New York Times editorials are often worth reading—stop
laughing, I’m serious!—because they provide a window into the
mindset of the liberal left, the ideological tendency that
dominates many major cultural institutions and, for at least the
next nine months, the executive branch of the federal
government.
Times editorialists write for people who think alike
and seek reinforcement of their prejudices. Unconstrained by any
need for compromise or sensitivity, they provide an honest
distillation of left-liberalism, something you can’t always get
from politicians who need to appeal broadly enough to win electoral
majorities. What you learn from reading Times editorials
is that the fundamental attitude of left-liberalism today is one of
contemptuous ignorance.
A case in point: In late January, as expected, President Obama
signed off on an Obamacare regulation deeming contraceptives,
including abortifacient drugs and sterilization procedures, to be
“preventive” medicine, which employer-provided medical insurance
must cover. When he refused to exempt religious organizations that
have moral objections, even pro-Obamacare Catholics like E. J.
Dionne of the Washington Post and Carol Keehan of the
Catholic Health Association objected. But not the New York
Times, which sneered at Mitt Romney for “promising to defend
the Roman Catholic Church’s ‘religious liberty.’” Those scare
quotes were the most shocking act of punctuation since early in
what Reuters called “the ‘war on terror.’”
By mid-February, Obama had made a symbolic concession to
religious liberty, an accounting gimmick by which insurers would
say they, not employers, were providing the disputed services. That
fig leaf was enough to satisfy Dionne and Keehan, but nobody
else—including the Times, which was happy with the
substance but angry about the symbolism. This time the editorial
led with the scare quotes:
In response to a phony crisis over “religious liberty”
engendered by the right, President Obama seems to have stood his
ground on an essential principle—free access to birth control for
any woman.…
Nonetheless, it was dismaying to see the president lend any
credence to the misbegotten notion that providing access to
contraceptives violated the freedom of any religious institution.
Churches are given complete freedom by the Constitution to preach
that birth control is immoral, but they have not been given the
right to laws that would deprive their followers or employees of
the right to disagree with that teaching.
In reality, no one denied that individuals have “the right to
disagree with that teaching,” and the reli-gious institutions that
objected to the mandate did not claim the authority to police their
employees’ private lives or opinions. Rather, they opposed the
government’s attempt to coerce them into facilitating the practices
against which they preach.
The editorial continued by assuring Times readers that
everyone who disagrees is dishonest, be-cause the Times
knows what they really think: “The president’s solution, however,
demonstrates that those still angry about the mandate aren’t really
concerned about religious freedom; they simply don’t like birth
control and want to reduce access to it.” The evidence for this
assertion:
Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican of Florida, has introduced a
bill that would allow any employer to refuse to cover birth control
by claiming to have a religious objection. The House speaker, John
Boehner, also supports the concept. Rick Santorum said Friday that
no insurance policy should cover it, apparently unaware that many
doctors prescribe birth control pills for medical reasons other
than contraception.
The Rubio and Boehner examples, as described here, offer zero
support for the claim that opponents “don’t like birth control” and
contradict the claim that they “aren’t really concerned about
religious freedom.” The Rubio bill would give broader recognition
to religious freedom than an exemption limited to religious
institutions.
As for Santorum, he has voiced serious, and not unreasonable,
doubts that birth control is good for society. But let’s stipulate
for the sake of argument that he doesn’t “like birth control.”
First of all, so what? The Times editorialists may believe
that birth control is valuable or beneficial, and it may be, but
it’s weird that they get bent out of shape merely because other
people don’t like the stuff. Second, even if the Times
accurately characterizes Santorum’s views on birth control, it is
both a non sequitur and, knowing him, a completely preposterous
assertion that he isn’t “really concerned about religious
freedom.”
Times columnist Gail Collins went off message,
beginning her column on the same day as the editorial: “It’s not
really about birth control.” It was amusing to imagine
left-liberals who look to the Times for guidance, driving
themselves crazy trying to reconcile the dueling messages.
But Collins was right that wasn’t about birth control. It was
about freedom from government control. She wants more such control;
as she put it sneeringly: “National standards, national
coverage-all of that offends the Tea Party ethos that wants to keep
the federal government out of every aspect of American life that
does not involve bombing another country.” But at least she has
some rudimentary understanding of the other side of the debate.
Not so her op-ed colleague Nicholas Kristof, who in his column
the following day treated savvy readers to this magnificently funny
display of un-self-awareness:
I may not be as theologically sophisticated as American bishops,
but I had thought that Jesus talked more about helping the poor
than about banning contraceptives.
The debates about pelvic politics over the last week sometimes
had a patronizing tone.
Physician, heal thyself. But the most revealing Kristof
assertion was this one: “The basic principle of American life is
that we try to respect religious beliefs, and accommodate them
where we can.”
That prompted an incandescently furious response from Albert
Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary:
Nicholas Kristof’s statement is light years beyond the President
in disrespect for religious liberty.…The language of accommodation
is almost as old as the Constitution itself, but it was never
framed as Kristof frames it—certainly not by the founders who spoke
of “inalienable rights” granted to human beings by the Creator’s
endowment.…
With this one simplistic and condescending sentence he throws
religious liberty under the bus and reveals what makes sense to so
many in the secular elite.
They will try their best, they promise, to respect our religious
beliefs, and to “accommodate them where we can.”
That’s it. Don’t dare ask for anything more.
Religious liberty—no scare quotes here—is one of America’s basic
principles, the first freedom in the Bill of Rights. The separation
of church and state protects religious minorities, and nonreligious
ones, from the coercive imposition of religious law. It is also a
bulwark against a secular government’s impositions on private
conscience. To the Times editorialists, it is at best an
inconvenience.
And the paper’s reporters aren’t much better. Here’s what passed
for balance in a story by Laurie Goodstein:
The uproar threatens to embroil the Catholic church in a bitter
election-year political battle while deepening internal rifts
within the church. On the one side are traditionalists who believe
in upholding Catholic doctrine to the letter, and on the other,
modernists who believe the church must respond to changing times
and a pluralistic society.
Albert Mohler is a Baptist. This columnist is an agnostic. But
I’m with Mike Huckabee, another Baptist, who said: “We’re all
Catholics now.”
