As expected, the Obama administration did make its announcement compromising yesterday with the U.S. Catholic bishops over the matter of the HHS guidelines. I won't insult the sharp readers of this blog with links to articles summarizing the details of the compromise, insofar as they've now been placed on the table. I know full well that most of you have kept up with the news about this development, and if not, will be adroit about finding good statements about it.
As well as I understand, the arrangement proposed by the administration does not forfeit women's access to contraceptive coverage in health care plans, but protects the tender consciences of the bishops by proposing to transfer the payment for that coverage to insurance providers rather than to institutions that object on grounds of conscience to having their money used to support contraceptive coverage for their employees.
And isn't it grand that the bishops display such acute conscience about how their money and the money of Catholic institutions gets used, so that no Catholic institutions (or bishops or dioceses) ever intend to have any money invested in anything that would support anti-life causes either directly or indirectly? It's grand to see the bishops suggesting by implication, for instance, that Catholic institutions must divest themselves of all investments that help build armaments directly or indirectly, since it would be extremely hard to characterize investments in the arms industry as pro-life, especially when children are starving in many places in the world and lack basic health care. And as Martin Luther King, Jr., observed, what we give to building arms takes food out of the mouths of the hungry.
It's also grand to hear the bishops articulating a principle of conscience which implies they'll think long and hard about the anti-life implications of using their money to strip rights from vulnerable targeted minorities susceptible to violence. Since it would be hard for the bishops to represent themselves as pro-life if they were contributing to a climate of repression of targeted minorities that actually helps foster violence against such minorities. And when the animosities bishops work up by spending large sums of money to strip rights from stigmatized minorities might well spill over into the lives of young members of such minorities, such that they begin to feel their lives are not worth living.
We Catholics do think it's just very grand when our bishops' consciences are so tender about all the life-issues involved in the pro-life political discussions that roil American culture so persistently now during each election cycle. Three cheers for our bishops as the official voice of Catholic conscience in the public square!
The president's proposed compromise strikes me as a politically astute one, since the bishops will now reject it only at their great risk. It boxes them in, even as it grants them an apparent victory.
It does so because if they reject it out of hand, they risk appearing to be rigid ideologues out of touch with the tribe on whose behalf they claim to speak or, even worse, baldly partisan political players whose primary interest in this manufactured war about contraceptive coverage in Catholic institutions has really been about influencing the fall elections more than anything else--and attacking the president. They (and their centrist Catholic media mouthpieces) have already done considerable damage to the Catholic church's credibility in the public square by giving this impression through their overheated, belligerent rhetoric, so that articles like Steven M's claiming that the Catholic church is nothing but a super-PAC in clerical robes are now popping up and will continue to pour forth even more if the bishops don't reciprocate the gracious overtures of the Obama administration with equal grace.
If the bishops refuse to accept the compromise, they'll appear to be petulant children to the Obama administration's as reasonable adult, and they'll give the administration the moral high road by seeming to be more interested in wielding swords than beating them into plowshares and reasoning together with other adults.
By the end of the day yesterday (I'm writing this in the middle of s sleepless night, and haven't checked the news since the end of the day), there were a number of outstanding articles already coming out applauding the Obama administration for its pacific approach to the bishops' war, and for its reasonable adult response. One that caught my eye, in particular, was Joan Walsh's article at Salon about how the reflex, atavistic tribalism that still dominates the thinking of not a few American Catholics has just led to the surprising, curious spectacle of leading centrist Catholic voices holding forth loudly in support of a magisterial position about birth control that the vast majority of Catholics--almost all liberal Catholics included--have long since rejected.
Walsh notes that, as a Catholic, she understands those atavistic tugs (and, yes, she does use these terms--"tribalistic" and "atavistic"--and I'm not imposing them on her analysis). But she also notes the considerable damage the primitivism of atavistic and tribalistic attitudes inflicts on the church itself--notably, by shoving out of the conversation Catholics who aren't willing to walk in unthinking lockstep unison with the tribal leaders, when the leaders rattle their weapons to muster the faithful.
She notes, in particular, how women have long been excluded from tribal Catholic conversations that are all about women's needs and issues--as the current discussion of providing contraceptive coverage to women as a matter of basic health care demonstrates. She notes that the Catholic tribal response, whether from the fringe right or the center-right perspective that now is the center for Catholicism as it interacts with the public square, has been entirely dominated by men (the centrist analysis here is mine, and not Walsh's).
And she thinks it's all to the good that the recent (and perhaps ongoing) discussion of the contraceptive issue and insurance coverage of contraceptives is also beginning to permit the voices of women to be heard--albeit very slowly, in the case of the Catholic church and Catholic women.
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