Limbaugh's words overwhelm bishops' 'religious liberty' call

Remember the "religious liberty" fight? Nope. Now, it's all about women's rights and dignity, thanks to Rush Limbaugh's attack on law student Sandra Fluke and President Obama's defend-our-daughter-citizens stance.

Just weeks ago, the Catholic bishops were running the table with their rhetoric. Even Congress bought into the idea that contraception access was not a women's issue. GOP presidential candidates dismissed questions about birth control as not important. (How's that working for you, fellows?)

The bishops, backed up by conservative evangelicals, call it a religious liberty fight. They don't want any employer of faith or conscience to be required to offer contraception, either directly or indirectly by making their insurers pick up the full tab. They argue the Constitution does not allow the government to decide what institutions are sufficiently religious to get the narrow exemption offered to houses of worship on the contraception mandate.

Now, however, even the strongest condemnations from Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York and head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and other leading bishops, can't push into the headlines. Dolan issued a letter last Friday to all the bishops, released to the press, saying, in part:

...As pastors and shepherds, each of us would prefer to spend our energy engaged in and promoting the works of mercy to which the Church is dedicated: healing the sick, teaching our youth, and helping the poor. Yet, precisely because we are pastors and shepherds, we recognize that each of the ministries entrusted to us by Jesus is now in jeopardy due to this bureaucratic intrusion into the internal life of the church...

...Since a big part of our ministries are "self-insured," we still ask how this protects us. We'll still have to pay and, in addition to that, we'll still have to maintain in our policies practices which our Church has consistently taught are grave wrongs in which we cannot participate. And what about forcing individual believers to pay for what violates their religious freedom and conscience? We can't abandon the hard working person of faith who has a right to religious freedom...

But it was drowned out by the Limbaugh blow-up as the public discussion moved away from the merits/horrors of requiring employers and/or their insurers to offer contraception free to female workers.

Women's groups, backed up by liberal denominations and the evangelical left, say this is a matter of women's health and women's individual liberties, their own conscience. To allow religious authorities to define the exemptions or eliminate the mandate is a violation of the Constitution which bans the establishment of any religion in shaping laws, they argue.

Rush Limbaugh's attack on Fluke was cast, by women, as an attack on them all, an effort to stifle the young women of American. The pill empowered women at home and at work. On the 50th anniversary of the pill, sociology professor Pam Brown Schachter of Marymount College, said,

It opened the door to a psychological mind-set of a life beyond having kids and being a housewife. It gave women a freedom they didn't have before.

President Obama played into that last week when he called Fluke to express his concern for her. He was prompted, he said, by his own concern for his daughters, Sasha and Malia, and their future ability to speak out in the public square according to their conscience.

Neither are all Catholics in line with the bishops on whether the revised mandate that created a work-around for faith-affiliated institutions. Some institutions are working with HHS on resolving how to make the rule work. There's dissent among the bishops, not on morality but on strategy, David Gibson points out in his Religion News Service analysis piece:

Some are arguing for a take-it-or-leave-it strategy with the White House. Even if that hard-line approach fails, they say that it will draw such a stark contrast between Obama's agenda and the bishops' interests that Catholics will rally to the church and help to defeat Obama in November.

Others, however, think the bishops should temper their rhetoric and keep a place at the table. That would give the bishops a better chance of securing an acceptable deal -- especially if Obama wins a second term. This pragmatic approach says the hierarchy needs to build bridges to help avert future confrontations and to foster cooperation on shared political goals.

"I don't think at the present time that they have a strategy," said Russell Shaw, a former spokesman for the USCCB who writes frequently about the church and politics.

Meanwhile, the Jesuit magazine America, editorialized that the bishops overreached in their religious liberty rhetoric.

The editors said the bishops' campaign

... devalues the coinage of religious liberty. The fight the bishop's conference won against the initial mandate was indeed a fight for religious liberty and for that reason won widespread support. The latest phase of the campaign, however, seems intended to bar health care funding for contraception. Catholics legitimately oppose such a policy on moral grounds. But that opposition entails a difference over policy, not an infringement of religious liberty. It does a disservice to the victims of religious persecution everywhere to inflate policy differences into a struggle over religious freedom...

The newest edition of America, has a sharp rebuttal from Bishop William Lori, dripping with sarcasm:

...So, the bishops should regard providing (and paying for) contraception as, well, a policy detail. After all, it's not like the federal government is asking bishops to deny the divinity of Christ. It's just a detail in a moral theology -- life and love, or something such as that. And why worry about other ways the government may soon require the Church to violate its teachings as a matter of policy?...

So, the fight is really about who's in charge: Religious authority or your individual conscience? Individual Catholics, as Gibson, points out, are going with the latter:

Surveys show that U.S. Catholics -- including the most devout -- do not heed the bishops' teachings against artificial birth control, and framing the issue as a threat to religious freedom hasn't moved Catholics to mass opposition.

DO YOU THINK... the bishops can keep folks from straying off the religious liberty script to a women's individual rights script? Will the parents-of-daughters forces outweigh them all in public opinion?