Stung by the backlash to his HHS mandate, Obama hastily proposed
a “revision” to it last February. The revision amounted
to an accounting trick that would theoretically shift
contraceptive and abortifacient costs from objecting religious
employers to their hapless insurers. Obama cast this magical
thinking as a neat resolution to his political problem. It at once
upheld a right to religious freedom and a right to free
contraceptives, he insisted: “Religious liberty will be protected
and a law that requires free preventative care will not
discriminate against women.”
He had promised feminists that he wasn’t going to let the
religious impede this new right. Would he defend it at all costs?
“Darn tootin,” he replied to one of them at a rally in 2011.
Last week Obama’s HHS gave more definition to his proposed
revision in an 80-page catalogue of regulatory contortions, all of
which are intended to uphold a right to free contraceptives, even
for the employees of most church-affiliated groups. The policy is
described as a concession to the religious, but it is sure to
operate more like a corrupt partnership with them. At best it keeps
the outside of the cup clean while leaving the dirt inside to
collect.
A barometer of the policy’s bogusness is the enthusiasm with
which Planned Parenthood and company greeted the “sensible
compromise.” Even Sandra Fluke approved, accepting the magical
payment arrangement as an unimportant distinction without a
difference. The key to these groups is that HHS locks in place a
federal right to free contraceptives. “This policy makes it clear
that your boss does not get to decide whether you can have birth
control,” read the statement from Planned Parenthood, working hard
as usual to twist non-participation into a form of sinister
oppression.
The revision, far from respecting religious employers, draws
them into a cynical arrangement: Obama will pretend to respect
their religious objections if they pretend to ignore his corrupting
of their employees and fleecing of insurance companies. After all,
shifting costs from employers to insurers is nothing more than
government-supervised theft, a shell game that Obama now tempts
religious groups to play alongside him.
This is an insidious offer, designed to turn the religious into
stooges for his secularism, stooges who earn their narrow
privileges through passive complicity in unjust state fiats. “Sure,
go ahead and bill our insurers for free contraceptives and
abortifacients” is hardly an honest or pious stance for church
officials to take. If that is a triumph for religious freedom, it
is an exceedingly sad and illusory one, as it rests upon new
violations of freedom, not to mention indifference to the mandate’s
overall hostility to conscience rights under the First Amendment
(groups and individuals deemed non-religious under the revision
still pay directly for contraceptive costs whether they like it or
not).
Forcing an insurance company to provide a product for free is
baldly unconstitutional. But Obama, having already lost many of the
HHS cases, figures that is an easier legal hill to climb than
preserving the original mandate. Insurance companies are so cowed
by the federal government that they offered only murmuring replies
to the news of the more definitive revision. They need to “study”
this “unprecedented” policy. No doubt many of these companies are
wondering how the costs of setting up a separate
free-contraceptives program for church-affiliated groups, some of
which are run by celibates, will pay for themselves under the
Sebelius model: “The reduction in the number of pregnancies
compensates for cost of contraception,” the HHS secretary casually
told Congress last year.
Obama’s contention that religious freedom and a federally-backed
right to free contraception can seamlessly coexist should offend
even the least skeptical. His claim rests upon the fantasy that
insurance companies won’t find some way to pass the costs of free
contraceptives on to religious groups through higher fees. It also
assumes that religious groups have no legitimate grounds to object
to enrolling its employees in a free-contraceptives program, as if
that level of involvement in the scheme doesn’t itself compromise
them. But of course it does. They are still required to expedite
access to insurance that treats contraceptives and abortifacients
as “essential” care. That they are nominally freed from paying for
it doesn’t eliminate all moral concerns.
The terminology of Obamacare remains relentlessly Orwellian.
Under it, one and all must accept the official lies that
obvious costs count as “free services,” disabling functioning parts
of the body constitutes “basic health care,” and blameless
assertions of freedom under the First Amendment are
“discriminatory.” Those who refuse to bow to these oppressive lies,
according to the federal government, are the real oppressors, the
“boss” who stands athwart his employees’ freedoms. The goal is to
propagandize the people so deeply that out of a petrified gratitude
they will trade their freedom for the latest Faustian
bargain.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
