As a shaky but still practicing Catholic, I have a “Catholic problem.” His name is President Obama.
Obama has a Catholic problem, too. And his problem is bigger than mine, because I’m not running for anything.
The Obama administration recently handed down an edict that requires Catholic institutions to provide coverage for birth control as part of their health insurance packages. Only problem is the church is down on birth control, considers its use a sin. And it’s been that way for some time now. Apparently Barack Hussein Obama never got that memo when he was doing all that community organizing out there in Chicago.
The reaction of the church and many Catholics has been swift, and it has been one of outrage.
I can’t say my reaction was similar. I’d expect just about anything of a president who seems to think that Roe v. Wade wasn’t a Supreme Court decision — and an egregiously flawed one — but God’s 11th commandment. The church also considers abortion a sin, and it wouldn’t surprise me that the thinking underlying Obama’s birth control mandate was this: “I can’t push the church around on abortion, but I can push ’em around on birth control.”
That presents Obama with another problem: What he did smacks of unwarranted, unconstitutional and heavy-handed federal government interference with a religion. It looks like Obama spent way too much time as a law professor teaching his students that abortion was a sacred right and not enough time reading that First Amendment stuff about freedom of religion.
Obama’s defenders are quick to drag stats into the issue. They point to this percentage of Catholics or, more specifically, Catholic women who support or practice birth control. They dredge up numbers of the percentage of Catholics who voted for Obama in 2008. (New York Daily News columnist S.E. Cupp put the figure at 54 percent, which only proves many of us Catholics were just as clueless as anybody else who catapulted him into the Oval Office.)
I get the feeling Obama may have listened to some of the people slinging these figures about before he made his decision, but he — and they — forget one thing.
Church doctrine is church doctrine. It’s not subject to a vote, or the ballot box, or a poll. The church hands it down. Individual Catholics are free to follow it or ignore it. Neither the pope, nor cardinals, nor archbishops nor bishops nor individual priests nor monsignors force individual Catholics to follow church doctrine — and not just the birth control part, either. Those decisions are left to each and every Catholic.
Catholic institutions that offer health care coverage to their employees don’t get to make the decision of whether to cover a procedure prohibited by church doctrine. Not any more, because Pope Barack I has made that decision for them.
And that, dear readers, is why all those figures about what percentage of Catholics and/or Catholic women support birth control, and about what percentage of Catholics voted for Obama, are absolutely irrelevant to this discussion. Those Catholics had the freedom make their decisions. They made them.
Catholic institutions, and those who follow Catholic teaching, will now have no such freedom. They have no “choice” — a word that’s really a big deal among the pro-abortion crowd and their new pope, Obama. If it involves a “woman’s right to choose” whether or not to have an abortion, it’s a sacred right. If it’s a Catholic institution’s right to choose whether to offer birth control coverage in a health insurance package, then it’s no right at all.
Considering all this, how can any Catholic consider voting for Obama in 2012?
Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer-nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.
