Five reasons why Obama is losing the contraception fight

c. 2012 Religion News Service
(RNS) The White House has surprised observers and disappointed some
liberal allies by signaling that it is willing to compromise and provide a
broader religious exemption in its controversial regulations requiring all
employers to provide free contraception coverage.

Given that birth control use is almost universal -- even among Catholics
-- many wonder why the Obama administration could wind up retreating on its
pledge.

Here are five reasons that may help explain the political dynamic the
president is facing:

1. It's about religious freedom, not birth control

U.S. Catholic bishops, who led the battle against the Health and Human
Services Department mandate, know that they long ago lost their own flock on
the contraception issue -- 98 percent of Catholics use birth control,
according to surveys.

So they have carefully reframed the issue as a fight for religious freedom
-- an effort to keep the government from forcing the Catholic Church and
other religious groups to subsidize something that goes against their
teachings. That makes it a violation of conscience, a sacred principle that
transcends any specific tenet of faith.

That argument also lends itself to the kind of heated rhetoric that plays
well in today's supercharged political atmosphere. For example, bishops and
their allies are accusing the president of "anti-Catholicism" and worse:
"The Obama administration has just told the Catholics of the United States,
'To hell with you!'" Pittsburgh Bishop David Zubik said after the HHS
regulations were announced.

The bishops don't have as much credibility with the laity as they used to,
thanks to the clergy sex abuse scandal, among other things. But Catholics
are still a potent tribe, and if outsiders are seen as attacking the
church, Catholics can get defensive -- and they can get even.

2. Obama has lost even the support of his liberal Catholic allies

Case in point: the HHS mandate has been opposed by liberal and centrist
Catholics who have supported the administration on a range of other issues --
including the Catholic Health Association and the NETWORK social justice
lobby -- and even went to bat to help pass health care reform despite
threats from the bishops.

The president "utterly botched" the religious exemptions issue, wrote
Washington Post columnist and liberal Catholic E.J. Dionne, and "Obama threw
his progressive Catholic allies under the bus."

"J'accuse!" Michael Sean Winters, a columnist for the liberal National
Catholic Reporter, wrote in a florid column that channeled Emile Zola's famous
1898 letter accusing the French government of anti-Semitism in the Dreyfus
affair. "The issue of conscience protections is so foundational, I do not
see how I ever could, in good conscience, vote for this man again."

3. It's not just Catholics

Even though evangelicals and other conservative Protestants generally
don't have religious objections to contraception, they do have a big problem
with "big government" and with perceived infringements on religious freedom.
Evangelicals -- both their leaders and their troops -- have never been big
Barack Obama supporters anyway, so they were happy to provide any
electoral and rhetorical muscle the Catholic hierarchy could not muster.

"We do not exaggerate when we say that this is the greatest threat to
religious freedom in our lifetime," evangelical leaders Timothy George and
Chuck Colson wrote in an open letter to their fellow believers on Wednesday
(Feb. 8). George and Colson compared the administration mandates to policies
enacted in Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler.

4. It gives Republicans a potent campaign wedge issue

Mitt Romney wasted no time in accusing Obama of launching an "assault on
religion" by way of the contraception mandate, and he declared that his first
act as president would be to overturn the HHS regulations. "Remarkably,
under this president's administration, there is an assault on religion, an
assault on the conviction and the religious beliefs of members of our
society," Romney said.

Romney's rivals, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, were not to be outdone,
and ramped up their rhetoric against Obama -- while also noting that Romney
had accepted similar policies while he was governor of Massachusetts.
In short, this is a political fight that the White House neither wants nor
needs in an already tough re-election campaign.

5. Obama needs the Catholic vote

In particular, he needs the support of white Catholics, which is the core
of this large swing vote (nearly one-quarter of the electorate). They are
concentrated in crucial battleground states like Michigan, Ohio and
Pennsylvania, and while Obama won the overall Catholic vote 54 percent to 46
percent in 2008, he lost the white Catholic vote, 47 percent to 53 percent.

"To the extent Catholic voters think of this as a religious liberty issue,
it does have the potential to pull Catholic voters toward Republicans or
away from Democrats," John Green, an expert on religious voting patterns and
director of the University of Akron's Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied
Politics, told Bloomberg Businessweek.

A poll on the contraception mandate released Tuesday by the Public
Religion Research Institute showed Catholics overall tended to support free
contraceptive coverage, but white Catholics were evenly split on the issue. The
Obama campaign can't afford to sacrifice any of those votes, or risk
watching the issue grow as a political liability when the election season heats
up.