Looking for a Ship

A Wall Street Journal Outlook piece late last week noted,

“Here’s a conundrum: The White House wants to impose its birth-control ideology on all Americans, including those for whom sponsoring or subsidizing such services violates their moral conscience. The White House also wants to avoid a political backlash from this blow to religious freedom.”

The writer correctly observed that these goals are irreconcilable.
Now, President Obama has floated: “The government will now write a rule that says the best things in life are ‘free,’ including contraception. Thus a political mandate will be compounded by an uneconomic one—in other words, behold the soul of ObamaCare.”

Behold the soul (or lack thereof) of ObamaCare, indeed. One way or another, the mandate is forced down the throats of Christions who object. In the arrogance of the administration, they have “compromised” on the the original Health and Human Services regulation, which mandated that all religious institutions except for houses of worship would be  required to cover birth control, including hospitals, schools and
charities.

Now, under the new, improved, rule, which the White House stresses is
“an accommodation” and not a compromise, nonprofit religious
organizations won’t have to directly cover birth control and can opt
out.

Aha! Shazam! No problem–except that the insurers they retain to cover their employees can’t opt out. In the words of the immortal Blondie, “One way, or another, I’m gonna’ getcha’, getcha’, getcha!”

Here’s the deal: St. Swithun’s Hospital decides not to cover birth control for employees on moral grounds. Nevertheless, a nurse on staff wants the coverage. So, the Obamandate will then require the insurerr required to offer contraceptive benefits in any event, at no cost to the nurse, or to any other worker. This is to nsure “access” to contraceptives. The costs will be passed along, somewhere, you betcha; and those with an objection will have the choice forced on them at not-so-arm’s length”

For the true believer in socialism in any of its forms, language means only what is necessary to accomplish the goal-the remaking of society to fit the socialist ideal. Marx, Lenin, Mao and a bunch of other humanitarians all articulated this principle.
So it is that, “if you like your health care, you can keep your health care” actually means that “you will accept the health care that we, the vanguard, have deemed appropriate.” An administration official admitted in a conference call with reporters that this was the goal all along.

The legal and moral standpoint, failure to resist this stuff is the death of the Constitution and of free exercise of conscience in this nation. This gets lost because we have been sold the desirability of “sexual freedom” (trans. “sex without responsibility”) through contraception.

From a societal and religious perspective, John Paul II of blessed memory warned of this. Thanks be to God, the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox bishops in the United States resisted the original plan, and the Roman Catholic bishops took a pass on the sequel late today.

The statement released by the Catholic Bishops conference said the proposal requires “careful moral analysis,” saying it did not appear to offer clear protection for self-insured religious employers or religious and secular for-profit and non-profit employers. The “compromise” proposal continues to involve needless government intrusion in the internal governance of religious institutions, and to threaten government coercion of religious people and groups to violate their most deploy held convictions,” the Catholic bishops’s statement said. Pretty clear, that. No surrender.

The Episcopal church, of course, embraced the modernist dream-indeed, offering up a clergywoman and “theology professor” last night on the news to talk about the “blessings of abortion”. One need only to compare the Roman Catholic Church (1.4 billion and growing) and the Episcopal sect (maybe 700,000 left) to see the result.

Continuing Anglican bishops? Still a stunning silence-with the exception of the new Anglican Church in North America which supported the Roman Catholics’ right to freedom of conscience. At least that’s something. Remember: contraception on demand has been a part of the Anglican/Episcopalian ethos since the 1930s. This already was engrained in many Episcopal clergy even before the 1978 split and has carried over into traditionalist Anglican moral theology, whatever that is. The declining birthrate, paralleled in “mainstram” Protestant denominations, is evident in the miniscule and declining membership rates of these groups.

In the meantime, the Western and Eastern Churches are left to defend the Christian standard and with it, the Constitution, while other religious leaders await the spring catalogues from vestment sellers.

Let us hope and pray that this fall we can say to the would-be-robbers of conscience, Christianity and Constitutional rights, “One way or another I’m gonna lose ya…” (With apoligies to, and appreciation for, Blondie)