Giving in to Catholic church's demands leads to bad politics
According to the conventional wisdom, President Barack Obama has made a political mistake. His administration decided some time ago to classify birth control as a preventive service, because, obviously, it is exactly that. The Affordable Care Act requires that insurance plans provide preventive services without a co-pay — that is, for free. This is sensible: Paying for preventive care saves insurers money in the long run. Now that birth control is officially defined as preventive, insurance companies must cover it completely, and employers must pay for it. Churches are exempt, but church-affiliated organizations and institutions that operate in the secular sphere are not — an apparently controversial idea. The pundits say that this is bad politics: the president should be careful not to upset religious people in an election year.
The conventional wisdom is wrong. If anything, free birth control is good politics. Not only is the policy supported by a majority of Americans, but it is also supported by a majority of American Catholics. This should not be surprising. Birth control hasn’t actually been controversial in a long time. In America, 99 percent of women use some form of contraception. Admittedly, that number is somewhat lower for Catholic women: 98 percent. Birth control is so normal now we shouldn’t even have to talk about it, except once in our lives when we explain to our children how to use it. Yet somehow I’ve had cause to write about contraception in this space three times now since 2012 began. How can something be ubiquitous in our daily lives and at the same time politically controversial?
The answer, of course, is that our attempted democracy doesn’t exactly work how it should. The all-male and theoretically celibate hierarchy of the Catholic Church has a louder voice, more money and better political connections than most of the millions upon millions of ordinary women who rely on contraception. The awkward but effective political alliance of free-market purists and cultural reactionaries that supports one of our two major parties unfairly benefits, with money and influence, the so-called moral crusaders and their far-from-mainstream politics.
Last week, Obama announced a compromise that looked like it would put this controversy to bed. Religious institutions will not be required to pay for contraception coverage, but insurers will still be required to provide it to those institutions’ employees. Insurers will simply have to offer the coverage directly to the employees. Any objection to the policy on the basis of “religious freedom” is now moot. But the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops still isn’t happy. In a statement they said they will continue to oppose the administration’s “nationwide mandate of insurance coverage of sterilization and contraception.” That is, they don’t just oppose the application of the policy to church-affiliated organizations; they oppose the policy in its entirety.
It’s time we stopped worrying about whether Catholic bishops are happy. They won’t be happy until all contraception has been eradicated off the face of the Earth. It shouldn’t be bad politics to ignore the bishops. It should be bad politics to ignore the people.
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