HHS Controversy and Catholic Vote: A Selection of Recent Articles

Commentary from various perspectives about the bishops' war on Obama over the HHS guidelines:

Charlotte Allen finds it "refreshing" that "Catholics" are all now in rare agreement about how the Obama administration is trampling on the religious freedom of "Catholics"--since it's about religious freedom and not contraception, you understand.  Allen finds it especially "refreshing" to see "liberal Catholics - people who don't even agree with the church's position on contraception" helping the bishops lie and dissimulate manufacture totally false claims that the Obama administration is at war with Catholics in an effort to drive swing-state Catholic voters to the polls to vote Republican.

Since, I suppose Ms. Allen intends to argue, it always best serves moral values (and builds credibility for a our Christian church) when we lie, dissimulate, and argue for positions in which we don't even believe.  As long as our tribal father leader instructs us to behave this way.

Joan Walsh, by contrast, recalls that 98% of Catholics practice contraception at some points in their lives, and wonders why those 98% of Catholics are so silent now that the rabid right (with the bishops leading the charge) are going for the Obama administration's jugular.  She turns Ms. Allen's power-and-establishment-serving argument on its head, noting that the religious freedom question at stake here is the "liberty of non-Catholic women who work for Catholic employers to have the full spectrum of healthcare coverage, regardless of what the church believes."

The Philadelphia Daily News weighs in with an editorial noting the grand lie that the bishops (and their powerfully connected media water-carriers including Michael Sean Winters at National Catholic Reporter) are trying to shop around now to accomplish their political goal of undermining the Obama administration: that the new HHS guidelines require Catholics to pay for abortions.  The Daily News notes that the Catholic bishops and their media spokespersons are "falsely equating contraception with abortion."

And the editorial adds, 

So Philadelphia Archbishop Charles J. Chaput is wrong when he claims that, under the new rule, Catholic-affiliated hospitals and colleges would have to provide health coverage for "abortion-inducing drugs." The policy states plainly that the coverage is only for FDA-approved contraception. (The contention that birth-control pills act after conception is scientifically inaccurate: even the Catholic Health Association agrees. It headlined a 2010 article on Plan B emergency contraception, "Science shows it is not an abortifacient.")

Meanwhile, as Sarah Posner reports at Religions Dispatches (and see also here), polls are now indicating that a majority of Catholic voters favor the HHS guidelines that the Obama administration has just approved.  And so Lisa Fullam concludes at Commonweal, in contrast to Charlotte Allen that, though "[t]he USCCB may be unified on the contraception mandate . . . Catholics aren’t."

And as the manufactured controversy about attacks on Catholic religious freedom unfolds, the Obama administration may or may not be caving in to demands from the religious and political right and the morally vacuous centrists allied with the right on these issues, and may cut a deal about the conscience exemption.  News reports about that possibility are conflicting.  (And, for my part, I have to confess that I've thought all long, even after the administration adopted the recommended guidelines for HHS, that it would eventually cave to the right and the morally vacuous centrists in order to play to the Catholic voters in swing states who are the real object of all this posturing about a war on Catholics.)

I say "morally vacuous" when I refer to the centrists who pretend to have liberal viewpoints but who predictably let the right determine the contours of conversations for this reason: as Joan Walsh points out, they keep their mouths shut when the right appears to be winning.  Because they intend to be on the side of power.  No matter who that power is and what it does.  They've long done this when the fellow human beings who are being savaged by the religious and political right are gay, and they continue behaving precisely this way at Catholic blog sites when slurs are made against gay folks: they keep their mouths shut about the slurs and never stand up to their fellow Catholics engaging slinging around the hateful language.

And as Charlotte Allen points out--though, astonishingly, she thinks this is admirable and morally justifiable behavior--they'll even carry water for the right when their own beliefs and their own lives belie the moral claims they're helping the fringe right promote.  And--even more preposterously--as they behave this way, they expect the rest of us, the 98%, to defer to their claims to have superior knowledge and superior moral insight as they speak on our behalf in the power-making conversations of the church and public square.