It was just weeks ago that the US Supreme Court delivered a unanimous rebuke to the Obama administration by ruling that religious groups must be allowed to retain exclusive control free of government interference over employment decisions regarding their spiritual leaders and teachers. Yet incredibly within days of the Court’s decision the administration seemed to thumb its nose at the nine justices announcing that the Obamacare requirement for employers’ health insurance policies to cover prescriptions that violate religious dictates would include only the narrowest possible exemption for religious employers.
Under this regulation any religious organization that either employs or provides services to people beyond its own faith will be forced to provide insurance coverage that violates its own religious principles. This understandably has ignited an unprecedented firestorm of controversy. Catholic bishops whose hospitals treat one out of every six patients in America and who run the country’s largest network of private schools took to pulpits across the country to proclaim that they “cannot — will not — comply with this law ” and minority leader Mitch McConnell took to the floor of the US Senate to denounce the regulation as “abhorrent to the foundational principles of our nation.”
One must concede that Barack Obama deserves credit in all this for consistency which isn’t a particular strong suit of his. This is after all someone who until just recently was calling the use of Super PACs to fund political campaigns a “threat to democracy” — until that is he decided that he needed a couple of those nifty funding vehicles for his own campaign (which isn’t quite the picture of poverty having raised close to a billion dollars for his 2008 run).
But in regard to the First Amendment’s Religion Clause the president has been a model of consistency. The clause states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” setting forth in those few words two important prohibitions: that government shall not endorse religion but neither shall it curtail religious freedom — and the president has done both.
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