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"  I think it says a lot about this country that there are so many of my fellow Papists \u2014 especially my fellow Irish-Catholic papists \u2014 involved in our great national dialogues there days. Sure have come a long way from No Irish Need Apply and all that. Now, if you all would be so kind, please shut the fk up about birth control, abortion, and this neverending madness about what ladies do with their lady parts without the pope&amp;#039;s permission. At the very least, please stop going on my television set and telling me what &amp;quot;the Catholic position&amp;quot; is on the fact that the president has told various Catholic institutions \u2014 and told them quite gently, too \u2014 that, yes, if they want all those nice juicy tax advantages, they must abide by the federal law and, in their capacities as employers, make contraceptives available to their employees under the new Affordable Care Act. There is no &amp;quot;Catholic position&amp;quot; on this issue. There are the opinions of the clerical bureaucrats, accessories after the fact, and the members of the Clan of The Red Beanie, and then there is the opinion of the overwhelming majority of Catholic laypeople, who stopped listening to anything the Vatican said on the matter of birth control back in 1965. (And recall that the Second Vatican Council emphasized that the Church consisted of the entire people of God, which means the opinion of the overwhelming majority of Catholic people, acting out of their own conscience on this issue, matters as much or more than the opinion held by the temporary holders of clerical offices not mentioned in any of the Gospels.) For that matter, there is no real &amp;quot;Catholic vote&amp;quot; out there to be mined, either. A breakdown of how American Catholics vote on one particular issue or another pretty much tracks with how the country in general breaks down.  But all this talk about how the president has violated &amp;quot;freedom of conscience&amp;quot; on the issue of religion \u2014 or, worse, as N. Leroy Gingrich puts it, how he has &amp;quot;declared war on religion&amp;quot; \u2014 is all ginned-up hokum. Catholic institutions are free to exercise their consciences by being idiots on the subject of birth control. They just can&amp;#039;t get the tax breaks, too. Exactly how much is your conscience worth, Your Eminence? (Judging by the available evidence coming from the revelations of the past 10 years, not very much.) Here&amp;#039;s Catholic Ross Douthat, being either dumb or deliberately obtuse, a while back in the New York Times: Ponder that for a moment. In effect, the Department of Health and Human Services is telling religious groups that if they don&amp;#039;t want to pay for practices they consider immoral, they should stick to serving their own co-religionists rather than the wider public. Sectarian self-segregation is O.K., but good Samaritanism is not. The rule suggests a preposterous scenario in which a Catholic hospital avoids paying for sterilizations and the morning-after pill by closing its doors to atheists and Muslims, and hanging out a sign saying &amp;quot;no Protestants need apply.&amp;quot;&amp;amp;gt; This is, of course, not true. Catholic institutions can do what they want. They just don&amp;#039;t get to take my money to enforce the idiocy of Humanae Vitae through the secular law. And, yes, there&amp;#039;s more: The regulations are a particularly cruel betrayal of Catholic Democrats, many of whom had defended the health care law as an admirable fulfillment of Catholicism&amp;#039;s emphasis on social justice. Now they find that their government&amp;#039;s communitarianism leaves no room for their church&amp;#039;s communitarianism, and threatens to regulate it out of existence. Oh, balls. First of all, very few Catholic Democrats were prepared to bail on the Affordable Care Act over birth control. (Abortion was a different matter, and the president bent over backwards to compromise on that, to no real avail.) And secondly, if the Church&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;communitarianism&amp;quot; can be defined as whether or not its hospitals have to cover the pill for their Episcopalian or Zoroastrian employees, then that &amp;quot;communitarianism&amp;quot; is pretty thin gruel anyway. And, even if it&amp;#039;s true, so what? The Catholic position on birth control is based on threadbare theology and a view of human sexuality that stalled out somewhere in 1958. (Poor Paul VI actually argued that birth control was a moral wrong because the primary purpose of intercourse was for procreation. Doing It for fun was also unnatural. This is so very sad.) A &amp;quot;conscience&amp;quot; based on this transparent nonsense is a badly formed one, indeed, and need not enjoy an unique pride of place in the secular law. (Try a thought experiment and imagine what would have happened if the president had allowed a &amp;quot;exception of conscience&amp;quot; loophole to a Muslim institution, which then operated, with tax breaks, under Sharia law.) So when you hear (or read) some earnest Catholic pundit, wrestling with the decision the president made, be advised that they&amp;#039;re engaged in vigorous theological wanking. Catholics made up their mind on this issue long ago. They stopped listening to Rome, and to the Chancery, and most of them are much better off. FURTHER READING: More of Our Great National Dialogue on Lady Parts "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a12606/catholic-church-birth-control-6652031/>