Divider-in-Chief (16 page)

The Obama administration has chosen to negotiate with the Taliban in anticipation of its resurgence. There are many signs of the Taliban's ascendancy. Numerous Afghan school girls have been poisoned
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or attacked with acid,
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and prominent female political leaders have been killed, according to Amnesty International.
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In February, the country's top religious body, the Ulema Council, issued a decree that men are “fundamental” and women “secondary” and barred women from mingling with men in schools or the workplace.
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Afghan President Hamid Karzai embraced the ruling.

The Obama administration has taken the position that in its rush to leave Afghanistan, women's rights don't matter. Nora Bensahel of the Center for a New American Security told
U.S. News & World Report
that
the president “is saying we don't care about what kind of government is formed, or who is in charge, as long as it doesn't allow al Qaeda to return.”
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Plenty of evidence confirms the lack of regard for the fate of women once the United States leaves Afghanistan. In March 2011, USAID solicited bids for a $140 million land reform program in Afghanistan. But it insisted that the winning contract fulfill specific requirements to promote women's rights. A year later, however, in March 2012, USAID revised its initiative, excluding explicit targets for women.
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According to a March
Washington Post
story, these and other changes “reflect a shift in USAID's approach in Afghanistan. Instead of setting ambitious goals to improve the status of Afghan women, the agency is tilting toward more attainable measures.”
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The
Post
story continued:

A March 2012 report by the Afghan Human Rights and Democracy Organization concluded that “[m]ost of women's important achievements over the last decade are likely to be reversed” with the departure of U.S. troops. Others involved in supporting Afghan women's rights are similarly worried.
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“I am at my wit's end at the lack of discussion by the media, by our government, by our president on the issue of women's rights in Afghanistan,” Esther Hyneman of Women for Afghan Women, which runs family centers and safe homes for abused women across Afghanistan, told
Foreign Policy
magazine in November 2011.
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“I am appalled that [President Obama] has not mentioned Afghan women's rights since his speech on withdrawing U.S. troops.”

A senior U.S. official told the
Washington Post
, “Nobody wants to abandon the women of Afghanistan, but most Americans don't want to keep fighting there for years and years. The grim reality is that, despite all of the talk about promoting women's rights, things are going to have to give.”

The Obama administration considers the basic rights of women “pet rocks”; meanwhile it regards the “right” of women to abort their children as so fundamental that it's become a cornerstone of the administration's diplomatic agenda. If this is “change,” it's certainly not the sort that inspires hope.

O
n May 28, 2012, Cardinal Timothy Dolan appeared with Bill O'Reilly on his popular Fox News show
The O'Reilly Factor
. As the two discussed the Catholic Church's opposition to artificial birth control and the HHS contraceptive mandate, Dolan made a stunning accusation: the president was trying to divide the Church against itself.

“Our opponents are very shrewd because they have chosen an issue that they know we are not very popular on,” Dolan said.

Obama had always enjoyed a cordial relationship with the American Catholic Church. He received funding and other resources from the church during his days as a community organizer in Chicago.

Obama won over many Catholic voters during his political rise by downplaying his positions on abortion and gay rights and instead talking broadly about empathy, social justice, and religious pluralism. He charmed many Catholics during his 2008 campaign. Obama was invited to the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, a white tie charity fundraiser for Catholic Charities held every third Thursday of October at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City.
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The dinner is held in honor of former New York Governor Al Smith, the first Catholic presidential candidate. Since 1960, almost every presidential nominee has attended and given a speech.

What made Obama's speech notable, however, was that abortion politics had prevented President Bill Clinton from being invited to the dinner in 1996, because he had vetoed a bill that would have outlawed partial-birth abortion;
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and in 2004 John Kerry, himself a Catholic, was shunned because of his effectively pro-abortion stance (personally opposed, but in favor of legal abortion).
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Yet Barack Obama's radical pro-abortion views didn't stop the Archdiocese of New York from inviting him in 2008. Obama was welcomed by, and yucked it up with, the East Coast's most prominent Catholics, helping to raise nearly $4 million for Catholic Charities.
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It was no surprise then that Catholic voters, blessed in a sense by the Catholic hierarchy, cast their lot with Obama in the 2008 election. Obama won Catholic voters by nine percentage points over John McCain (54 percent to 45 percent).
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But while Obama won Catholics as a whole in 2008,
he performed poorly among the most devout Christians, including faithful Catholics. He lost among voters who attend church at least weekly by twelve percentage points, 55 percent to 43 percent.
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This is where the deepest divide exists in the Catholic Church, between observant Catholics and less observant Catholics. And Obama has spent his term in office exploiting that divide at almost every opportunity. He has done so by attacking the church's teachings on moral issues such as birth control, abortion, and same-sex marriage, and even more, by attempting to conscript Catholic and other religious organizations to advance his radical agenda.

When Secretary Sebelius announced that religious organizations would not be exempt from having to pay for their employees' birth control, she assured the public that she had given concerns about religious freedom “very careful consideration” and claimed that the final rule struck “the appropriate balance between respecting religious freedom and increasing access to important preventive services.”
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Despite Sebelius's assurances, the response from the Catholic Church was immediate, strong, and almost unanimously negative.

Cardinal Dolan felt personally betrayed by Obama, with whom he had met to discuss the mandate the previous fall. At that time, the two men shared what Dolan called a productive and “extraordinarily friendly” meeting. Dolan later recalled that Obama “seemed very earnest, he said he considered the protection of conscience sacred, that he didn't want anything his administration would do to impede the work of the church that he claimed he held in high regard. So I did leave a little buoyant.”
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After the mandate announcement, Dolan said he felt “terribly let down, disappointed and disturbed, and it seemed the news he had given me was difficult to square with the confidence I had felt in November.”

In a March interview with the
Wall Street Journal
, Dolan said that Obama had reneged on assurances to “take the protection of the rights of conscience with the utmost seriousness.”
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But Dolan couldn't have been completely surprised. He knew Obama's record of abortion extremism. He had to have known that Obama and Sebelius had crafted the mandate policy while in regular contact with pro-abortion and feminist groups, in particular Planned Parenthood and its president, Cecile Richards. Dolan had to have known that these groups would not allow their president, the man in whom they had invested so much, to betray them.

The administration no doubt expected a strong backlash by the U.S. Catholic bishops. But it apparently did not anticipate a strong negative reaction from its liberal Catholic allies.

That, however, is exactly what it got. Liberal Catholic
Washington Post
columnist E. J. Dionne accused the administration of having “utterly botched” the mandate decision and of committing a “breach of faith” with Obama's Catholic supporters. MSNBC
Hardball
host Chris Matthews called the rule “frightening.”
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Then there was Sister Carol Keehan, president and CEO of the Catholic Health Association (CHA). Sister Keehan, a member of the Daughters of Charity, has led the CHA since 2005. The CHA is a network of more than 600 Catholic hospitals and 1,400 long-term care and other health facilities across the country. It is the largest group of non-profit health care providers in the country. Keehan is arguably the most powerful female American Catholic, and she went out on a limb for Obama in defying the Catholic bishops in her support for Obamacare. She had taken Obama at his word that abortion would not be funded by taxpayers under his reform plan and that conscience protections would be included.

Her support for Obamacare invited criticism from the bishops and others. Thomas Joseph Tobin, bishop of the Diocese of Providence, withdrew his diocese's hospitals from membership in the CHA, telling Keehan, “Your
enthusiastic support of the legislation, in contradiction of the bishops of the United States, provided an excuse for members of Congress, misled the public and caused a serious scandal for many members of the church.”
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Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City said Keehan had been “incredibly naïve or disingenuous” for claiming that Obamacare precluded taxpayer funding of abortions.
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United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) then-president Cardinal Francis George said Keehan had chosen Obama over the church when she backed Obamacare. “She had weakened the moral voice of the bishops in the U.S.,” he said.
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But Keehan endorsed Obamacare anyway, and her support was seen as so integral to its passage that the president gave her one of the pens used to sign the bill as a gesture of gratitude.

Keehan had gone all in for Obama. And she got burned. With the administration's mandate announcement, she was exposed as having been precisely what Archbishop Naumann accused her of: either “incredibly naïve or disingenuous.” When the mandate was announced, Keehan immediately issued an opposing statement, which said that the mandate had “real potential for serious problems” and that it had “jolted” her organization. Keehan further pledged to use the one-year grace period the administration had provided to “pursue a correction.”
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As the backlash to the mandate intensified, Obama announced an “accommodation” for religious organizations that objected to covering birth control. In these cases, the insurer, not the employer, would be required to provide contraceptive coverage to women free of charge. The administration later proposed a similar requirement for group health plans sponsored by religious organizations that insure themselves.

But the “accommodation” was unacceptable. After scrutinizing the proposed changes, the USCCB rejected the compromise, because religious employers and other stakeholders would still be required to have their
employee health insurance plans and premiums “used for services they find morally objectionable.”

“We believe that this mandate is unjust and unlawful—it is bad health policy, and because it entails an element of government coercion against conscience, it creates a religious freedom problem,” Anthony Picarello, USCCB associate general secretary and general counsel, and Michael Moses, associate general counsel, wrote in a joint statement.
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If the accommodation seemed flimsy, it quickly became clear why: it wasn't meant to accommodate the Catholic bishops' concerns but rather those of the administration's liberal Catholic allies. As a
New York Times
article stated, the accommodation was “never really driven by a desire to mollify Roman Catholic bishops, who were strongly opposed to the plan.” Instead, the “rule shift on birth control is [a] concession to Obama['s] allies.”
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