ObamaCare's Overreach Is A Challenge To The Constitution

[Geee]

Investors Business Daily:

Give him points for cleverness. President Obama's birth control "accommodation" was as politically successful as it was morally meaningless.

It was nothing but an accounting trick that still forces Catholic (and other religious) institutions to provide medical insurance that guarantees free birth control, tubal ligation and morning-after abortifacients — all of which violate church doctrine.

The trick is that these birth control-abortion services will supposedly be provided independently and free of charge by the religious institution's insurance company. But this changes none of the moral calculus.

Holy Cross Hospital is still required by law to engage an insurance company that is required by law to provide these doctrinally proscribed services to all Holy Cross employees.

Still, the accounting device worked politically. It took only a handful of compliant Catholic groups — ObamaCare cheerleaders dying to return to the fold — to hail the alleged compromise, and hand Obama a political victory.

Before, Obama's coalition had been split. His birth control mandate was fiercely opposed by such stalwart friends as former Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine and Rick Warren (the pastor Obama chose to give the invocation at his inauguration), who declared he would go to jail rather than abide by the regulation.

After the "accommodation," it was the (mostly) Catholic opposition that fractured. The mainstream media then bought the compromise as substantive, and the issue was defused.