Bishops sue over birth control

More than 40 Catholic institutions, including the archdioceses of New York, St. Louis, and Washington, D.C., filed lawsuits this week challenging the Obama administration’s requirement that employers provide insurance coverage for birth control. Catholic bishops say the mandate, part of the new health-care law, is an unprecedented assault on religious freedom because it compels Catholic-run hospitals and schools to give employees access to services that violate Catholic teachings. President Obama offered a compromise in February, allowing insurance companies, rather than the Catholic institutions that engage them, to pay for birth control coverage. But bishops rejected it, saying the Catholic Church would still be forced to facilitate what it considers immoral activities. “Fundamental rights hang in the balance,” said Cardinal Timothy Dolan, “so we have to resort to the courts now.”

The stakes could not be higher, said Mary Ann Glendon in The Wall Street Journal. Catholic institutions are concerned about the alarming “erosion of conscience protections” under this administration, and this mandate is President Obama’s most serious attempt yet to “conscript religious organizations into a political agenda.” If this assault is not repelled, we risk demoting religious liberty “from its prominent place among this country’s most cherished freedoms.”

This isn’t about religious liberty, said Maureen Dowd in The New York Times. It’s about the all-male Vatican hierarchy trying to put “women in chastity belts.” These same moral pillars let “unchaste priests run wild for decades,’’ passing molested children “around like Communion wine.’’ Polls show that 82 percent of Catholics think birth control is morally acceptable. So to scare Catholics into siding with them, the bishops are falsely claiming that the White House’s contraception rule will force them to turn non-Catholics away from hospitals, schools, and shelters. The bishops’ truculent stand, said E.J. Dionne in WashingtonPost.com, is “looking more and more like a direct intervention in this fall’s elections.”

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All the more reason Obama should tread carefully, said Michael Gerson in The Washington Post. Cultural debates may lag behind the economy in priority for most voters, but issues like this may be decisive with Catholic constituencies in critical battleground states. Obama has gambled that “appealing to younger, nonreligious voters is worth the alienation of traditional Catholics.” It’s a strategy he may regret come November.