A year to figure out how to violate our consciences

    If we have learned anything in recent history, it is that elections have consequences. Politicians will say anything to anyone at any time according to a precise electoral calculus: Will what I say – even more than what I do – get me re-elected?
    Truth, therefore, is a malleable commodity, sometimes for sale to the highest bidder or the most energized bloc of likely voters.
    In March 2009, Cardinal Francis George, then the head of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, held a 30-minute meeting with President Obama in the White House. Cardinal George offered a revealingly candid assessment of his meeting with the president when he spoke to the Louisiana Priests Convention in New Orleans a month later.
    “On the life issue, he’s on the wrong side of history,” Cardinal George told the Louisiana priests. “I think he has political debts to pay, and so he’s paying them.”
    It was a polite conversation in the Oval Office, because the president is a polite man.
    “It’s hard to disagree with him because he’ll always tell you he agrees with you,” Cardinal George said. “Maybe that’s political. I think he sincerely wants to agree with you. You have to say, again and again, ‘No, Mr. President, we don’t agree (on abortion).’ But we can agree on a lot, and we do, and that’s why there is so much hope. I think we have to pray for him every day.”
    Put this conversation into the context of what happened last week. After assuring the nation’s Catholics during a commencement speech at the University of Notre Dame in 2009 that he would seek “common ground” with pro-lifers on the issue of abortion, President Obama’s electoral calculus kicked in.
    The Obama administration announced Jan. 20 that it would not revise its religious exemption to the requirement that all health plans, even those offered by nonprofit or religious organizations, provide contraceptives, including abortifacients, and surgical sterilization free of charge. In making the announcement, Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, offered religious groups an additional year “to adapt to this new rule.”
    How accommodating and polite.
    Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan of New York, the current president of the USCCB, echoed the words of his predecessor, Cardinal George, in describing  President Obama as “on the wrong side of the Constitution.”
    “In effect, the president is saying we have a year to figure out how to violate our consciences,” Cardinal-designate Dolan said. “To force American citizens to choose between violating their consciences and forgoing their health care is literally unconscionable. It is as much an attack on access to health care as on religious freedom. Historically, this represents a challenge and a compromise of our religious liberty.”
    Before leaving for Rome to participate in an ad limina visitation with Pope Benedict, former Archbishop Alfred Hughes told a pro-life Mass on Jan. 20 at St. Angela Merici Church that the administrative decision constituted “an unconscionable assault on religious liberty.”
    “If this trajectory continues,” Archbishop Hughes warned, “the federal government will force churches one day to provide abortion coverage. We have to be alert and we have to stand up together, and we have to march for religious liberty and for human life.”
    But in electoral calculus, nothing matters more than a committed voter, and it has been obvious in recent elections that Catholics who believe abortion is an unconscionable moral evil have not, in sufficient numbers, made politicians pay for policies that harm the innocent unborn.
    And so, President Obama can continue selling the fantasy, as he did in 2009 with Cardinal George, when he told the Chicago prelate that his decision to rescind the Mexico City policy did not result in providing taxpayer money to fund abortion overseas.
    “He said we weren’t exporting abortion,” Cardinal George said. “I said, ‘Yes we are.’ He would say, ‘I know I have to do certain things here. … But be patient and you’ll see the pattern will change.’ I said, ‘Mr. President, you’ve given us nothing but the wrong signals on this issue.’ So, we’ll see, but I’m not as hopeful now as I was when he was first elected.”
    The president’s rhetoric was clearly reflected in the tortured logic of his Notre Dame address.
    “Too many of us view life only through the lens of immediate self-interest and crass materialism, in which the world is necessarily a zero-sum game,” he told the graduates. “The strong too often dominate the weak, and too many of those with wealth and power find all manner of justification for their own privilege in the face of poverty and injustice.”
    Who is more powerful than a person (the strong) deciding whether or not the unborn child (the weak) should live?
    Then the president mentioned the Golden Rule as the shared DNA of all of the world’s religions and even among those with no faith.
    “(It is) the call to treat one another as we wish to be treated, the call to love, the call to serve, to do what we can to make a difference in the lives of those with whom we share the same brief moment on this earth,” he said.
    For some – the unborn – their “moment on this earth” is “briefer” than others.
     But that’s OK. We have been “patient” and the president’s anti-life “pattern” has changed.
    Be thankful for small favors. We’ve got another year to figure this all out.
    Peter Finney Jr. can be reached at [email protected]