Confronted with a “train wreck,” the new archbishop of Baltimore implores us to “pray diligently as communities, as families, and as individuals.”
Coming from clergy, this wouldn’t necessarily be breaking news, except the train hurtling toward us is driven by the current president of the United States and his secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius. Under Obamacare, the secretary has unprecedented power to make health-care decisions affecting every American. The recent HHS mandate — requiring all employers, regardless of moral objections, to offer health-care coverage that includes contraception, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs — is the poisonous fruit of that power.
And so Archbishop William Lori’s prayer is for religious liberty.
It’s an ecumenical prayer that requires ecumenical labor. This talk of religious liberty “is not about the Catholic Church wanting to force anybody to do anything,” Archbishop Lori emphasized during a speech at the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s conference on religious freedom. “It is instead about the federal government forcing the Church — consisting of its faithful and all but a few of its institutions — to act against Church teachings.”
We are confronted today with a question of integrity, and it’s not only Catholics who are asking it, or who have a stake in the answer. The right to liberty is at the core of our national identity, and every freedom-loving American should ask: Do we value liberty as much as we say we do? People thirsting for freedom the world over have long seen America as a beacon. Are we the shining light they think we are?
It is only through complete inattention to this question of integrity that Georgetown University could have invited Secretary Sebelius to speak at a campus commencement ceremony. For this dereliction of moral duty, Georgetown surely wins this year’s audacity-at-commencement competition. At a moment that should be a radicalizing milestone for any American who values freedom, Georgetown chose to send a message of complacency. We have long been the place where people come to flee tyranny. But are we now comfortable with tyranny at home? This fight over the HHS mandate is much more than another Left–Right debate. It strikes at the core of who we are as Americans.
The 12 lawsuits recently filed against the Department of Health and Human Services are instructive. They came days after the Franciscan University of Steubenville announced that it would no longer provide student health plans. As a letter protesting the Obama administration noted, it’s “unacceptable” that the Ohio Catholic college found itself forced into this position — ending health coverage in order to honor its core religious beliefs.
“It is simply a matter of integrity that what we teach in the classroom, advance in our student life, and preach in the chapel is consistent with how we use our limited resources in regards to health care,” says Michael Hernon, vice president of advancement at Franciscan. We can see Franciscan’s dropping of health-care coverage as a profile in integrity. But the fact that it has come to such an impasse means we’ve reached a real tipping point.
The plight of Franciscan University highlights the pernicious nature of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a misnamed law if ever there was one. “The question is whether, under Obamacare, students who want to attend an authentically Catholic university will be able to do so without being disadvantaged,” explains Thomas Messner of the Heritage Foundation. These predicaments, he says, “should lead those who care about religious freedom to ponder more deeply the ways that religious freedom goes hand in hand with the condition of freedom more generally.” He adds that Obamacare taken as a whole “represents an enormous intrusion by government into freedom of private choice and decisionmaking more generally.” The law “has already triggered” the deepest imposition on religious freedom our nation has known, he notes, adding that this should come as “no surprise” given the gargantuan scope of the legislation. “The ‘preventive services’ mandate is just one small part of a gigantic statutory and regulatory scheme that is still being implemented,” he warns. Messner is not speaking out as a good conservative hewing to talking points; his criticisms come from his deep concern about the future of civil society. “A society that abandons its moral and political commitment to freedom in general will become less willing and indeed even hostile to protecting religious freedom in particular instances,” he says.
With Franciscan and the other institutions that have now filed suit, we see how all the mandates in the health-care law “build a box around freedom, trapping conscience,” as Messner puts it. It’s now impossible for a place such as Franciscan University to offer a plan that conforms to the religious values at the heart of its mission. (Franciscan also found that the health-care law drives up costs for student insurance plans, adding financial burden to the ethical cost of Obamacare.)
Archbishop Lori hopes the Church will win the lawsuits, but his concerns run deeper. In his Ethics and Public Policy Center speech, he mapped out the big picture for us: “The HHS lawsuits, if successful, would only provide a band-aid solution to the greater problem of radical secularism that we face in this country.”
We’ve taken a bludgeon to the very foundation of our nation. It’s cracking at the core, and we can stand on this new platform only at our peril.
— Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online. This column is available exclusively through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.