…we note at the outset that the lack of clear protection for key stakeholders—for self-insured religious employers; for religious and secular for-profit employers; for secular non-profit employers; for religious insurers; and for individuals—is unacceptable and must be corrected. And in the case where the employee and insurer agree to add the objectionable coverage, that coverage is still provided as a part of the objecting employer’s plan, financed in the same way as the rest of the coverage offered by the objecting employer. This, too, raises serious moral concerns.

We just received information about this proposal for the first time this morning; we were not consulted in advance. Some information we have is in writing and some is oral. We will, of course, continue to press for the greatest conscience protection we can secure from the Executive Branch. But stepping away from the particulars, we note that today’s proposal continues to involve needless government intrusion in the internal governance of religious institutions, and to threaten government coercion of religious people and groups to violate their most deeply held convictions. In a nation dedicated to religious liberty as its first and founding principle, we should not be limited to negotiating within these parameters. The only complete solution to this religious liberty problem is for HHS to rescind the mandate of these objectionable services.

We will therefore continue—with no less vigor, no less sense of urgency—our efforts to correct this problem through the other two branches of government. For example, we renew our call on Congress to pass, and the Administration to sign, the Respect for Rights of Conscience Act. And we renew our call to the Catholic faithful, and to all our fellow Americans, to join together in this effort to protect religious liberty and freedom of conscience for all.

Indeed, the Wall Street Journal confirms that President Obama’s “accommodation” has simply made matters worse for him. An editorial sums up the lameness of his attempt at making his edict more politically tolerable:

So you almost have to admire the absurdity of the new plan President Obama floated yesterday: The government will now write a rule that says the best things in life are “free,” including contraception. Thus a political mandate will be compounded by an uneconomic one—in other words, behold the soul of ObamaCare.

Under the original Health and Human Services regulation, all religious institutions except for houses of worship would be required to cover birth control, including hospitals, schools and charities. Under the new rule, which the White House stresses is “an accommodation” and not a compromise, nonprofit religious organizations won’t have to directly cover birth control and can opt out. But the insurers they hire to cover their employees can’t opt out. If that sounds like a distinction without a difference, odds are you’re a rational person.

But, jumping on the muted initial statement by the Catholic bishops about the “accommodation,” President Obama’s Catholic left base rushed in with their response, signaling their satisfaction with the shell game, never mind that the consciences of religious organizations can’t tell the difference between directly covering free contraception, etc. or writing a check out to an insurance company to do it for them. And never mind that they are satisfied with President Obama- the government- telling a private company what it can and cannot do.

Sister Carol Keehan, head of the Catholic Health Association, who provided the “appearance” of Catholic support for ObamaCare to the president, responded to the “accommodation:”

The Catholic Health Association is very pleased with the White House announcement that a resolution has been reached that protects the religious liberty and conscience rights of Catholic institutions. The framework developed has responded to the issues we identified that needed to be fixed. We are pleased and grateful that the religious liberty and conscience protection needs of so many ministries that serve our country were appreciated enough that an early resolution of this issue was accomplished. The unity of Catholic organizations in addressing this concern was a sign of its importance. This difference has at times been uncomfortable but it has helped our country sort through an issue that has been important throughout the history of our great democracy.

So, if we follow the logic of Sister Keehan, it appears it is against one’s conscience to kill someone yourself, but it is not against one’s conscience to hire someone to kill on your behalf. As the Wall Street Journal so aptly noted, “If that sounds like a distinction without a difference, odds are you’re a rational person.”

The Obama administration recently ruled that all insurance policies must offer contraceptive services with no co-payments required. In and of itself, that decision is neither positive nor negative. Forty-three percent of voters favor it, while 46 percent are opposed. Among Catholics, though, according to Scott Rasmussen, only 28% believe religious organizations should be required to implement rules that violate church teachings. Sixty-five percent are opposed, which is true even though many Catholics disagree with the Pope on this matter. The only Catholics that agree with Obama are those that already voted for him. Only 39% of Catholic voters approve of Obama’s job performance today, compared to 54% in November 2008.

The person most helped by all of this is Rick Santorum, who now trails the president nationwide by only four points, 46% to 42%. In Ohio, Santorum is even with Obama, while Romney trails by four points.

Interestingly, Mitt Romney’s argument about electability is also called into question by recent polling. According to Rasmussen’s tracking history, Obama attracts some 50% of the vote against Romney’s 40%, opening up the largest lead Obama has yet enjoyed against Romney in regular polling going back more than a year. It’s also the first time that the president has reached the 50% level of support against Romney.

So what to make of it all? Romney’s down against Obama and Santorum’s up.

Ah, but will he swing and miss in November?

Contrasting an America that can versus an America that can’t, Gingrich compared America’s speed and might in winning WWII versus her current inability to seal its own border. In a lighter moment, the former Speaker contrasted the efficiency of package tracking by Federal Express with the government’s inability to track illegal immigrants, suggesting sending each one a package may be the best way to apprehend the latter.

He also mentioned repealing Obamacare, Dodd Frank, and Sarbanes Oxley on his first day in office. He stated his desire to be a “paycheck president” versus a “food stamp president,” a term he used to denigrate Barack Obama.

Calling for a Fall campaign focused on substance, Gingrich also mentioned eliminating the Capital Gains tax and implementing 100% expensing for all new equipment written off in one year to help get the economy growing. Additionally, he called for a modernization of the workforce, proposing that unemployment compensation be linked to business training programs to avoid paying people for 99 weeks “for doing nothing.”

The solutions were bold but would obviously involve more than giving one speech. He called for the elimination of the EPA, replacing it with a new agency that would take economics and business interests into account in all decision-making. On tax policy, Gingrich called for a 12.5% corporate tax rate, abolishing the death tax, and the option of a 15% flat tax for individuals he called a tax cut.

Citing the need to shrink spending to meet revenue levels and the replacement of the current Civil Service system with a new modern personnel management system, his remarks appeared to be well received. Gingrich also cited abolishing the Dept of Energy (DOE) and a task forced to be headed by Texas Governor Rick Perry focused on the 10th amendment to return power to the states, as appropriate.

Gingrich also called for an audit of the Federal Reserve and an end to Ben Bernanke’s term as Chair of the Federal Reserve. The former Speaker also called for a more honest foreign policy, one acknowledging the dangers of radical Islamists intent on doing America and Americans harm.

WASHINGTON (AP) – Rushing to end a political uproar, President BarackObama on Friday will announce that religious employers will not have to coverbirth control for their employees after all, The Associated Press has learned. The administration instead will demand that insurance companies will be the ones directly responsible for providing free contraception.

Obama’s abrupt shift is an attempt to satisfy both sides of a deeply sensitive debate, and most urgently, to end a mounting election-year nightmare for theWhite House. The leader of a Catholic organization and a prominent women’s group both expressed initial support for the changes.

Women will still get guaranteed access to birth control without co-pays or premiums no matter where they work, a provision of Obama’s health care law that he insisted must remain. But religious universities and hospitals that see contraception as an unconscionable violation of their faith can refuse to cover it, and insurance companies will then have to step in to do so.

Obama will speak about his decision at 12:15 p.m. EST.

Senior administration officials confirmed the details to the AP but insisted they remain anonymous in advance of the president’s announcement.

By keeping free contraception for employers at religious workplaces—but providing a different way to do it—the White House will assert it gave no ground on the basic principle of full preventative care that matters most to Obama.

Yet, it also was clear that Obama felt he had no choice but to retreat on a three-week-old policy in the face of a fierce political furor that showed no signs of cooling.

The White House consulted leaders on both sides of the debate to forge a decision.

Read more at the Associated Press

President Barack Obama will announce a plan to accommodate religious employers outraged by a rule that would require them to cover birth control for women free of charge, according to a person familiar with the decision.

Obama was expected to make the announcement at the White House Friday.

The shift is aimed at containing the political firestorm that erupted after Obama announced in January that religious-affiliated employers had to cover birth control as preventative care for women. Churches and houses of worship were exempt, but all other affiliated organizations were ordered to comply by Aug. 2013.

It is not clear with whom Obama has negotiated a “compromise”; it would appear he has simply compromised with himself, modifying his rule in a way he believes he can sell politically.

Mulligan?

The outrage is as much about the fact that the Obama administration tried to define what is, and is not, a religious institution as it is about the fact that it tried to impose its own dogmatic beliefs–in population control, among other things–on Catholics and other religious groups.

Earlier this week, administration officials had signaled that the president might “compromise,” a prospect that was greeted with skepticism by religious leaders, who struggled to imagine a halfway point between religious freedom and state dictates on religious faith.

The last, best word belongs to Charles Krauthammer, who writes today:

To flatter his faith-breakfast guests and justify his tax policies, Obama declares good works to be the essence of religiosity. Yet he turns around and, through Sebelius, tells the faithful who engage in good works that what they’re doing is not religion at all. You want to do religion? Get thee to a nunnery. You want shelter from the power of the state? Get out of your soup kitchen and back to your pews. Outside, Leviathan rules.

Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) was the first female U.S. Senator to speak out against the administration’s rule from the floor of the Senate. “This mandate places religious institutions in this impossible position of violating their core beliefs in order to comply with the mandate or dropping employee insurance coverage altogether. We should not be putting these organizations that do great work throughout this country in this position,” Ayotte argued.

She has also soundly denounced the politics of gender identity by stating plainly, “this is not a women’s rights issue. This is a religious liberty issue.”

Ayotte’s public comments on this matter have been honest, forthright and respectful of her constituents concerns.

Her colleague Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) presents an entirely different example. Shaheen took to the Op-Ed pages of the Wall Street Journal Wednesday along with Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Ca.) and Patty Murray (D-Wa.) to argue “why the birth control mandate makes sense.” Shaheen’s article is a textbook case of agitprop using selective data, straw men (literally, men) and identity politics.

Shaheen starts her argument off by deceptively conflating conscience issues with laudable and necessary medical procedures like breast exams. “It was a historic victory for women’s health when the Obama administration changed the law to require private health plans to provide preventive services including breast exams, HIV screening and contraception for free,” she writes.

We’re not stupid and we know why Shaheen is tossing non-controversial medical procedures into the mix – straw men make the best enemies. But her argument is intellectually insulting. No one opposes health coverage for breast exams. She’s just making that up. But the Senator should watch that “free” talk – someone is paying for it.

Shaheen wastes no time trying to change the playing field in the very next paragraph. This a not matter of religious liberty, but rather, she argues, “the real forces behind it are the same ones that sought to shut down the federal government last year over funding for women’s health care.” Yes, I remember all this Catholic Bishops hooting and hollering about shutting the government down like it was yesterday! It’s rare that I have a conversation with my priest in which he isn’t mashing his fist into his palm bemoaning the fact that the federal government is still open for business. I’m being sarcastic, of course. Shaheen’s argument is simply absurd.

(Oh, this just in: The secret-shut-down-the-government-and-kill-women cabal has recruited a new member – Shaheen’s Democrat colleague Sen. Bob Casey.)

The senator then dedicates a few paragraphs to the obligatory rigged statistics from various leftwing “institutes” and a Democrat pollster. Here’s just one example of her bogus presentation of “facts.” “A recent survey by Hart Research shows 71% of American voters, including 77% of Catholic women voters, supported this provision broadening access to birth control,” she writes. But Shaheen fails to mention the poll is almost two years old– it came out before all those ObamaCare-voting Democrats were thrown out of office in November 2010 – and was conducted on behalf of … wait for it … Planned Parenthood.

Considering how much taxpayer money Planned Parenthood receives every year, I suppose we should consider that poll “free,” too, eh? What’s more, from what I can determine, the survey in question represents a classic example of a polling company attempting to “push” respondents toward a pre-determined response. It appears to contain no mention at all of the potential violation of conscience within the provision in question.

What’s more, a brand new survey by Rasmussen reveals a very different result. According to Rasmussen, “Fifty-six percent (56%) of male voters are against the government requiring contraceptive coverage in a case like this. Female voters are almost evenly divided on the question. Sixty-five percent (65%) of Catholic voters oppose this requirement, as do 62% of Evangelical Christians, and 50% of other Protestants. Most non-Christians (56%) support the Obama Administration ruling.”

It may be convenient for Shaheen’s argument to regurgitate dusty, skewed data, but it’s also dishonest.

Shaheen wraps up by arguing the whole controversy is just a big mix up anyway. After all, this is “good health policy and good economic policy” and is “consistent with federal policy.” Oh, well! It’s policy … it must be serious and thoughtful.

But of course it isn’t, which is why there is such an outcry. And if I may deviate from my main point for a moment, government mandates requiring businesses to offer anything for “free” is, by nature, not “good economic policy.”

A quick summation of the two women Senators’ careers might explain why one has presented a rational, thoughtful argument and the other serves up so much partisan and ideological tripe. Ayotte is a former Attorney General – the first woman to hold that office in New Hampshire, I believe, though I don’t recall any self-congratulatory commemoration of that fact from her office – who has argued before the Supreme Court of the United States and prosecuted cop killers to the fullest extent of the law.

And Jeanne Shaheen? Well, she was a run-of-the-mill, liberal political operative with deep ties to pro-abortion and feminist groups. He rode a wave of gender identity politics into the governorship and she wastes no time reminding people she was the state’s first governess. She lost in her first bid for the U.S. Senate and waited around for another opportunity to run. She used the unpopularity of the Iraq War – a war she supported – to defeat Republican Sen. John Sununu.

In other words, Kelly Ayotte is a public servant. Jeanne Shaheen is a one-trick-pony party hack. Her dishonest, gender-baiting Op-Ed is of a piece with her entire dishonest career.

Rather, it is about population control.

Creamer–like his wife, the pro-abortion Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL)–embraces the left-wing fallacy that children are a burden on the planet, which the state should encourage the church–and everyone else–to limit.

At 6:16-7:03 in the video below, by CNS News, Schakowsky describes abortion as “most often” a “responsible decision” to control the size of their families:

Writing in the Huffington Post yesterday, Creamer declared:

…[T]here is a worldwide consensus that the use of birth control is one of society’s most important moral priorities. Far from being something that should be discouraged, or is controversial, the use of birth control is critical to the survival and success of humanity….It is simply not possible for this small planet to sustain that kind of exponential human population growth. If we do, the result will be poverty, war, the depletion of our natural resources and famine. Fundamentally, the Reverend [Thomas] Malthus was right–except that the result is not inevitable….That’s why it is our moral imperative to act responsibly and encourage each other to use birth control.

Malthus’s late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century views, which still inspire much of today’s environmental movement, have been repeatedly disproved over the course of two centuries. Economic freedom, growth and innovation have made human society vastly more productive and efficient.

It is precisely because radical socialists like Creamer, Schakowsky and Obama detest the free economy that they continue to rely on old Malthusian and Marxist ideas.

Regardless, the indication by Creamer that the contraception mandate is not about “equality,” but population growth, suggests that the Obama administration’s challenge to the beliefs of the Catholic church may be more direct–and deliberate–than was previously suspected.