I’ve been following politics my whole life. I understand the politicians live in a different world than the rest of us. But is still surprises me when they work from a different dictionary.
We’re talking now about the Administration and their mandate that all employers, including Catholic institutions, will be forced to offer their employees health coverage that includes sterilization, abortion-inducing drugs, and contraception — free of charge.
Having inadvertently dragged the Church into electoral year politics, the Administration has now started talking about “compromise” to take some of the heat off. To most normal people, the word “compromise” means that people sit down, talk to each other as equals, and try to work out something that will respect each other’s beliefs and values. An online dictionary defines it as “a settlement of differences by mutual concessions”.
But the Administration seems to think that the word means “surrender your values, be quiet, and do what we tell you”.
We’ve seen some of these “compromise” laws in other states, and they don’t resemble anything a normal person would consider to be a genuine “settlement of differences by mutual concessions”. All of them run roughshod over religious liberty, and merely dress up the morally offensive mandate in slightly different clothing, in hopes that people won’t recognize it. Here’s why:
We’ve been down this road before. We know the playbook. Now that the Administration is facing some political heat, they’ve started talking about “compromise” — without being open to conceding anything real. Next, we’ll see the release of polls that purport to show that the bishops are “out of touch” with Catholics — as if our constitutional rights are disposable, based on the shifting whims of public opinion. Dissenting Catholics will be trotted out, to talk about their disagreements with Church teaching. Then, there will be “gotcha” moments where the advocates will lead the media to agencies that are already complying with similar mandates under protest, and imply that we don’t really mean what we say. The bishops and their supporters will be labeled “heartless” and “anti-woman”, and will be on the receiving end of protests and heart-rending “human interest” stories. It will be unpleasant and personal, with sharp elbows thrown in the corners — that’s the way that ideological politics is played by the devotees of the Culture of Death.
And, they won’t stop with contraceptives and sterilizations. Forcing insurance plans to cover surgical abortion is clearly next — a bill to that effect is moving forward in Washington State, and one has been introduced in the New York Legislature. And once they’re finished with gutting our religious liberty, they’ll move on to someone else’s freedoms.
The best solution to this problem is to eliminate this awful mandate. There is no compelling need to provide sterilization and hormonal contraceptives, free of charge to users, while all the rest of us — including those of us who consider those services to be dangerous and immoral — pick up the tab in higher insurance premiums.
There is no compelling reason — outside of anti-life ideology — to throw out the First Amendment, all in the name of a phony “compromise”.
