54% of Catholics voted for Obama in 2008. Now the Catholic Bishops are screaming bloody murder because of contraception mandates. Maybe it’s only the 46% that didn’t vote for him who are doing the screaming.

What about the Catholic bishops? They got behind Obamacare like they got behind every so-called Progressive social justice program. Here’s how Stephanie Block frames the issue:

For Over 40 years you’ve been funding, via the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, community organizations with progressive political agendas that convinced you that your religious world and your public policy world were two separate entities. You wanted universal health care? Well, so did they. Never mind the pesky little business of abortion and family planning funding. But here it is, back at you!

Oh, wait.  Not only have you been funding these guys to see that fellow progressive organizers like themselves got put into political office – think Obama – but you’ve been systematically reeducating your Catholic people to understand “social justice” in terms of precisely such organizing, with all the lovely compromises that entails. And now you’re surprised that it’s threatening your charitable activities?

Now that the chickens have come home to roost, the Roman Catholic hierarchy are in shock that they’re going to have to pay for mandated medical procedures. They knew mandates were part of the legislation when they pushed their fellow Catholics to support it. In fact, they knew about them when it was HillaryCare.

Here’s what George Will had to say on their support for ObamaCare:

The Catholic Bishops, it serves them right. They’re the ones who were really hot for Obamacare, with a few exceptions. But they were all in favor of this. And this is what it looks like when the government decides it’s going to make your healthcare choices for you.

Once we allow government to govern in areas not outlined in the Constitution, there is no place they won’t govern, even when the initial legislation doesn’t give them the authority. It doesn’t take long before some lawyer and a sympathetic court extends the reach of the State far beyond what was originally proposed. George Will continues:

This is what liberalism looks like. This is what the progressive State does. It tries to break all the institutions of civil society, all the institutions that mediate between the individual and the state. They have to break them to the saddle of the state.

Herbert Schlossberg made the same point in his book Idols for Destruction:

The paternal state not only feeds its children, but nurtures, educates, comforts, and disciplines them, providing all they need for their security. This appears to be a mildly insulting way to treat adults, but it is really a great crime because it transforms the state from being a gift of God, given to protect us against violence, into an idol. It supplies us with all blessings, and we look to it for all our needs. Once we sink to that level, as [C.S.] Lewis says, there is no point in telling state officials to mind their own business. “Our whole lives are their business.”1 The paternalism of the state is that of the bad parent who wants his children dependent on him forever. That is an evil impulse.2

It’s been said, “Be careful what you wish for . . . You might get it.” Well, the Catholics got. The contraception mandate is only one of many that all of us have to live with.

1. C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970), 314. [↩]
2. Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction, 184. [↩]