ObamaCare's Great Awakening

Obama tells religious believers to go to hell. The public notices.

The political furor over President Obama's birth-control mandate continues to grow, even among those for whom contraception poses no moral qualms, and one needn't be a theologian to understand why. The country is being exposed to the raw political control that is the core of the Obama health-care plan, and Americans are seeing clearly for the first time how this will violate pluralism and liberty.

Mr. Obama's allies among Catholic liberals are also professing shock—even the Catholic Health Association's Sister Carol Keehan, who lobbied for ObamaCare, and Notre Dame's Father John Jenkins, who invited Mr. Obama to speak on campus in 2009. But if they now claim they were taken for a ride by the secular left, the truth is that theywanted to be deceived in the name of their grander goal of government-enforced equity. The Catholic left was one of ObamaCare's great enablers.

This is also a teaching moment for Mitt Romney, who has joined the calls to defend "the right to worship in the way of our own choice," as he put it in a Colorado speech on Monday. "This is a violation of conscience. We must have a President who is willing to protect America's first right, our right to worship God," he added.

This is fine as far as it goes, but as usual the GOP front-runner is missing the larger policy and moral issue. The HHS diktat isn't something unique to President Obama. It is the political essence of government-run medicine. When politics determines who can or should receive what benefits, and who pays what for it, government will use its force to dictate the outcomes that it wants—either for reasons of cost, or to promote its values, which in this case means that "women's health" trumps religious conscience.

This is fine as far as it goes, but as usual the GOP front-runner is missing the larger policy and moral issue. The HHS diktat isn't something unique to President Obama. It is the political essence of government-run medicine. When politics determines who can or should receive what benefits, and who pays what for it, government will use its force to dictate the outcomes that it wants—either for reasons of cost, or to promote its values, which in this case means that "women's health" trumps religious conscience.

The White House is now trying to cauterize the political damage and saying it is open to some "compromise" on its own contraception decision. But the rule is already final. HHS tried to sell it as a compromise when it was announced, and in any case HHS would revive this coercion whenever it is politically convenient some time in Mr. Obama's second term. Religious liberty won't be protected from the entitlement state until ObamaCare is repealed.

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