Obama's assault on the poor

WASHINGTON — Some issues fade; others fester. The Obama administration's contraceptive mandate on religious charities, hospitals and universities is the festering kind.

The initial reaction concerned the rights of institutions. Catholic organizations naturally resent being forced to buy health insurance that covers sterilization, contraceptives and drugs that can end a pregnancy soon after conception. The Obama administration seems to have calculated that since contraceptives are popular and the Catholic Church is not, the outcry would be isolated.

But religious liberty is also popular, given the Constitution and all that. Even those who have no objection to contraception — the category in which I have repeatedly placed myself — can be offended when arrogant government officials compel religious institutions to violate the dictates of their conscience. Religious liberty that applies only to doctrines and practices of which we approve means nothing.

In this case, however, the main harm Barack Obama has done is not to institutions. It is to the people they serve.

The provision of social services in America, and by America abroad, is a partnership between government and religious groups, both of which have advantages. Religious charities are compassionate and trusted by communities. Government has greater reach and resources.

A humane partnership between the two has depended on an uneasy compromise. Religious groups must use public funds for public purposes, not for proselytization. Government, in turn, allows religious charities to maintain views and practices that are different from those of public institutions.

At first, Obama endorsed this consensus — in his "Call to Renewal" speech in 2006 and his Zanesville, Ohio, speech in 2008. Now his administration is applying an ideological wrecking ball. It asserts that only churches merit serious religious liberty protection. The government's views and standards must prevail when religious groups serve nonmembers — an apparently unlimited power to regulate religious institutions that don't distribute the bread and wine.

The health care mandate is not an aberration; it is a culmination. In the Hosanna-Tabor Supreme Court case, the Obama administration opposed any special ministerial exception to federal law — a radical argument unanimously repudiated by the court. The Department of Health and Human Services recently denied a grant to the Migrant and Refugee Services committee of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to assist women rescued from sex trafficking, ostensibly because the organization does not refer for abortions.