laurie Goodstein wrote that the contraceptive accommodation “threatens to embroil the Catholic Church in a bitter election-year political battle while deepening internal rifts within the church. On the one side are traditionalists who believe in upholding Catholic doctrine to the letter, and on the other, modernists who believe the church must respond to changing times and a pluralistic society.”
¹⁸

Goodstein's main point was correct: the contraceptive mandate debate was dividing the church.

Numerous polls, however, also showed that the HHS mandate hurt Obama with Catholics and women. A poll commissioned by the Catholic Association and carried out by the Washington-based polling firm QEV Analytics found that 58 percent of Catholics surveyed believed that it was fair to suggest that Obama was creating divisions and conflicts with the HHS mandate.
¹⁹

Paul Danello, an expert on civil and canon law issues in Catholic health care, told the
National Catholic Register
regarding the split between the CHA and USCCB: “It's the right hand fighting against the left hand. Who is speaking for the Church here? The Church needs to get its house in order.”
²⁰

In June 2012, Carol Keehan and CHA announced in a letter to HHS that they could not support Obama's contraceptive “compromise.” Keehan criticized the plan as “unduly cumbersome” to carry out and “unlikely to adequately meet the religious liberty concerns” of all CHA's members.
²¹

In late May, forty-three Catholic entities filed twelve lawsuits challenging the HHS mandate under the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Among the plaintiffs suing the Obama administration were the Archdioceses of Washington and New York, Notre Dame University, the Michigan Catholic Conference, Catholic Charities in Illinois, Mississippi, Missouri, and Indiana, and Catholic health care agencies in New York and two dioceses in Texas.

The Catholic institutions filing lawsuits were careful to keep the focus on the essential issue. “This lawsuit is about one of America's most cherished freedoms: the freedom to practice one's religion without government interference,” opens the Notre Dame suit. “It is not about whether people have the right to abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization and contraception.”
²²

It was ironic that Notre Dame was among the Catholic entities suing the Obama administration over the contraceptive mandate. In 2009, President Obama had received an honorary law degree from, and gave the commencement speech at, Notre Dame, where he insisted, “I am a believer in conscience clauses” and “Let's honor the conscience of those who disagree with abortion.”
²³

But he qualified those statements by saying that he wanted to “draft a sensible conscience clause, and make sure that all of our health care policies are grounded in clear ethics and sound science, as well as respect for the equality of women.”
²⁴

The controversy surrounding Notre Dame's invitation to Obama, and the uproar created by the new president's appearance, was the first major sign of just how deeply Obama could divide Catholics, and a foreshadowing of things to come. A Pew Forum poll released a few days before Obama's speech found “a deep division on this issue between the most-observant Catholics and those who are less observant.”
²⁵

On graduation day, thousands of protestors descended on the Notre Dame campus in South Bend, Indiana. With the protestors outside thumbing their rosaries and getting hauled away by police, Obama walked onto the commencement stage, where he was met, first with a chorus of boos, then with cheers and chants of “Yes, we can!” and “We are N.D.!”

Obama's appearance had drawn strong opposition from many Catholic groups, including the Cardinal Newman Society, which gathered 358,000 signatures for a petition condemning Obama's invitation.
²⁶
 More than seventy American bishops—including local Bishop John D'Arcy, who boycotted the commencement—voiced their disapproval. 

It had also prompted former Vatican ambassador Mary Ann Glendon, a pro-life advocate and Harvard law professor, to announce she would not speak at the university on the same day as Obama, when she was slated to receive the Laetare Medal—an annual award given in recognition for outstanding service to the Roman Catholic Church and to society. Glendon submitted a letter to university president John Jenkins. It stated, in part:

In the wake of Obama's appearance, Notre Dame lost more than $8 million in donations from disgruntled alumni.
²⁸

The Catholic Church wasn't the only religious denomination fighting the mandate. Before Sebelius's January announcement, a group of more than sixty evangelical, Baptist, and Jewish leaders voiced their objection to the mandate in a letter to President Obama. They noted that “religious organizations beyond the Catholic community have deep moral objections” to the proposed mandate.
²⁹

And in April, three private, evangelical colleges became the first entities to sue. Colorado Christian University, Geneva College, and Louisiana College filed suit in federal court against Obama's mandate. In a
Wall Street Journal
op-ed explaining their decision, the colleges' presidents wrote that they filed suit because they too felt it was wrong that their schools “would be forced to offer abortion-inducing drugs as a part of our insurance benefits, and that is a line we cannot cross.”
³⁰

They noted that exemptions for religious entities with objections to contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs would not be unprecedented.

And in June a coalition of 150 religious leaders, led by conservative Protestants, sent a petition to the Obama administration to broaden the contraceptive mandate exception to include them.

For its part, the Catholic Church is poised to fight the mandate with everything it has—including, if necessary, civil disobedience. Citing Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, the U.S. bishops issued a nationwide bulletin in June 2012 called “Protecting Consciences: Why Conscience Is Important.” It states, in part:

The USCCB also launched a campaign called the Fortnight for Freedom in late June and early July 2012. Its goal was to alert Catholics and others who believe in the right of conscience to the danger of the HHS mandate, which took effect on August 1, 2012. There are areas of disagreement among the bishops, but on the question of protecting religious freedom there is unanimity.

On the day the Catholic lawsuits were filed, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, Archbishop of Washington, D.C., wrote a
Washington Post
op-ed explaining his church's decision to file suit:

Wuerl's last two sentences capture the essence of how the Obama administration operates. The common view is that liberals attempt to banish displays and recognition of faith in the public square in order to enforce a strict separation of church and state that denies the inherently religious founding principles of our nation.

But radical leftists (particularly champions of the Saul Alinsky worldview) use the opposite means to achieve a more sinister end. Rather than erecting a wall to keep religion out of the public square, they favor using the brute force of the state to control all that the church does. Obama and his allies would like nothing more than to turn religious groups into instruments of the federal government.

This type of church-state relationship is common in places like China and Cuba, where churches exist but derive any power they have from the state, which exploits the church's influence and means for its own ends.

Obama views civil society, including the church, as an obstacle that interferes with the only important relationship, that between citizens and the state. For that relationship to flourish, civil society must be destroyed or dominated. Radical leftists would prefer the former, but they'll settle for the latter.

With the HHS mandate, Obama is attempting to dominate the church—in order to, as Wuerl wrote, “conscript us into advancing government objectives against [Catholics'] conscience.”

T
he HHS mandate is a departure from America's tradition of respecting rights of conscience. In 1973, after the U.S. Supreme Court's
Roe
v.
Wade
decision legalizing abortion nationwide, Congress passed the Church Amendment, which exempts private entities that receive public funds from having to provide abortions or sterilizations. It also protects health care workers from being compelled to assist in those practices if they work for fund recipients.

Laws passed in the subsequent forty years have reaffirmed the federal government's commitment to protecting the conscience rights of American citizens, and extended those rights to outlaw discrimination at the state and local government levels.

Despite the vast body of law protecting conscience rights, however, there have been numerous recent attempts to weaken them through legislation, the courts, and medical licensing boards. In 1995, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education passed a regulation requiring medical schools to offer abortion training in order to receive accreditation. Only a federal law prevented its enforcement.

In 2007, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) issued a statement that health care providers may not exercise their right of conscience if it might “constitute an imposition of religious or moral beliefs on patients.”
¹

Not long after, the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ABOG) issued a policy stating that board certification can be withdrawn from providers “if there is a violation of ABOG or ACOG rules and or ethics principles or felony convictions.”
²

Michael Leavitt, secretary of health and human services under President George W. Bush, summed up the emerging position of the medical community: “[I]f a person goes to medical school, they lose their right of conscience.”
³

President Bush responded to attacks on conscience rights by reinforcing conscience protections. Shortly before leaving office, Bush issued the Provider Conscience Regulation through HHS.
⁴
It strengthened existing federal conscience laws by requiring recipients of federal funds to certify compliance and specified a mechanism for investigating complaints of conscience violations.

Barack Obama once claimed to support “robust” conscience protections for those with religious or moral objections to participating in life-destroying procedures. But in 2011, Obama, through HHS, released a directive to rescind the Bush order.
⁵
The Obama administration claimed, without evidence, that the conscience protections could endanger some people's access to medical care.

To understand why the administration would attack conscience rights, one must first understand the mindset of the abortion absolutist. Obama and his allies consider “reproductive care,” including abortion, to be “preventive care” and thus “fundamental care.” As Obama himself has said, “reproductive justice” is “one of the most fundamental rights we possess.”
⁶

Since they are “essential” and “fundamental” to health care, birth control and abortion-on-demand must be covered in all health plans free of
charge. To abortion advocates, then, whenever First Amendment conscience rights collide with access to abortion or birth control, “reproductive rights” must triumph.