If someone told me "I am going to kill your mother" and then came back four days later and said "I have changed my mind about killing your mother" I would not be praising said person as "wise" or "compromising" or anything else in that vein.
That is the exact same thing we have here. Already people are dissecting the deception in the "contraception compromise," and as the analysis pours in I'll pass it on. But let's be clear about one thing - if any Catholic praises whatever this "compromise" turns out to be, they just don't get it.
This change is nothing other than the President's camp failing to properly forecast the push back from the Catholic Church. There is no change of heart on any of this, no apology about violating religious liberty; all this is is an acknowlegement that our society is not QUITE ready to accept this garbage.
There are certain things you can never take back, and this is one of them. To suggest that the government could force the Church to fund contraception and sterilizations, and to put a law in place to do that can not ever be undone. Again, there is no going back after saying something like "I am going to kill your mom."
I think most Catholics are smart enough to see these past 10 days for what they are. This is not "cooler heads prevailing" this is not "dialogue working" and any attempt to frame it in that light is naivete in its most dangerous form.
I don't think most Catholics who fled "camp Obama" this week are going to go back. I'm sure that Cardinal Mahony and some of the other bishops have recognized the President for who he really is... at least I hope so.
There's no way to undo what the President put into action, no way to unsay it, no way to unsuggest such a blatant violation of our First Amendment, and I have no doubt that President Obama regrets anything other than his timing.
Essentially the way it looks is that the "compromise" says, "instead of making the Church provide coverage for free contraception, we will simply mandate that the only health insurance available includes free contraception." It seems then that the Church is given the option of "voluntarily" providing access to health insurance the includes free contraception OR simply not providing health insurance at all, which I don't think would be legal under the Obama Health Care plan, so we're really back to square one. And the insurance companies are now supposed to foot the bill for the contraception without passing that cost on to the employers or employees?
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