For the National Organization for Women, liberal ideology comes before, you know, actual women.

NOW outs Little Sisters of the Poor for being "too Catholic/insufficiently liberal."

The National Organization of Women (NOW) has compiled a list of what they're calling the "Dirty 100" — organizations who have filed suit against the HHS Contraception Mandate. One of the "Dirty 100" organizations that NOW claims is simply "using religion" to discriminate against women, is, in fact, a group of Catholic religious sisters called the Little Sisters of the Poor.

The Little Sisters of the Poor take vows to tend to the needs of the elderly poor. They are opposed to providing contraception to their employees as contraception violates the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. The Little Sisters of the Poor are not considered to be a "religious employer" and exempt from the mandate as they employ and care for people of all faith backgrounds.

It's weird how all those Nancy Pelosi cronies who got waivers from the mandate are not on the list....because, you know, liberals can sacrifice women to liberalism.

If anyone is interested in the Constitutional issues involving the Obamacare mandate's impact on religion...

... James Taranto has a good discussion of it.

Any such claim is baseless. The legal basis of the Hobby Lobby and Conestoga cases is entirely distinct from that of Smith, although the cases are related. In 1993, Congress responded to the Smith ruling by enacting the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which, as Kapur writes, "says any law that 'substantially burden[s]' a person's exercise of religion must demonstrate a 'compelling governmental interest' and employ the 'least restrictive means' of furthering that interest." Kapur acknowledges that "that's the basis under which Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood . . . are suing for relief from the birth control rule."

And that," he continues, "might offer Scalia an escape hatch":

Experts say he could conceivably decide that the First Amendment doesn't protect a religious person's entity's [sic] to an exemption from the law but that RFRA suffices to let Hobby Lobby and certain others off the hook from the birth control rule.
Actually, that is a very unlikely outcome. Judges tend to avoid making unnecessary pronouncements about constitutional questions, so the inquiry will begin with the question of whether the mandate violates the plaintiffs' rights under the RFRA statute. If the answer is yes, that is where the inquiry will end--with no determination about what the First Amendment requires.

The "escape hatch" language suggests that the RFRA question is a contrivance Scalia will use to mask his supposed religious favoritism. That is preposterous in light of the 2006 case of Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficente União do Vegetal, a case with a fact pattern similar to that in Smith:

A religious sect with origins in the Amazon Rainforest receives communion by drinking a sacramental tea, brewed from plants unique to the region, that contains a hallucinogen regulated under the Controlled Substances Act by the Federal Government. The Government concedes that this practice is a sincere exercise of religion, but nonetheless sought to prohibit the small American branch of the sect from engaging in the practice, on the ground that the Controlled Substances Act bars all use of the hallucinogen. The sect sued to block enforcement against it of the ban on the sacramental tea, and moved for a preliminary injunction.
The plaintiffs prevailed in an 8-0 decision by Chief Justice John Roberts, which Scalia joined without comment (Justice Samuel Alito had not yet been seated when the case was argued). So Scalia has already applied RFRA to vindicate the rights of a hallucinogen-using minority sect. There would be no contradiction in holding that the statute also protects mainstream religious believers to whose moral views the current administration is hostile.//

I have to admit that at the time of a recent discussion with Jeff Bishop, I hadn't understood that that RFRA was a reaction to the Smith decision, and I'd never heard of the Gonzales decision.

Even Jove nods.

But it looks that I was "righter" than I thought.

Liberals Embracing Their Inner Fascist.

Obama, and his supporters, quite clearly take joy in coercing those seen as enemies to do things they find objectionable. It is indicative of a deep psychological disorder.  - Glen Reynolds

Megan McCardle observes:

I gather that both supporters and opponents of the mandate think the Supreme Court will probably rule that corporations (at least closely held ones such as these two) are going to be granted an exemption from the mandate if they have clear religious objections.

Social media was on fire over this when it happened, and I confess that I am struggling to see why. There was a lot of outraged talk about how corporations aren’t people, of course, but a lot more about employers trying to control their employees’ sex lives, treating women as second-class citizens and so forth. To judge from these reactions, you would think that birth-control pills were a scarce resource that could only legally be obtained through employers. In fact, generic birth-control pills are available for $25 a month through a Costco pharmacy, $50 if you want a brand name.

“But that’s expensive for a young woman on a budget!” you are about to cry. And I am about to answer that it doesn’t get less expensive because an insurer buys it. Regular, predictable expenses such as birth-control pills cannot be defrayed by insurance; they can only be prepaid, with a markup for the insurer’s administrative costs. The extra cost is passed on by the insurers to your employer, and from your employer to you and your fellow workers, either by raising your contribution or lowering the wage they are willing to offer. There’s obviously some cross-subsidy from your fellow employees who don’t use birth control, but overall, there’s no particular reason to force insurers to cover a minor and predictable expense.

The administration didn’t force employers with a religious objection to offer contraception because it made financial or medical sense; they did it because it had great symbolic value to Barack Obama’s political base. And much of that symbolic value seems to actually come from the willingness to coerce people who object to buy the stuff.//

Tossing a pinch of incense to the statue of the emperor.

Daniel Henninger at the Wall Street Journal says "welcome to 3rd Century Rome":

Suddenly amid this hallowed tradition, we get Barack Obama and Kathleen Sebelius (Trinity College, '70) claiming with the zeal of secular fanatics that these priests, nuns, their hospitals and the people who work in them will find a way to pay for and permit sterilizations and abortifacients. Catholics can believe what they want inside their churches, but in public they too must show belief in reproductive rights as defined in law by the state. Welcome to 3rd-century Rome.

The resisting Catholic bishops, say the administration and its factions, are "out of step" with the current American consensus on women's reproductive rights. Possibly so, but official Catholic doctrine and the HHS mandate are in opposition.

The Obama administration is effectively saying that all the practices and beliefs embedded in the Obama health-care law are established in America and consent is required, no matter what some religion purports to believe. It is this attempt to displace religious belief with an alternative belief system that goes against the American grain and has Catholics up in arms.

Perhaps the Catholic-myth people are right that most Catholics are OK now with abortifacients. And maybe the pundits dripping ridicule and bile on New York's Cardinal Timothy Dolan have got the modern American Catholic pegged right. I doubt it. Not yet.

Exactly.

Notice how liberals view Catholics and other groups who aren't liberals as infants?

This Washington Post column by Lisa Miller is amazing for its tendentiousness and its picture of Catholics as being infants who are swayed by their puerile need to comfort:

Mommy and daddy are fighting, and the anguished children don’t know where to turn.

This is the state of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States today. A small group of very conservative bishops has hijacked the church, or at least the public voice of the church. The bishops are playing the role of the authoritarian father. In case after case, their message to the faithful is “Do it because I say so.”

Last week, in an orchestrated political maneuver, 43 Catholic entities — including the Archdiocese of Washington — filed a dozen lawsuits against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, saying that any mandate requiring religious organizations to provide contraceptive coverage to employees was a violation of religious liberty.

So, even though 82 percent of American Catholics believe that birth control is morally acceptable, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who is president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, called the lawsuits “a compelling display of the unity of the church in defense of religious liberty.” (The USCCB is not a party to the suits.)

A much larger group of more moderate bishops has stayed mostly silent, fearful that to take a stand against the brethren would be to lay bare intramural fissures. They play the role of the silent and frustrated mother.

The lawsuits are, in fact, very far from a “compelling display of unity.” There are 194 dioceses in the country; only about a dozen joined the suits. There are more than 200 Catholic colleges and universities in the United States, and only a handful joined the suits. Notably missing from this so-called display of unity are the dioceses of Chicago and Los Angeles, both of which have prominent leadership and robust, vibrant Catholic communities. Also missing from the list of plaintiffs are some of the country’s most prominent Catholic educational institutions, notably Boston College and Georgetown University.

Only one brave bishop has so far explained his refusal to sign on with the authoritarian minority. Like a parent who prefers to work on marital disagreements in private, rather than expose the kids to disharmony and force them to choose sides, Bishop Stephen Blaire of Stockton, Calif., told America magazine Tuesday that he wanted the bishops to do more consensus building. If religious liberty is indeed the goal, then high-impact lawsuits with news releases aren’t the best way to achieve it.

A few points -

1. Notice that a media that has no time to report on the lawsuits has plenty of time to report on the purported fissures in the Catholic community.

2. Could you imagine a columnist describing the Black community as being anguished children who don't know where to turn?

Bizarre.

3. Poor Lisa Miller is behind the eigh-ball in not knowing that their "brave Bishop" is not going to play stooge for the liberal agenda.

4. This constant quote about 83% of Catholics dissent on Catholic teachings on contraception is simply bad-faith. No one believes that Catholicism is a democracy. The fact that 83% dissent means that 83% are wrong, and that 17% are showing heroic virtue in this day and age.

5. When did liberals stop liking "high impact lawsuits with press releases"? Hasn't that been their modus operandi for 60 years? Hasn't the homosexual marriage agenda been advanced exactly by this strategy.

What fargin' hypocrites.

Fight the Corporations...

...and pass on the news about the Catholic lawsuit against Obamacare. It's news and it's something people should know about, but it doesn't fit The Narrative, which is why the mainstream media have devoted 19 seconds to it.

Powerline posts:

Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the archbishop of Washington, appeared on Fox News Sunday yesterday (video below). FNS host Chris Wallace and Wuerl discussed the 12 lawsuits brought by 43 Catholic institutions against officers of the Obama administration seeking declaratory and injunctive relief against the “preventive services” mandate promulgated (and to be promulgated) by the administration. The complaint in one of the 12 lawsuits — University of Notre Dame v. Sebelius — has been posted online.

Wallace noted in the interview that the national networks have devoted a total of 19 seconds of news coverage to the lawsuits. A highly effective version of the Cone of Silence has descended over the lawsuits. Wallace also pursued a line of inquiry straight out of E.J. Dionne’s moronic Washington Post column that I discussed here.

You probably won’t find an account of the interview in your local paper. It’s a good thing that Fox News and Fox News Insider have posted accounts of the interview; it is newsworthy.

We don't have a Soviet economy yet, but we do have a Soviet media.

When you hear statement in the liberal media that some "bishops" in California are dissented from the lawsuits against the HHS mandate, get the facts.

Here's the overview:

For weeks now the American bishops have been marching in lockstep unity, completely unanimous in their opposition to the HHS contraceptive mandate. The Catholic hierarchy has been headed into a showdown with President Obama, and not a single bishop had shown any inclination to back away from the fight. But you knew it couldn’t last. And it didn’t.

This week Bishop Stephen Blaire became the first prelate to break stride, voicing his misgivings about the confrontation. Oh, Bishop Blaire wasn’t suggesting that the Catholic hierarchy should accede to the HHS mandate. After all he had already condemned the mandate as unjust, as had the leaders of every other Catholic diocese in the United States. But Bishop Blaire raised a few questions about the strategy being followed by the leaders of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), about the lack of consultation, about the possible public perceptions. That was enough. Immediately liberal Catholics seized the opportunity to launch their own campaign, suggesting that only a minority of “conservative” bishops favor the all-out battle against the HHS mandate.

Now Bishop Blair says that his words were misinterpreted. “I stand solidly with my brother bishops in our common resolve to overturn the unacceptable intrusion of government into the life of the Church by the HHS mandate,” he insists in a follow-up statement. But no one ever doubted his opposition to the mandate. Every reasonable Catholic—excluding the extreme ideologues like Kathleen Sebelius and Nancy Pelosi and “Catholics” for Free Choice—opposes the HHS mandate. What divides liberal Catholics from the mainstream is the question of how to respond to that mandate. Should Catholic voters see this as a crucial battle that we absolutely cannot afford to lose? Or should they look at the mandate as one of many issues to take into consideration during this year’s election campaign? In his remarks to America magazine, Bishop Blaire leaned heavily toward the latter option. “The question is what is our focus as bishops,” he said.

Bishop Blaire evidently has his own ideas about “our focus as bishops.” As chairman of the USCCB committee on justice and peace, he has released a raft of statements on other political issues, taking public stands that usually coincide with the positions of the Obama administration. Now he expressed his concern that “some groups ‘very far to the right’ are trying to use the conflict [over the HHS mandate] ‘as an anti-Obama campaign.” He had never voices any misgivings that people ‘very far to the left’ might exploit his own statements in a pro-Obama campaign.

And here is Bishop Blaire's "walk-back" statement:

I wish to clarify some misunderstandings related to my comments about the HHS Mandate.

First of all, I stand solidly with my brother bishops in our common resolve to overturn the unacceptable intrusion of government into the life of the Church by the HHS Mandate. In March, the Administrative Committee issued a statement of commitment to persuade the Administration to eliminate this interference, the Congress to overturn it or the courts to stop it. I contributed to and voted for this statement, and continue to support it, including its call for legal action as was announced on Monday.

The fundamental issue is the freedom of the Church to carry out her mission as given by Christ. Religious Freedom protects the right of the Church to define herself and her ministries. It is totally unacceptable to have the federal government decide that our religious ministries are not "religious." The continuing effort of the government to intrude itself by re-defining Catholic ministries as somehow less religious or less Catholic because they employ or serve those without regard to their creed is unjust and a violation of religious liberty. The government should not intrude itself in forcing the Church and her institutions to violate her long standing teaching to provide essential health care to her employees.

From my perspective, the recent legal challenges by dioceses and Catholic entities throughout the United States, as well as discussions with the Administration, and the advocacy of Congress, all have one essential goal: to defend the right of the Church to define herself and to preserve the identity and integrity of the Catholic ministries exercised through her institutions.

I am convinced we need to continue to seek to persuade others to join us in this just cause through reasoned, civil and respectful discussion. Our defense of religious liberty is advanced when there is open discussion about the best strategies to promote our common goal.

I look forward to the discussions at the Bishops' meeting in June which will offer us an opportunity to agree on next steps to achieve our common and essential goal of ending this violation of religious freedom.

Apparently, Bishop Blair's statements were initially reported and/or misconstrued in "America." America, the magazine of the American Jesuits, has been notoriously "anti-ultramontane," or "ultrajectine," in recent years; during the German Kulturkampf, America would have been on the side of the Old Catholics and Ignatz Dollinger.

The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is no bad news...

...such as the largest suit ever by religious institutions against the American government.

Mollie at Get Religion compares the media treatment of the Susan G. Komen Foundation's decision to stop paying Planned Parenthood with the media treatment of the Catholic lawsuits against the HHS mandate:

It led the news that night. A decision by a women’s breast health charity to stop giving a few hundred thousand dollars a year to the nation’s largest abortion provider was massive news. And the stories that were done — for instance, by ABC, were just horrible. ABC’s report ran for three and a half minutes.

So earlier this week, one of the largest religious lawsuits in American history was launched. For all I know, it may be the largest religious lawsuit ever launched in history. It involves, as savvy readers probably know by now, 43 Catholic dioceses, schools, hospitals, social service agencies and other institutions. They all filed suit in federal court to stop various government agencies from implementing a mandate that would require them to cover contraceptives, sterilization and some abortion drugs in their health plans.

How many minutes did ABC World News give this story when it opened the broadcast with this news? Well, it turns out that they didn’t open their nightly news with this lawsuit. That’s understandable, I guess. I mean there were other major stories they featured, judging from their Twitter feed, such as “Meet the First Lady of Facebook: Priscilla Chan,” and “Yemen Suicide Bombing Death Toll Nears 100” and “Dharun Ravi Sentenced to 30 Days in Jail.” I don’t know which story they led with, if any of those. Maybe someone who watches that program can tell us. But it wasn’t the religious liberty lawsuit.

So where did the religious liberty lawsuit get placed in ABC’s nightly news and how long did it run?

I’ll let you guess on placement before we find out the answer. Did you guess?

You are 100% correct: They didn’t get around to mentioning it. On Monday or Tuesday. At this point, I’m just wondering how someone who gets their news exclusively from ABC World News views the world. I don’t really watch network news (I save up my TV time for important stuff such as Community and Top Chef) so I don’t know the answer to it, but it’s just really interesting to me.

The media bias has gone beyond absurd.

The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is never any bad news...

...such as the fact that the Obama administration was hit with dozens of suits by Catholic institutions alleging religious persecution.

We may not have communism yet, but we definitely have its media apparatus.

Frank Weathers points out that the Catholic blizzard of lawsuits against the Obamacare mandate got all of 15 seconds on the three broadcast networks:

Thinking along these lines then, I can’t remember the last time I actually watched the evening news. Too many ads from pharmaceutical companies and not enough real news as I recall. But tonight, what with the news that 40+ Catholic organizations sued the government by simultaneously filing a dozen lawsuits across the country, I decided to take a look, and realized pretty quickly that I’m never going to get back that half hour of my life.

I didn’t bother with CNN, or Fox, but I informally surveyed what used to be the Big Three, ABC, CBS, and NBC. Of those three networks, only CBS mentioned the story at all. Deep into the program, ’round about the 25 minute mark, Scott Pelley spent 10 to 15 seconds on the story, er blurb. ABC and NBC? Nothing at all. Nada, zilch, zippo.

The only thing left to be amazed about the media's bias is that I still have the capacity to be amazed.

Via Brutally Honest.

Catholic entities coordinate massive challenge to Obamacare HHS mandate.

Emily Stimpson at Catholic Vote writes:

So, as you may have heard, it was a busy morning in the U.S. District Courts.

Today, at 11 a.m. Eastern, 12 lawsuits were filed by 43 different plaintiffs—all Catholic dioceses, universities, health systems, and apostolates, and all with one goal in mind: blocking an unprecedented infringement on religious liberty by the federal government.

Two of those plaintiffs are institutions that help me pay the mortgage: Franciscan University and Our Sunday Visitor. Others include the Archdioceses of New York, Washington, and St. Louis, the Dioceses of Pittsburgh, Ft. Wayne, Erie, Dallas, Ft. Worth, the Michigan Catholic Conference (which represents all seven dioceses in Michigan), The University of Notre Dame, Catholic University of America, and many more.

And for those who want to use contraception as a wedge issue:

This is not about access to contraception. We’ve said it a hundred times. I’ll say it one time more. If a woman wants to use contraception, she can. It’s her choice. And it’s a choice she can exercise for about $9 at her local Target. We’re not saying we agree with that choice. We’re not saying it’s a good one. But we are saying we shouldn’t have to pay for it.

Moreover, the contraception issue has been the stalking horse for the other things that the HHS mandate requires, specifically abortion:

The lawsuits argue that a federal mandate issued by the Obama administration violates their fundamental religious liberty. The controversial mandate will require employers to offer health insurance plans that cover contraception, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs, even if doing so violates their consciences.

Apparently, Notre Dame has learned that sucking up to the Caesar is not a guarantee that when the time comes, you won't be thrown under the bus:

Notre Dame president Fr. John Jenkins, C.S.C., said the lawsuit was filed “neither lightly nor gladly, but with sober determination.”

“We do not seek to impose our religious beliefs on others,” he explained in an email to Notre Dame employees.

Rather, he explained, “we simply ask that the Government not impose its values on the University when those values conflict with our religious teachings.”

According to Fr. Jenkins, the lawsuit is about “the freedom of a religious organization to live its mission, and its significance goes well beyond any debate about contraceptives.”

He cautioned that when the government decides “which religious organizations are sufficiently religious to be awarded the freedom to follow the principles that define their mission,” the nation has started down a path that could lead to “the end of genuinely religious organizations in all but name.”