OK, this is idle speculation, but bear with me. As you know the Feds have got a regulation requiring Catholic institutions to provide birth control to workers as part of their health insurance. It’s caused a huge uproar as you might imagine. To my mind, it seems curiously tone deaf of the Obama Administration. Pissing off that many Catholic voters for no reason is just weird.
Then I noticed the success of Rick Santorum in the primaries held on Tuesday, which was attributed to an unusually large turnout of social conservatives. And that made me think, "I wonder if they turned out because they were so pissed about the whole “making Catholics provide birth control” issue?
And that made me think that maybe Obama is purposefully riling the social conservatives to put some more steam in Santorum’s bid for the nomination. Making things harder for Romney, at the very LEAST extending Romney’s bruising primary battle and maybe even giving Gingrich or Santorum the nomination. Especially Santorum, probably the least capable primary opponent.
Of course, this could piss off a lot of voters towards Obama, but once the Republican nominee is decided, there’s plenty of time for Obama to ride to the rescue and give the regulation a good quashing, winning back those voters.
So it COULD be a deep ploy by Obama. I’ve seen no indication the Dems are capable of playing politics this well, is my only problem with the theory.
Are Catholic voters pissed off? I know the church hierarchy is pissed, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Catholic voters were actually more likely than the average American to support the rule.
ETA: According to the one poll I can find, Catholics are more likely to support the rule, but Catholic voters are slightly less likely to support it. (52% of Catholics think “religiously affiliated colleges and hospitals should have to provide coverage that includes contraception”, compared to 49% of all Americans and 45% of Catholic voters.)
This isn’t infringing on any institution’s religious beliefs. This is a workers-rights issue. Just because the Catholic Church doesn’t believe in contraception doesn’t mean they get to be exempted from work laws which require employers to provide certain benefits to it’s employees. No one who believes that using contraception is a sin would be put in a position of violating their beliefs. This is a phony issue which isn’t going to piss off the majority of Catholic voters.
The mandate to require insurance coverage to cover contraception is not a spanky new requirement, and has been in place for years in many areas, and a majority of Catholics agree that this is a good thing. This is a non-controversy controversy.
Earlier today I saw that thread on Ellen DeGeneres and JCP and the so-called Million Mom Club (or whatever) (link); this whole kerfuffle is on a par with that one. A couple of jackasses braying loudly is not a majority, nor is it necessarily a reason to change course.
One would think, then, that they would object just as strenuously to military funding and capital punishment, both decidedly right-wing planks. Odd that it’s the funding of *contraceptives *which supposedly has their collective panties in a twist, isn’t it?
Actually, a lot of left-leaning and moderate Catholic men (EJ Dione, Mark Shields, Chris Matthews) are making a stink. They are certainly softer in their criticism, but they are not instinctive anti-Obamaites. Listening to their criticism, they are often offended on behalf of the Catholic hierarchy.
They’re just as wrong the Republicans you’re referring to (which are certainly the most vocal and strident), but it’s not accurate to say it’s only Republicans.
The problem is tribalism, not just Catholicism. It’s the larger social issue behind most “religious” issues that have nothing to do with religious beliefs, defensiveness about your “tribe” that you wouldn’t support with anyone outside your own self-identified tribe whether you share their core beliefs or not. It’s a kind of sickness.
Someone on Wednesday’s Hardball claimed the objection was not to coverage, but to the mandate that there be no deductible or co-pay. In other words, the employer must pay 100% of the cost for contraceptives.
I don’t see why that makes such a difference, but that’s what they said.
Here’s the deal as I see it: One of the basic guiding goals of Health Care Reform is that ALL citizens get the same basic package of services and benefits regardless of who’s their employer or if they’re employed at all. Not being able to pass a Public Option or a true Universal Coverage, you get mandates that everybody’s coverage must include X, Y or Z .
As pointed out, in a lot of the country already similar mandates are in place. But having it come from the Feds as something you can’t get out of (with a religious exemption in effect only for actual houses of worship or smaller-than-50-employee entities where the staff could be reasonably expected to all be part of the congregation), was something that really ticked off some people and a golden opportunity for the RW to rally around the notion that this is somehow violating people’s faith (OK so it subverts the notion that just saying “it’s against my religion” magically trumps almost anything and everything. Meh).
Yes, the Catholic *people *in the USA largely stopped paying attention to the Bishops on the contraception issue a generation or two ago, much to the Vatican’s chagrin. But IMO the Catholic organizations have only been getting more conservative, not less, during that same period since all of us lapsed/liberal/indifferent “catholics-merely-by-family-legacy” just won’t bother participating. *** And ***part of what the organizations have been heated up about in this recent time has been reclaiming the “Catholic mission” of nonworship institutions like the hospitals and universities. This one was just a perfect scenario to energize them.
They do object to capital punishment and military funding, but they’re not being required by law to provide either. What they’re particularly objecting to here is that they’re being required to pay for contraceptive funding for their employees. They’re not complaining for disinterested, abstract reasons.
If their employees were such good Catholics, they wouldn’t be using contraceptives or getting abortions and it wouldn’t matter what the policy covered. Perhaps what the Church is worried about is that their flock isn’t following their teachings as well as they would like.
Most employers only pay part of their employees premium, so even if there’s no copay, I don’t think its really correct to say they pay for 100% of the cost for contraceptives.
And of course, even if you pay 100% of someone’s premiums for a plan that covers contraception, thats not really the same as “paying 100% of the cost for contraceptives.” If you go in for surgery, and people want to know if you had to pay out of pocket for it they ask “did your insurance pay for it?”, not “did your employer pay for it?”