Betrayed

We put him in office--promises broken.
Here's part of a brilliant article from the St Louis Dispatch.

...Among Catholics, the most egregious example of Obama's broken promise of religious tolerance is the one dominating diocesan headlines now: His administration's push for a mandate that would require Catholic institutions to violate the teachings of their church by covering contraceptives in their health care plans – including sterilization and drugs that induce abortions.

The mandate would be controversial even if accompanied by the standard religious exemption that allows faith-based organizations to opt out of government regulations that violate their religious beliefs. But the Obama administration has gone a step further, by crafting a religious exemption for the mandate so narrow that it excludes nearly all Catholic hospitals, elementary and secondary schools, colleges and universities and charitable organizations – virtually everyone, it seems, except Catholic parishes and religious orders. The upshot: Catholic colleges that teach abortion is evil must pay for abortifacient drugs for their students and Catholic hospitals that refuse to sterilize patients must subsidize sterilization for their employees.

The mandate and its lack of conscience protection is a blatant attack on religious freedom and a far cry from the promise Obama made at the University of Notre Dame in 2009. Back then, when the president was peddling his health care plan and pledging to seek "common ground" with pro-life Catholics, he vowed to "honor the conscience of those who disagree with abortion, and draft a sensible conscience clause." Now that Obamacare has passed, the president and his surrogates are singing a different tune.

Sebelius followed her martial rhetoric with a sarcastic swipe at pro-lifers who fail to see church-funded contraception as a cure-all for America's astronomical abortion rates. Apparently, the secretary has not read the 2011 Guttmacher Institute report that found a majority of women who abort their babies were using contraception the month they conceived.

Obama displays a similarly dismissive attitude toward his pro-life and Catholic critics. At a fundraiser here in St. Louis last week, he offered a flippant "darn tooting" rejoinder to an audience member who called out support for his unyielding enforcement of the contraceptive mandate. He answered a recent invitation to dialogue from U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops President and New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan with stony silence. And he has ignored pleas for compromise from the likes of Notre Dame President Rev. John Jenkins and Catholic Health Association President Sr. Carol Keehan, two former Obama cheerleaders who now look like Obama's dupes.

The president's hard-line, anti-freedom stance threatens to alienate millions of Catholics, including many who disagree with their church's teachings but resent the prospect of government officials dictating which doctrines Catholic institutions may follow and which ones they must violate. For these voters and millions of their fellow travelers of other faiths, Obama's election in 2008 is looking more and more like a mistake – one they do not intend to repeat in 2012.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT Colleen Carroll Campbell. "Obama is alienating Catholic voters." St. Louis Post-Dispatch (October 13, 2011).