Dionne's dutiful dance and those devilish details

When the HHS mandate was first delivered from on high, it so shocked and stunned many Catholics that something rather exceptional occured: for a few moments—even a few days, in a handful of remarkable cases—some of the most openly dissenting, cave-in Catholics were startled awake by the brazen attack leveled by the Obama administration on religious liberty. Some, such as E. J. Dionne, Jr., awoke from their ideological slumber and stumbled to the edge of reality's bright light and blurrily wondered how the most thoughtful, moderate, and Catholic-friendly President in the history of humanity could ever make such a dreadful blunder:

One of Barack Obama's great attractions as a presidential candidate was his sensitivity to the feelings and intellectual concerns of religious believers. That is why it is so remarkable that he utterly botched the admittedly difficult question of how contraceptive services should be treated under the new health-care law. His administration mishandled this decision not once but twice. In the process, Obama threw his progressive Catholic allies under the bus and strengthened the hand of those inside the church who had originally sought to derail the health care law.

But even as Dionne warily breathed in the fresh air from outside his liberal echo chamber, he admitted being still conflicted about the matter because the clash between "women's rights" and "religious pluralism" didn't seem to have an easy answer:

As a general matter, it made perfect sense to cover contraception. Many see doing so as protecting women's rights, and expanded contraception coverage will likely reduce the number of abortions. While the Catholic Church formally opposes contraception, this teaching is widely ignored by the faithful. One does not see many Catholic families of six or ten or twelve that were quite common in the 1950s. Contraception might have something to do with this.

Speaking as a Catholic, I wish the church would be more open on the contraception question. But speaking as an American liberal who believes that religious pluralism imposes certain obligations on government, I think the church's leaders had a right to ask for broader relief from a contraception mandate that would require it to act against its own teachings. The administration should have done more to balance the competing liberty interests here.

Fortunately for Dionne, the Obama administration came through with an "accommodation" that gently—paternally, even—turned him away from the startling sunlight and nudged him back toward the cozy confines of his progressive Catholic cave, where he could return to his main work: sniping with indignation at Catholics not taken in by the President's cynical shell game. Yesterday, Dionne double-checked the shades, cursed the light, and fired off some of the same tired, left-wing-ish salvos that have long been a matter of pride for those Catholics more interested in the amorphous entity called "social justice" than dealing with actual assaults on, well, social justice:

The nation's Roman Catholic bishops will make an important decision this week: Do they want to defend the church's legitimate interest in religious autonomy, or do they want to wage an election-year war against President Obama?
And do the most conservative bishops want to junk the Roman Catholic Church as we have known it, with its deep commitment to both life and social justice, and turn it into the tea party at prayer?

This sort of rhetoric is decidedly unserious and misleading. Is Dionne really assuming, against all evidence, that the Obama administration is working in perfectly good faith, but that the bishops (all of whom—every single one—has spoken against the mandate and accommodation) are acting in bad faith and with poor judgment?

Read the entire post on the Catholic World Report blog...