When Joe Biden promised last month to reinstate a contraception mandate on the Little Sisters of the Poor, he ditched the last of his previous moderation on religious issues.
Biden’s statement, which came after the Supreme Court freed the Little Sisters from the mandate, was expected: the former vice president has moved steadily left on social issues since declaring his candidacy last April. Biden used to support the Hyde Amendment, which bars federally funded abortions. Now he opposes it. In the Senate, he opposed adding transgender protections to a gay-rights pledge. Now he calls transgender rights the “civil rights issue of our time.” He has even flipped on the Little Sisters case itself. He privately opposed the Obama-era contraception mandate until the Supreme Court in July overruled it. Now he promises to “restore” the old policy.
The reversals perfectly illustrate the Biden conundrum. He is running as the establishment moderate: he opposes Medicare For All, called for cracking down on looters and violent protesters during anti-police demonstrations, is more hawkish on foreign policy than much of his party and less critical of environmental bugaboos such as fracking. His surge of primary victories came thanks to other candidates coalescing behind him as the way to stop Bernie Sanders’s socialist agenda. Yet social issues have become nonnegotiable for too many Democrats.
And then there is his faith. Joe Biden has always maintained his Catholicism plays a role in his life. In an increasingly radical and anti-Catholic party, Biden must walk a fine line.
Meanwhile his coreligionist critics say that he cannot claim to be a faithful Catholic and support policies contradicting Church teaching. Biden has always responded that his religion is a personal matter and that he will not “impose” his beliefs on others. But in the 2020 race, there are few moderates, left or right — and Biden’s balancing act is teetering.
Biden’s troubles began with the Hyde Amendment. He had always voted for it while in the Senate, along with other measures restricting abortion. But when he reaffirmed his support last June, nearly every candidate in the then-crowded field — as well as every prominent abortion advocacy group — lashed out at him. His top opponents, Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Bernie Sanders, condemned his opinion as retrograde, with Sanders explaining that there is “no middle ground on women’s rights.”
Biden flipped the next day, saying that “circumstances have changed” on the issue.
This created a bigger problem than credibility damage from flip-flopping on such a high-profile issue. Biden’s newfound opposition to the Hyde Amendment stripped him of his claim to moderation on abortion — and exposed him to a new line of attacks. Later that year, Robert Morey, a priest in South Carolina, denied him communion on the grounds that Biden had effectively tossed himself out of the Church.
“Holy Communion signifies we are one with God, each other, and the Church,” Morey said. “Our actions should reflect that. Any public figure who advocates for abortion places himself or herself outside of Church teaching.”
Biden refused to speak about the incident when prodded by PBS’s Judy Woodruff beyond saying that, in the past, Pope Francis had given him communion.
The dispute echoed a similar battle fought by John Kerry, also a Catholic, when he ran against George W. Bush in 2004. Then-St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke said that he would deny Kerry communion because he had voted in favor of legislation supporting abortion.
Once Biden became the presumptive Democratic nominee, the Trump campaign launched a more wide-ranging attack. Accusing Biden of disingenuously playing “the Catholic card,” the Trump team that, in reality, the former vice president was an enemy of religious liberty. At the same time, the campaign launched Catholics for Trump, a coalition aimed at combating Biden’s appeal to fellow members of his faith. The coalition’s argument was that Biden, through his service in the Obama administration, was complicit in an assault on the freedoms of the Little Sisters, who were then embroiled in nearly a decade of litigation over contraception provisions in the Affordable Care Act.
Tim Huelskamp, the former Tea Party congressman serving on the coalition’s advisory board, told the Washington Examiner that, no matter how the Supreme Court decided the Little Sisters case, Trump can repeatedly whack Biden for it, simply because Biden was Obama’s top adviser when the contraception mandate was instituted.
“He can have Joe Biden and the Democratic Party hating the Little Sisters of the Poor,” Huelskamp said of Trump. “That is just not a good position to be in for the Democratic Party.”
But the truth of Biden’s position on the Little Sisters is murkier. Until the Supreme Court decided that the nuns were free from the imposition of the mandate, which required that the group pay for employees’ contraception in its insurance plans, Biden had never publicly commented on the case.
In private, he had opposed it. In 2012, Biden, along with then-White House chief of staff Bill Daley (also Catholic), attempted to block the inclusion of the mandate in the ACA, fearing it would hurt Obama’s electoral chances in the Upper Midwest. They were overruled by then-Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who felt it was an important women’s issue. The final mandate included narrow exceptions for churches. It was a precursor of the fight Biden is in eight years later, only this time the buck stops with him.
How Biden handled losing that internal battle is also instructive. Biden campaigned as if the exceptions were wider than they actually were. In an October 2012 debate with vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan, Biden said that most Catholic institutions were protected.
“With regard to the assault on the Catholic Church, let me make it absolutely clear: No religious institution, Catholic or otherwise — including Catholic Social Services, Georgetown Hospital, Mercy, any hospital — none has to either refer contraception, none has to pay for contraception, none has to be a vehicle to get contraception in any insurance policy they provide,” Biden said. “That is a fact.”
This was, strictly speaking, not a fact — and Ryan pointed that out in his response.
“If they agree with you, why would they keep suing you?” he asked in reference to a growing number of religious liberty cases against the Obama administration, which would soon come to include that of the Little Sisters.
Biden didn’t have an effective response. And when he finally did speak publicly on the issue, the day of the Supreme Court’s decision, circumstances had once again changed, just as they had with the Hyde Amendment. Now Biden faced a Republican aggressively pursuing religious liberty causes and a Democratic Party openly hostile to them.
The Little Sisters decision was tinderbox and the White House was quick to light the flame. In a statement released shortly after the court’s decision, Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany lambasted the “overly rigid and misguided efforts” of the Obama administration in instituting the mandate. She also praised the Trump administration for seeking “to lift burdens on religious exercise” for people in every religion “since Day One,” via executive orders and court appointments. Unlike the previous administration, she added, it had the “courage of our convictions” to extend protections to all classes of society.
Democratic denunciations of the court’s protections poured in throughout the day with the usual criticisms of the conservative-dominated court for not taking a broader view of women’s issues. Biden didn’t release a statement until after 11:00 p.m. And when he did, it focused not so much on the case at hand but on preserving the “Obama-Biden” legacy and the rehabilitation of the much-maligned ACA.
The statement was fuel for the Trump campaign, which re-upped its efforts to paint Biden as a nun-hater. In early August, Vice President Mike Pence drew huge cheers from a crowd in Florida when he laid into his predecessor for his position on the Little Sisters. Pence also threw in a gibe about the Hyde Amendment, just for good measure.
The Biden campaign responded by launching “Believers for Biden,” a counter coalition aimed at appealing to voters’ personal faith. During its launch event, Biden surrogates described the former vice president as a pastoral figure and a prayerful man, whose leadership will bring about “reconciliation in our nation.”
Absent, however, from any religious appeals coming out of the Biden camp are policies pitched specifically to religious people. Biden does not talk about religious liberty — except when he expresses opposition to whatever iteration of it is in the news. He does not harp on the recent rash of Catholic church burnings, despite calls for him to do so. And on abortion, the issue that most motivates Catholics to vote, he all but pushes them to Trump.
“If someone is a single-issue voter on abortion and they still think Republicans are better than Democrats on the issue, that’s probably not someone we’re going to get,” Doug Pagitt, founder of the Biden-friendly Vote Common Good group, told Politico.
Failure to pass the abortion litmus test will likely doom Biden’s attempts to reach practicing, as opposed to self-identified, Catholics, or any people who vote based on their faith, said Frank Pavone, a priest activist who has worked with every Republican presidential candidate since George W. Bush. Pavone, who until recently served in both the anti-abortion and Catholic wings of the Trump campaign, told the Washington Examiner that, in his experience, too many faith-based voters are mistrustful of a candidate who professes faith, but then supports policies contrary to its teachings.
“You can take religion and use it as a cover for anything,” Pavone said. “But belief has to be rooted in more than just Bible verses. People want to know whether what you’re advocating for helps or hurts people. And abortion hurts people.”
Nicholas Rowan is a staff writer at the Washington Examiner.
