I’m not so sure… I mean, isn’t he still mandating what it is Americans can or can’t do without due process?
President Obama is scheduled to announce Friday afternoon a revamp of his contraception policy requiring religious institutions to fully pay for birth control, changing the onus on who pays for contraception from employers to insurance companies.
Sources tell CBS News the White House will not back off the administration goal to provide increased access to birth control for women, but it will provide religious institutions additional details on how to comply with the law.
Senior administration officials tells CBS News the new policy will mean female employees of religious institutions will get free contraceptive coverage from health insurers, without employers having to pay for it.
Religious institutions don’t have to cover it, don’t have to pay for it, and they don’t have to refer women to it. It is the insurance companies’ responsibility, per the Obama administration.
I agree with Professor Reynolds:
My advice to the bishops: He’s on the run — don’t settle for his opening bid.
The focus needs to be liberty. Period. Religious or otherwise and this administration’s attempt to circumvent what our forefathers died on battlefields to give us.
He’s still mandating, to religious organizations and all others, what Americans must purchase, must possess.
The man and those who think like him are still a threat.
Father Z references the words of his good friend Roman Fabrizio to spell it out:
Where am I going with all this?
It’s good to see such a massive reaction – albeit only a verbal one so far – by the US bishops. But if they think that all they have to aim to is for Obama and his Kommissars to drop the contraception mandate they’re in for bitter surprises down the road, and they would prove that they are completely missing what’s at stake here (but some bishops gave me hope with what they wrote).
What I mean is that it is inherent to the very idea of socialized medicine that the state gets to tell you what to do and what to pay for and how much.
It’s all about the delusional thought that unhindered “planning” done by “experts” who “know” is what will make the magic machine work. They may back down on secondary provisions for political/electoral reasons, but the principle they want to enshrine is that the state is the ultimate and basically the sole provider of healthcare. What it does is bring to completion the utter distortion of the relationship between the individual, the family and all “intermediate bodies” of society and the State. In other words, the contrary of subsidiarity, which is the XX century Catholic name for the originally Catholic concept of “limited government”. Once it’s in place, you can kiss the Declaration of Independence and the whole Land of the Free business goodbye. You’ll be forever a glorified European Union.
Sooner or later, because of the invitable rationing that comes with centralized healthcare, they won’t even need to mandate that you perform abortions or give away condoms. You’ll simply lose all hospitals and schools because there is no way a large independent health provider can survive in such a system. Why do you think so many Italian hospitals, founded centuries ago, with names of saints and popes, are nowinn the hands of the Sistema Sanitario Nazionale, directly or indirectly? Why do you think there is hardly a Catholic school that is affordable anymore and which teaches anything different from what kids would hear at the Liceo Statale A. Gramsci or what have you?
The contraception/abortion coverage mandate is immoral, we all agree on that, but getting Catholics – and anybody who’s not in the service of the State – out of the healthcare system is PRECISELY what the goverment wants. If they can force you to accept it now, that’s good for the State, they take over indirectly. If you go the principled way and shut down or sell facilities, that’s good for the State, they take over directly. If you manage to obtain an exemption, that’s still good, the principle of the State running the asylum will still be there and it will become unstoppable before too long and you’ll have to cave in anyway.
You can’t help but wonder if we’ve been played.
America needs to see this man and his minions for what they are. A threat to our liberty.
UPDATE: Mark Shea calls today’s move a head fake from our tyrant King:
Don’t be a sucker. No compromise. This assault on religious liberty must be utterly defeated and salt sowed in its smoldering ashes. This man is an enemy of the Church and is acting with malice.
Read the whole thing.
