Obama STILL Trampling on Religious Freedoms!

Why the White House Botched Contraception

By Chris Stirewalt Published February 13, 2012 | FoxNews.com

Groupthink Led to Obama Missteps on Religion

“The good news is that the president seems to have noted the tremendous unanimity among people of all faiths, or none at all, that this was a dangerous intrusion into the integrity of the internal life of the church, and has indicated a willingness to offer some mitigation. The bad news is that the terribly restrictive mandate still stands.”

-- Archbishop Timothy Dolan, the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, talking to the New York Times while waiting for his luggage at Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci Airport.

The federal government will no longer require religious organizations to purchase health insurance that covers pills and procedures that violate their faiths. Instead, the federal government will require these organizations to purchase health insurance that comes with a free side order of such pills and procedures.

The president is trying to let himself off on a technicality. Yes he plans to force the Catholic Church, starting next year, to buy health insurance that includes contraception, sterilization and the “morning after” pill, but says that those items will be provided as a gift from insurance companies.

This, of course, is going over about as well as a BBQ joint in a Hasidic neighborhood.

Perhaps the point of the change is to simply cast the president’s opponents on the subject as unreasonable and unyielding. Listening to the administration’s talking points, it sounds like that’s the plan: shrug and suggest that opponents are motivated by cynical political aims.

If the president tries to hold the line here, his chances in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida and New Mexico will be substantially worse off that when he started this process. Yes, he gets credit from liberal women, but that’s the base of his base. They’re not voting Republican this year, no matter whom the GOP nominates.

Instead of fixing the problem, Obama has worsened it by suggesting that the core complaint is so unworthy as to be remedied by an accounting gimmick. One doesn’t prescribe a placebo unless he or she believes that the problem is all in the patient’s head.

Much has been made of the effort by former White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley to get the president to back down in his effort to force Catholic colleges, hospitals and charities to comply. Daley brought in the president’s designated emissary to blue-collar and Catholic voters, Vice President Joe Biden, in his bid to get Obama to back down.

But they were pretty clearly in the minority view since the meeting had to be arranged by back channels and go on in secret. Daley and Biden are Catholics and understand how their church functions and how such issues affect Catholic voters, including the ones who may disagree with church dogma.

Obama long ago tried to excuse the conservative proclivities of these voters, telling liberal California donors that these folks “cling” to their faith because they are downtrodden and disadvantaged. One would think that someone who was so badly embarrassed by his own incomprehension might have more than a token presence from those precincts.

If the concerns of the largest denomination in the nation and a meeting with its American leader must be conducted on the down low, something is out of kilter.

If he had more diversity in his administration, Obama might have thought better of his original rule and certainly would have avoided offering a condescending correction.