Excuse me

Do you have a girlfriend?

  That is what I want to ask some of these loud irate right wing single male catholic bloggers hailing the hill they want to die on being this HHS insurance reform legislation/regulation. Really? Come on.

   You need a girlfriend is what I want to tell them. Then you would have the foggiest idea what you are talking about.

  The amount of hype, hyperbole and campy merchandising schtick over this Fortnight of Freedom is enough to make you go-which religion is this? Is this the one with the beautiful latin chants and ave marias by the greatest italian opera singers in the world? Is this the one that runs the best relief services for refugee and migrants around the world? The prayerful rosary singing one- The one with beautiful stunning cathedrals in France? Or is this some Ralph Reed incarnated assault on Obama in an election year to make democrats out to be the immoral ones- the party that murders babies. The Republican Prayer Cabal.

click: HERE for WashPo article

  Come on. Insurance regulations to mandate access to birth control and sterilization (for maybe if you have uterine cancer and need the procedure to live) are not matters of religious freedom of an institution because corporations don't have religions.  What religion is GM, or Verizon or Ford or Citibank? They don't pray, they don't go to confession, they don't worship, they don't sing, they don't commune with God. The PEOPLE in them do. Religious freedom has to have an individual dimension such that the consciences of actual people, not the legal fiction of corporations matters and is considered for the liberty interest. So if for example over half the people Georgetown serves, and over half the administrators and teaching professionals there are not catholic but say jewish or protestant, then is it fair to say that an exception should be extended for catholic conscience rights regarding prohibition of something doctrine holds --and the people predominantly disagree with anyway?

     The best hope for this mess is that the mandates all together are done away with on grounds that the Government can't order anyone to purchase anything- the commerce clause doesn't permit regulation of consumers.

   Absent that sweeping mootness the Archdiocese should mediate because if not it will come out looking as bad as it did having its mitre handed to it in the gay marriage business. It looks ridiculous frankly.

   Saint Thomas More died over whether or not the Pope ruled English churches or what the King of England did as what King Henry VIII was trying to do in nullifying all authority of the Catholic Church on ecclesiastical matters was make King Henry the effective head of the Church of all England.
The analogy here would be if Obama said, all congregations now are free to ignore anything Wuerl, Dolan and all Bishops do because I, Obama am the Head of the Catholic Church now in America and dissolving the offices of Cardinal making them government adjunct agencies. It is absurd to make this insurance regulation analogous to that which St. Thomas More was opposing. I sincerely doubt that he would have gone to the gallows over this one. It makes a bit of a mockery of him.