Did Obama Set a Contraception Trap for the Far Right?

Listening to some of the talking heads blather on the morning news shows about Barack Obama's confrontation with the Roman Catholic Church I was more than a bit annoyed that none of these so-called journalist said a single word about the admitted 8,000 instances of sexual abuse reported in Milwaukee. Which is precisely what the Church is seeking to have happen. I wish someone would ask the morally bankrupt "princes of the Church" some hard pointed questions about the magnitude of abuse this one archdiocese suggests. And then those questions should be followed by a simple questions as to why anyone should trust the bishops on any issue of morality. Will it happen? Of course not. The mainstream media is spineless not to mention lazy.

Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan is taking a different read on the Church's and far right's deliberately manufactured confrontation and - unlike too many of the talking heads who shamelessly and simple mindedly repeat the sound bites of the Church and hate group leaders like Tony Perkins - believes that it is the Church and its reactionary allies who will ultimately lose the battle. If one has followed the far right for any time, they should know that banning ALL contraception and reversing Griswold v. Connecticut has been a long term goal. Especially because Griswold first formulated a right to privacy that laid the basis for the Court's later rulings in Roe v. Wade and Lawrence v. Texas. Here are highlights from Andrew's piece in Newsweek:

Perhaps some helpful soul could inform the Catholic bishop of Pittsburgh, who last week calmly explained that “the Obama administration has just told the Catholics of the United States, ‘To hell with you!’” A quiet word in the ear of the dogged opponent of gay marriage Maggie Gallagher might have helped too. Just after Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage in California, was struck down by a court on narrow grounds, she titled a blog post: “Ninth Circuit to 7 Million California Voters: You Are Irrational Bigots.”

Not to be outdone, newly insurgent presidential candidate Rick Santorum described a secular society not based on religious principles as a renewal of the French Revolution and “the guillotine.”

Who knew the sexual and religious politics of the 1990s were suddenly back, under the president who promised he’d try to end them? And who knew the president himself—who has made an elegant art form out of avoiding exactly these kinds of controversies in his first three years — would have made the final call on the one that suddenly united the entire Republican right in roiling rage? That decision was the now-infamous one to propose a new rule to mandate coverage of contraception, sterilization, and morning-after pills in all health-insurance plans, exempting purely religious institutions, but including Catholic-run hospitals, colleges, and charities who serve the general public and employ many non-Catholics.

Suddenly no-drama Obama was neck deep in the kind of religious warfare he vowed to avoid. Many pundits—led by older white Catholic men, such as Joe Scarborough and my friend Chris Matthews and even the fair-minded liberal Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne—declared his decision on contraception as not only morally wrong but a politically disastrous violation of religious freedom.

Within the administration, almost all the white Catholic men opposed the decision—from Bill Daley to Leon Panetta. But critically, the support for the decision came from women, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and key adviser Valerie Jarrett chief among them. So Obama didn’t ignite just a culture war but a religious and gender war as well. Welcome to the election focused almost entirely on jobs.

But the conflict-driven headlines and predictions of disaster for Obama are, in my view, deeply misleading. Right now, they are driven both by cable news’s love of a good fight and high ratings and by the Republican primary campaign, in which the candidates, especially Newt Gingrich and Santorum, are desperately battling to unify the evangelical base, which is convinced its faith is somehow under attack. In the longer run, however, I suspect this sudden confluence of kerfuffles will be seen as one of the last gasps of the culture war, not its reignition. That’s especially possible since Obama’s swift walk-back last Friday . . . shifting the coverage requirement to insurance companies.

Instead of being lose-lose for the president, it became win-win. Most Catholics will be fine with this compromise, as are the Catholic Health Association and Planned Parenthood. But the bishops? They’ve gone out on a very long limb. This could be the moment when the culture-war tide finally turns and the social wedge issues long deployed so effectively by the Republican right begin to come back and bite them.

The more Machiavellian observer might even suspect this is actually an improved bait and switch by Obama to more firmly identify the religious right with opposition to contraception, its weakest issue by far, and to shore up support among independent women and his more liberal base. I’ve found by observing this president closely for years that what often seem like short-term tactical blunders turn out in the long run to be strategically shrewd. And if this was a trap, the religious right walked right into it.

Take a look at the polling. Ask Americans if they believe that contraception should be included for free in all health-care plans and you get a 55 percent majority in favor, with 40 percent against. Ask American Catholics, and that majority actually rises above the national average, to 58 percent. . . . . . And on the issue of contraception itself, studies have shown that a staggering 98 percent of Catholic women not only believe in birth control but have used it. How is it possible to describe this issue as a violation of individual conscience, when no one is forced to use contraception against their will, and most Catholics have already consulted their conscience, are fine with the pill, and want it covered?

And the truth is, there is no real debate among most actual living, breathing American Catholics on the issue, who tend to be more liberal than most Americans. They long ago dismissed the Vatican’s position on this. And after the sex-abuse scandal, they are even less likely to take the bishops’ moral authority on sexual matters seriously.

In other words, this is a potential political winner for President Obama, not just among liberals, many women, younger voters, and moderates—but among American Catholics! And even more so in light of the pragmatic compromise announced last week, which puts the administration precisely where it should be, and in a much better place than it was before the announcement, and reinforces Obama’s reputation as a man willing to compromise, one of his core strengths among independent voters.

But some Republicans and conservative Catholics have already rejected the compromise. They have declared it to be just as inimical to religious freedom as church organizations being forced to pay for their employees’ contraception. . . . . Catholic doctrine should, according to the bishops’ spokesman, also apply to non-Catholics—even if they are merely selling burritos.

This kind of rhetoric is not about protecting religious freedom. It is about imposing a particular religious doctrine on those who don’t share it as a condition for general employment utterly unrelated to religion at all. And if that is the hill the Catholic hierarchy and evangelical right want to fight and die on, they will lose—and lose badly.

Contraception is popular. Even in conservative Mississippi, a recent ballot initiative to amend the state constitution to ban the morning-after pill failed badly at the polls. If this issue won’t work for the GOP in Mississippi, they’ll have a hard time winning a general election over it. And if the bishops think opposing Obama’s compromise will rally Catholics to their cause, they are even more out of touch than they realize.

To make the Republican rhetoric even more absurd, the precompromise version of the Obama insurance rule is already the law in two of the biggest states, New York and California, as Linda Greenhouse has noted in The New York Times. . . . . . All of which makes one wonder exactly how genuine the current outrage is—or whether it is part and parcel of a political campaign against Obama rather than a defense of religious freedom.

If the Catholic bishops and the religious right reject the proposed Obama compromise, they will be digging themselves even deeper into positions that are fast losing traction. Time after time, they have rejected compromises on social issues because of fundamentalist rigidity, not Christian engagement with a changing world. . . . . Their radical fundamentalism—so alien to the spirit of the Second Vatican Council and to so many lay Catholics — has discredited the core priorities of Christianity . . . . And the obsession among Catholic and evangelical leaders with an issue like contraception stands in stark contrast to their indifference to, for example, the torture in which the last administration engaged, the growing social inequality fostered by unfettered capitalism, the Christian moral imperative of universal health care, and the unjust use of the death penalty.

[T]he Republican fusion with the Vatican is also, it seems to me, a terrible mistake for the party. Obama’s greatest skill is in getting his opponents to overreach and self-destruct. And this issue could not be more tailor-made to benefit the candidate with real potential pull with far-right-wing Catholics and evangelicals: Santorum. . . . . In fact, it could be the issue that wins him the nomination. And do you really think that would hurt Obama in the fall?

To me, Andrew's analysis makes sense and I hope he's correct. Nothing would be sweeter than to see the bishops and fundamentalist evangelicals set the GOP up with a candidate who will scare the daylights out of independents and moderates in the general election. And if the GOP then suffered a horrific defeat, then perhaps the Christian Right would finally experience the political death rattles it so well deserves.