Burying the Lede
It’s with a tip of the hat to Glenn that I mention this story about liberal Catholics, understandably upset with ObamaCare’s latest diktat:
Now, suddenly, we have headlines about the president’s “war on the Catholic Church.” Mostly they stem from a Health and Human Services mandate that forces every employer to provide employees with health coverage that not only covers birth control and sterilization, but makes them free. Predictably, the move has drawn fire from the Catholic bishops.
Less predictable—and far more interesting—has been the heat from the Catholic left, including many who have in the past given the president vital cover.
But the real news might come from lower down on the page:
The liberal Cardinal Roger Mahony, archbishop emeritus of Los Angeles, blogged that he “cannot imagine a more direct and frontal attack on freedom of conscience”—and he urged people to fight it. Another liberal favorite, Bishop Robert Lynch of St. Petersburg, Fla., has raised the specter of “civil disobedience” and vowed that he will drop coverage for diocesan workers rather than comply. They are joined in their expressions of discontent by the leaders of Catholic Relief Services and Catholic Charities, which alone employs 70,000 people. [Emphasis added]
Does Obama’s long-term goal for nationalizing health care remain the single-payer system? If so, getting Catholic organizations to dump their employees onto the dole goes a nice little ways towards his socialist prize.
Catholic Church to Obama Administration: “Go to hell.”
And how many of these liberal Catholics voted for Dear Liar? We warned you about him.
– there are those who pray the Rosary at abortion clinics who voted for Obama and will vote for him again. Prelates like Mahony have failed at the pulpit — which Obama uses to raise money and votes.
What department or agency enforces these wonderful new rules passed down to us dummies…and how can we de-fund them.
I don’t think there’s any great master plan here. This is just part of the great collision of the components of the New Deal coalition. The concerns that united them have long ago been taken care of, and now they’re fighting each other for total control of the agenda.
The Keystone pipeline decision was part of the same fight–the greens won at the expense of private-sector unions. There is a great deal of data contained in that outcome, if there’s any Kremlinologists out there trying to figure out the true internal state of President Obama’s coalition.
It wasn’t so much the greens who won, it was crony capitalism. The fact that the greens like it too, well, that’s just lagniappe.