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Great post! I’d also like to make a comment that I hope will spark any Catholics still on the fence to vote for Romney. Some labor under the impression that Obama does not want to see Catholic hospitals, schools, and charities close their doors, and the bishops are crying wolf.

I am convinced that the President’s HHS mandate is not accidental, but deliberate. He knows that (1) Catholic bishops will not betray their principles and provide hospital, school, and charity employees health insurance that includes the funding abortion and birth control; and (2) the Church will pay the huge fines until they have no choice to close the doors to all of these institutions.

Why?

With Obamacare, there will be fewer doctors, rationing of scarcer health care, and ever-increasing costs of an increasingly older citizenry. Who will cost/expend the most of these dwindling resources? The answer:

(1)Unborn children whose prenatal care reveals abnormalities and health problems that will cost the system every year of their life. (It happens: last year, doctors encouraged my sister-in-law and brother to abort their son because they thought he had Downs Syndrome and other ailments; they refused, but he was born with many birth defects).

(2) The elderly whose productive days are long in the past, but whose visits to the doctor’s office are weekly, not annually.

(3) The chronically ill.

To curtail the costs incurred by the first category, HHS will want doctors to encourage abortions—that will never happen in a Catholic hospital.

To curtail the costs of the elderly and the chronic ill, HHS will deny them the level of care they now enjoy and encourage euthanasia—again something the Church will never sanction at its hospitals.

Thus, the best way to keep costs down is to get the Catholic Church (and like-minded Christians) out of health care entirely.

As for schools, close down the parochial schools and you have no debates about voucher programs and school choice, less competition for teacher union power, and an education system that can dispense with outdated Judeo-Christian values.

Finally, close down the non-profits, you increase dependence on government programs—and make the so-called 47% a super-majority big government electorate.

What is so scary about this is that Obama is attacking the Church on a doctrinal point that few Catholics actually follow or agree with: artificial birth control. The public has swallowed the media’s attempt to frame the issue as about birth control and the Church trying to deny them reproductive freedom. Even my most intelligent friends fail to see that the actual issue is about the First Amendment and the unconstitutional attempt to force an employer to violate his institution’s or his own personal religious beliefs in subjugation of a secular government’s decree. (They finally see the point when I ask them if I have a Second Amendment right to own a gun or a First Amendment right to free speech (they agree), and then when I inquire whether I have a right to receive their tax dollars to buy a Glock handgun or air time on a radio station to express my political views.)

The administration has chosen the battleground for achieving its goals very wisely. The challenge is understanding what is at risk, and what the true objective is. I hope that this lifts the veil for many.