. . . of fellow “liberal” Catholics upset with the HHS mandate for its quite un-liberal approach to conscientious objection. In a piece in today’s Washington Post , he writes:
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.
While Dionne’s main point is that the mandate makes for bad politics, particularly for a president who campaigned as a unifying figure by appropriating the rhetoric of the religious right, he also notes broader theoretical objections to this sort of compulsion:
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.
Read the rest of the editorial, which goes into detail about how Dionne wishes Obama would approach the question of conscience exemptions, here .
Even though the piece is hardly a ringing statement of principle, it’s notable that statements of concern like this one have been issuing from so many unexpected quarters. In fact, has there yet been a member of the mainstream commentariat who’s risen to defend the mandate?
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