The religious should march on this unjust presidency

Some of Barack Obama's useful idiots on the Catholic center/left say that his decree forcing religious organizations to pay for contraceptives amounts to a betrayal. No, it is not. Candidate Obama had telegraphed his plans to discriminate against the religious.  Were Cardinal Mahony and company too busy burbling over "hope and change" to pay attention? You made Obama's bed; now lie in it.

And let's not kid ourselves: they will lie in it, even if a few of them have mumbled in recent days some words about "civil disobedience." Whatever civil disobedience materializes in the future, it will not come from these worldly weasels -- who don't even consider artificial birth control a mortal sin anyways -- but from orthodox priests and nuns uncowed by the state.

The ambitious sophist Doug Kmiec, before receiving his plum ambassadorial assignment to Malta, declared Obama a great friend of the Catholic Church. In a grotesque farce beyond the satirical imagination of Tom Wolfe, academics and administrators at Notre Dame, panting after the approval of the chosen one, gave him an honorary law degree. The obtuse semi-official newspaper of the Vatican, L'Osservatore Romano, liked the cut of Obama's jib too, pooh-poohing criticism of him as mere alarmism from Catholic yahoos in the States.

All the while Obama had made his secularist, anti-Catholic bigotry clear. A Health and Human Services order requiring most Catholic and religious employers to pick up the tab for their employees' sterilizations, birth control pills, and dashes for "emergency" contraceptives flows from the logic of this bigotry.

Obama's cynicism is impressive. He could have selected open pagans as his agents of anti-Catholic destruction. Instead, he found Catholics like Kathleen Sebelius and Joe Biden to do the dirty work. That's a nice touch. And let's not forget that these Catholics have received the blessing of Cardinal Mahony and his friends. Recall the petition signed by Catholic academics defending Sebelius during her confirmation hearings; recall Cardinal Mahony's invocation at the 2000 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles to which a young and rising Obama traveled.

Mitt Romney, by the way, is no guaranteed savior in this scenario. Proof of his pro-life ambivalence is that after his supposed conservative conversion he supported a law in the Bay State that bullied Catholic hospitals into giving rape victims abortifacients. He, too, supported the secularist monopoly over public life -- a monopoly that, until it is busted by civil disobedience and a deep change in the culture, will make assaults on religious freedom unceasing and inevitable.

~~ George Neumayr