The Catholic Hierarchy's Disingenuous Rage at Obama

With a high profile criminal case pending in Philadelphia where a retired cardinal avoided the witness stand only by conveniently dying, a plethora of lawsuits brought by victims of sexual abuse at the hands of priests virtually all over the USA, and major investigations of the Church leaderships protect on child rapists in Europe, the bitter old men in dresses within the Church hierarchy are desperate to change the conversation about the Church. Hence the manufactured rage at new federal regulations on the availability of contraception under health care plans. Twenty-eight states already have nearly identical requirements and the world has not ended as claimed by the chicken little sycophants of the bishops and cardinals. But then, truth and honesty are not exactly hallmarks of the Roman Catholic Church leadership which prefers to engage in lies and demagoguery- not to mention the coddling of sexual predators. Michelle Goldberg has a piece in The Daily Beast that looks at the intentionally manufactured rage against the Obama administration. And the dishonesty of GOP politicians like Mitt Romney who are acting as the Church's trained circus dogs. Here are some highlights:

Mitt Romney has been railing again the Obama administration’s refusal to exempt Catholic-affiliated institutions like hospitals and universities from its mandate that health insurance cover contraception. “Such rules don’t belong in the America that I believe in,” he writes in a Washington Examiner op-ed. Perhaps no one told him that such rules were in place in Massachusetts the entire time he was governor, because as far as I’ve been able to tell, he never raised a word of objection then.

From the enraged response to Obama’s policy, one would think it represented some sort of radical break with the status quo. In The Daily Beast, Kirsten Powers suggests the administration is threatening to put Catholic institutions out of business. “One thing we can be sure of: the Catholic Church will shut down before it violates its faith,” she writes.

But many Catholic institutions are already operating in states that require contraceptive coverage, such as New York and California. Such laws are on the books in 28 states, and only eight of them exempt Catholic hospitals and universities. Nowhere has the Catholic Church shut down in response.

Time and again, when these laws were being considered, Catholic bishops and their sympathizers made the same sort of hysterical arguments we’re hearing today. . . . . the [New York] law passed—it was signed by Republican Gov. George Pataki—with exactly the same sort of exemptions we’re now seeing at the federal level. There’s a conscience clause that applies to Catholic churches, grade schools, and parishes, but not institutions that serve the broader community, such as universities and hospitals. The church sued, but New York’s State Court of Appeals ruled against it; in 2007, the Supreme Court let the ruling stand. Likewise, California’s Supreme Court upheld that state’s version of the mandate.

And yet, somehow, Catholic institutions have continued operating. Nationwide, major Catholic universities including Fordham, Georgetown, and DePaul all offer birth-control coverage. So does Dignity Health, until recently known as Catholic Healthcare West, the fifth-largest health system in the country. In Massachusetts, the six former Caritas Christi Catholic hospitals, which were recently acquired by Steward Health Care System, all complied with the state law.

And make no mistake: health plans that exclude services used only by women constitute a form of discrimination. That’s why in 2000, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled that employers that cover prescription drugs but do not cover contraception are in violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Such employers have “circumscribed the treatment options available to women, but not to men,” it said. The EEOC’s ruling made no exemptions for religiously affiliated organizations. Indeed, in 2009, responding to a lawsuit, the EEOC ruled that the Catholic college Belmont Abbey discriminated against women when it refused to cover birth control.

The bottom line is that the wailing and lies coming from the Catholic Bishops and their lackeys need to be ignored. Given the Church leadership's role in a worldwide criminal conspiracy to protect sexual predators who were allowed to time and time again prey on children and youth, no one with a shred of moral fiber should listen to a single word these nasty old men have to say - on anything.