For a moment there, the Obama administration must have felt as if it had dodged a bullet.
Two weeks ago, Kathleen Sebelius announced a narrow religious exemption for contraception coverage, meaning that almost all religious organizations that provide health care for their employees will have to cover birth control, even if it conflicts with their religious beliefs. A few predictable objections arose from the more vocal Catholic groups and conservative publications, but even these lamented the finality of the decision rather than called for action against it.
But since then, the outcry has grown exponentially, with Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich loudly (if opportunistically) condemning the mandate, and even liberal columnists denouncing the decision.
The administration is feeling the pressure. On Tuesday, the Obama administration signaled it might be willing to revise the religious exemption. “We certainly don’t want to abridge anyone’s religious freedoms,” Obama advisor David Axelrod said, sounding as if he were trying to squeeze past someone in the aisle seat. “So we’re going to look for a way to move forward that both provides women with the preventative care that they need and respects the prerogatives of religious institutions.”
Good luck parsing that for any specifics. Rather, Axelrod’s statement seems like a first volley to religious groups to sound out what they may be comfortable with. Some have speculated that the administration is considering a Hawaii-style mandate, in which religious groups don’t have to provide the contraception themselves, but are required to give a timely referral to an institution that will. Nobody on the right seems happy with being forced to refer patients to Planned Parenthood (though they would be advised not to mess with the non-profit itself, which is on a roll right now).
In fact, Axelrod’s statement was so vague that at least one commentator speculated it was intentionally meaningless, a stall to quiet Catholic bishops and National Review bloggers for the time being.
Complicating this issue are election-year politics. Obama won Catholics by a decent margin over John McCain, but that was before the onslaught of death-panel-level rhetoric surrounding health care reform. The President needs all the independent and swing voters he can get this time around, which means walking a careful line with Catholics, who factor in considerably in crucial swing states.
But, as S. E. Cupp points out in a characteristically schizophrenic editorial, “American Catholics are hardly single-issue voters like some of their evangelical counterparts.” A vast majority of Catholics use contraception, and even those who don’t are largely supportive of its use.
Contraception, however, is only half the story, electoral or otherwise. The rhetoric from the right has been focused less on health services and more on religious freedom. Under this argument, the merits of the service are overruled by the religious infringement involved in mandating them. “Religious pluralism imposes certain obligations on government,” E.J. Dionne wrote in his editorial. “The administration should have done more to balance the competing liberty interests here.”
That’s the nice way of putting it. One of the main narratives of the general election will be the acceptable extent of government reach, and this mandate can be easily framed as a stark example of federal intrusion of the type warned about during the health care debate. (Everybody remember this stuff?) It’s unlikely that the mandate itself will alienate Catholic voters, but the worry of Obama’s reelection campaign is that it will be assimilated in this greater narrative of government largesse, a narrative that feeds into the more elemental issue of the economy.
In the meantime, the mandate is set to go into effect on January 1, 2013, following a one-year grace period for religious organizations to comply. But given how much this controversy has heated up in the past couple weeks, the next 11 months will look less like a grace period and more like the height of the battle.
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