NRO on the contraception mandate: "Unconscionable"

Holy Name of Mary Pro-Cathedral,
Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan

I thought I was alone in thinking that the White House won't back down from its unpopular contraception order. Because when the far-left squeals on issues such as the Keystone XL pipeline or illegal immigration, President Obama caves in.

National Review Online, in an op-ed entitled "Unconscionable," explains why the White House won't be surrendering.

The Obama administration is now telling liberals that it is not backing down on its new health-care mandate, even as it coos of compromise to religious groups appalled by it. These messages may seem to be contradictory, but actually the administration has been quite consistent: Nothing it has ever said on this issue has been trustworthy.

Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, has been the leading misleader. The administration, recall, has decided that almost all employers must cover contraception, sterilization, and abortifacients in their employees’ insurance plans — even if those employers are religious universities, hospitals, and charities that reject those practices.

So she has tried to make the mandate seem more moderate than it is. In USA Today, she writes that "in the rule we put forward, we specifically carved out from the policy religious organizations that primarily employ people of their own faith." Taken at face value, this statement would seem to imply that Notre Dame could escape the mandate if it fired its non-Catholic employees. That policy would be outrageous: What gives the federal government the legitimate authority to tell a religious institution how it should structure its mission? But in fact the administration would make the university jump through several more hoops. It would also have to expel its non-Catholic students. And even these changes would not be enough, since the university would continue to do much more than attempt to inculcate religious beliefs in its students — which is another test the administration requires for the exemption to apply.

Sebelius says that three states have religious exemptions as narrow as the one the federal government has adopted. The notion that the federal government is imposing the model of three very liberal states — New York, Oregon, and Vermont — on the entire country is not comforting. But even in those states, some employers have been able to sidestep the mandates by, for example, organizing their insurance under federal regulation, which until now has not overridden conscience. The new mandate eliminates that escape route.

As I've noted before, pragmatic senior White House staffers, such as William Daley and Rahm Emanuel, eventually find themselves working elsewhere. Daley, along with Vice President Joe Biden, argued against the mandate, but Obama listened to his sycophantic left-wing choir, which is led by Valerie Jarrett.

Technorati tags: news obamacare health universal health care health care reform religion Catholic