
Andrew Sullivan, whom I assume is a Roman Catholic, has written an excellent piece on how President Obama and others, over the past month or so, have navigated these very difficult and personal social issues, to the satisfaction of the majority of American voters.
Consider these social issues:
* Gay civil unions/marriage: Prop 8 overturned in CA, reestablishing civil unions for gays.
* Planned Parenthood: Komen Foundation reversed itself on funding PP’s breast cancer screening and treatment.
* Taxes: Proposal to revise the tax code so that the burden is more uniformly shared, with on the wealthier.
* Contraception: President Obama compromise restores Catholic opt out of their health insurance coverage.
On the tax issue, the President very recently did the following:
“The next week, for good measure, President Obama was conspicuously seen going to church. And at the National Prayer Breakfast, Obama himself defended a fairer tax code as an explicitly religious issue for him: “If I’m willing to give something up as somebody who’s been extraordinarily blessed, and give up some of the tax breaks that I enjoy, I actually think that’s going to make economic sense,” he said. “But for me as a Christian, it also coincides with Jesus’ teaching that ‘for unto whom much is given, much shall be required.’””
What Christian could rightly disagree with his Jesus teaching?
On the latter and most recent social issue, contraception, here is how the President set the scene:
“Who knew the sexual and religious politics of the 1990s were suddenly back, under the president who promised he’d try to end them? And who knew the president himself—who has made an elegant art form out of avoiding exactly these kinds of controversies in his first three years—would have made the final call on the one that suddenly united the entire Republican right in roiling rage? That decision was the now-infamous one to propose a new rule to mandate coverage of contraception, sterilization, and morning-after pills in all health-insurance plans, exempting purely religious institutions, but including Catholic-run hospitals, colleges, and charities who serve the general public and employ many non-Catholics. This, House Speaker John Boehner declared, was an unprecedented assault on the First Amendment by a president who Texas Gov. Rick Perry recently said was “at war against organized religion.”
Pouring more gasoline on the rhetorical fire, evangelical leader Chuck Colson compared opposing the Obama administration’s contraception rule to Catholic religious resistance to the Nazis.”
We now know the outcome: The President compromised, such that Catholic organizations and employees could opt out of health care coverage for contraception services, but the health insurers would have to offer such coverage for those who wished to have it, for free.
And being free makes sense, because this policy saves the insurers money, contraception coverage being far cheaper than providing pre-natal, birth, and post natal care.
This then has gone from lose-lose to win-win, even though the bishops have yet to give in. Nevertheless, this makes sense to me about our tactically astute President:
“”The more Machiavellian observer might even suspect this is actually an improved bait and switch by Obama to more firmly identify the religious right with opposition to contraception, its weakest issue by far, and to shore up support among independent women and his more liberal base. I’ve found by observing this president closely for years that what often seem like short-term tactical blunders turn out in the long run to be strategically shrewd. And if this was a trap, the religious right walked right into it.
The fact is that the majority of Americans and Catholics believe that contraception should be a health insurance covered service, not to mention that “a staggering 98 percent of Catholic women not only believe in birth control but have used it”. So the moral authority of the bishops on this issue is ignored, perhaps also because of the moral breakdown among bishops on the decades old sex abuse scandals.
The fact that some bishops and the evangelical Right are continuing to hold out for more contraception coverage exemptions is rhetoric “not about protecting religious freedom. It is about imposing a particular religious doctrine on those who don’t share it as a condition for general employment utterly unrelated to religion at all.”
With contraception being as popular as it is, this position by some bishops and the evangelical Right is a losing proposition.
Finally, as food for thought for Catholics and Evangelicals who seem predisposed to join politically with the Vatican on the contraception issue, Andrew Sullivan proffers this:
“There was a time not so long ago when Catholics and other Christians weighed various moral claims to find a balance. Sometimes, the lesser of two evils was preferable. For centuries, for example, Catholic theologians, including the greatest, Thomas Aquinas, argued that human life begins not at conception but at some point in the second trimester. For centuries the Catholic Church allowed married priests. For centuries Catholics believed that extending the end of life by extreme measures like feeding tubes was a violation of natural death, which Christians of all people should not be afraid of. But this ancient, moderate, pragmatic reasoning has been rejected by the last two popes, who have increasingly become rigid, fundamentalist, and hostile to prudential balancing acts in the real, modern world we live in. Their radical fundamentalism—so alien to the spirit of the Second Vatican Council and to so many lay Catholics—has discredited the core priorities of Christianity, failed to persuade their own flock, and led to increasing politicization. And the obsession among Catholic and evangelical leaders with an issue like contraception stands in stark contrast to their indifference to, for example, the torture in which the last administration engaged, the growing social inequality fostered by unfettered capitalism, the Christian moral imperative of universal health care, and the unjust use of the death penalty. That’s why younger evangelicals are also alienated. They want to refocus on issues of the poor, prison rape, human trafficking, and the kind of injustices Jesus emphasized, rather than on these sexual sideshows the older generation seems so obsessed with.”
So politically, are the Republicans going to continue to overreach on this issue, because if they do, they will likely self-destruct, since this is clearly the direction in which this issue is headed, because *contraception* is popular; a majority of American people like it!
