President Obama offered an “accommodation” Friday aimed at ending a rapidly growing rebellion among Catholic, Protestant and Jewish leaders. They are rebelling against a Department of Health and Human Services Obamacare regulation mandating that they provide health care services that violate key doctrines of their faiths, including morning-after abortifacient drugs, sterilization and contraception. Under the revised mandate, “religious organizations won’t have to pay for these services and no religious institution will have to provide these services directly,” Obama claimed. The key word in Obama’s statement is “directly.” To be intellectually honest, Obama should have added “but we still require them to do it indirectly.”
Here’s why: Under Obama’s revised rule, health insurance companies contracted by hospitals, schools and charitable institutions associated with the religious groups will have to provide the services at no cost to the employees. But there is no such thing as “free” health care services, so ultimately the religious institutions will still have to cover the costs of providing employees with access to the objectionable services. As National Review’s Yuval Levin put it, “the choice for religious employers is still between paying an insurer to provide their worker with access to a product that violates their convictions or paying a fine to the government.”
As Bishop William Lori explains, “the Church cannot, even reluctantly, provide information, make arrangements for, facilitate, counsel or instruct people on how to obtain these immoral procedures. To do so would be to participate in the violation of the moral law and thus to act against conscience.” This is why, Lori said, “the Church must have the freedom to refuse to cooperate in any way in making these ‘services’ available. It comes down to this: If we provide the means for another to act against the moral law, we ourselves become morally culpable as well. We simply cannot and will not do that. The doctor simply cannot say, ‘Well, I will not kill your unborn child but let me send you to Dr. Smith who will.'”
The problem here is that Obama wants to do something the Constitution explicitly bars. The First Amendment instructs Congress to “make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” There is nothing in those words that allows any public official to define by bureaucratic edict religious practices that are acceptable to government. Offering certain “accommodations” regarding how acceptable religious practices are carried out is still a violation of the First Amendment, no matter how adroitly Obama tries to camouflage what he is doing.
This is why the Obamacare rule presents a fundamental civil liberties issue, not one concerning women’s right to free contraception. The founders of this nation did not make the free exercise clause the first to appear in the Bill of Rights so that Obama could come along two centuries later, casually boss around church institutions, and compel religious adherents to participate actively in what their churches teach is evil. Obama must change his ways and begin honoring — not accommodating — religious freedom by rescinding this ill-advised mandate.
