The blogosphere is hopping today with commentary about the HHS controversy and the Catholic bishops' alliance with the Republican party in suddenly seeking, as an election nears, to make a major issue of "conscience" out of what they've long since accepted in more than half of the states in the nation (i.e., mandated contraceptive coverage in health care plans in Catholic institutions)1. As my contribution for readers of this blog, who are, I suspect, very well-versed in the news and don't need me to provide any more extensive commentary, I'll list the articles that have caught my eye in the past two days:
As I said yesterday, I have thought all along (after the administration initially surprised me by accepting the National Academy of Science's Institute of Medicine's recommendations for HHS) that the administration would eventually cave in to the orchestrated bullying campaign of the U.S. bishops, the Republican party, and centrist Democrats who get their kicks by feeling they control the Democrat party and by repeatedly marginalizing its progressive wing. I've thought the administration would eventually compromise for a variety of reasons.
This is and has been a centrist administration from the outset. The president chose to keep alive the "faith-based" umbrella that Bush created for religious groups offering public services, which provides unprecedented exceptions for religious institutions and gives them lavish support that erodes the wall separating church and state. Mr. Obama has always been attuned to the arguments of centrist Democrats who insist that the Democratic party has alienated religious voters, and who maintain that, if it expects to win elections, the Democratic party must reach out to "faith-based values" voters by courting religious groups more overtly.
As I've just noted, in the Catholic context, at least, many of those centrist Democrats who are essentially Republicans wearing Democratic clothes have an exceptionally nasty streak. They gloat about their effectiveness in marginalizing progressives, and they delight in assisting the American bishops in letting uppity women know that women just don't count when it comes to wielding power and making decisions. They have invested a great deal of emotional and psychological energy in this discussion, those centrist Catholic "Democrats" who actively need to bruise and nullify their progressive co-religionists, because it's in the final analysis about them. It's about their pretense to speak on behalf of others and to make themselves feel important as winners by making the more vulnerable into losers. They see this as a winners-and-losers kind of battle in which their access to power and their right to allocate privileges to others is vindicated.
They are also advising the president and the Democratic party that it can afford to slap women and progressives in the face one more time over the HHS guidelines, since they think that progressives will naturally vote Democratic in the coming elections. Where else do we have to go?
But they may turn out to have miscalculated this time. As the reaction to what the Susan G. Komen foundation tried to do demonstrates, progressive voters are singularly energized over issues of women's right to good health care these days, and there will be significant pushback if the Obama administration caves in to those pressuring it to alter its initial decision about the HHS guidelines.
Polls indicate that Republican turnout in the primaries held thus far has been nowhere near the level of Republican turnout in 2008. Republicans are demoralized due to the exceptionally shoddy slate of candidates from which they're being asked to choose a candidate.
And a wrong step on the part of the Obama administration right now could demoralize a lot of Democratic voters just as decisively, and could result in many of us choosing to sit out the 2012 elections.
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