Here\u2019s an old joke: Sometime in the 1930s, one Jew spots another Jew scanning an issue of Der St\u00fcrmer,<\/em> the Nazi party\u2019s official newspaper. He asks, \u201cHow come you\u2019re reading that trash?\u201d \u201cWell,\u201d says his friend, \u201call the Jewish papers talk about is how we\u2019re being beaten up and oppressed. This one says we control the world. I guess I just needed a pick-me-up.\u201d<\/p>\n Barely a day after the White House announced its revision of the guidelines ensuring free contraception for employees of religious institutions, both sides are looking for that pick-me-up. The New York Times<\/em> credits<\/strong><\/a> \u201cCatholic Democrats, liberal columnists and left-leaning religious leaders\u201d with bending the will of the administration. According to the Times, protests from these former supporters forced a \u201cfed-up Mr. Obama\u201d to announce that \u201ctime was up,\u201d and order the rules re-written. The story carries quotes from administration officials \u2014 \u201cwe were getting killed,\u201d \u201call hell broke lose\u201d \u2014 attesting to the Church\u2019s power to induce shell shock.<\/p>\n This image of Obama, yielding to pressure from Planned Parenthood on one hand and time on the other, and allowing Kathleen Sebelius to roll out a political disaster, doesn\u2019t do much to inspire confidence. In Slate, <\/em>Amanda Marcotte offers an antidote<\/strong><\/a> in the form of a counter-narrative. \u201cObama,\u201d she writes, \u201cjust pulled a fast one on Republicans.\u201d The initial guidelines were just a feint that succeeded in provoking a \u201cfrenzy of anti-contraception rhetoric, all thinly disguised as concern for religious liberty.\u201d Since the revisions \u201caddressed their purported concerns,\u201d Republicans \u201ccan either drop this and slink away knowing they\u2019ve been punked, or they can double down\u201d by condemning contraception openly. <\/p>\n Marcotte\u2019s saying, in other words, that Obama won the same strategic and moral victory on birth control that he won over his birth certificate. In both cases, he spared a respectful nod for the rednecks a moment after they ran off the nearest cliff.<\/p>\n Both views have their merit. For better or worse, this is one of those controversies that offers something for everybody. Marcotte is correct that \u2014 as I observed Thursday<\/strong><\/a> \u2014 it\u2019s given a soapbox to anti-contraception polemicists. If the Church is so dead-set against contraception that she\u2019s willing to buck a socially just policy during an election year, her mouthpieces have to say why. But what Marcotte never figures on is how pundits are couching their arguments in terms relevant to people uninterested in the niceties of Catholic moral theology. Sick of gay marriage? Divorce? Ambiguous role expectations for the genders? Kim Kardashian? Kourtney Kardashian? There\u2019s your culprit \u2014 the man in the latex hat! <\/em> If sweeping solutions for complex problems held no appeal, our War on Terror wouldn\u2019t be global.<\/p>\n Marcotte also underestimates Republicans\u2019 ability to spin the issue exactly how they want to spin it. To a party that\u2019s hung its hat on fears of European-style socialism \u2014 if not Stalinism or fascism \u2014 the very fact that Obama ever suggested any curtailment of religious liberty offers a large and solid hook. At the CPAC conference, Mike Huckabee said, of the president:<\/strong><\/a> \u201cYou have done more than any person in the entire GOP field, [than] any candidate has done, to bring this party to unity and energize this party as a result of your attack on religious liberty.\u201d Far from a John Galt wannabe, Huckabee is the Republican Ann Coulter called<\/strong><\/a> \u201cthe one true Christian liberal\u201d in America. If he says the party\u2019s found a unifying issue, it has. <\/p>\n But even if the president\u2019s initial move was a bad one, and his subsequent correction fearful, he could still realize some benefits \u2014 at least where Catholic voters are concerned. Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan, no stranger to Tea Party-style rhetoric,<\/strong><\/a> has conceded<\/strong><\/a> that he revised guidelines represent \u201can openness to respond to some of our concerns\u201d on the executive branch\u2019s part. In a briefing circulated among the bishops,<\/strong><\/a> Dolan (along with Bps. William Lori and Stephen Blaire, and Cardinals Daniel DiNardo and Donald Wuerl) outlines problem areas in very precise language. The signatories are unhappy with the administration\u2019s narrow definition of \u201creligious institution,\u201d for example. They are unconvinced that the costs of covering contraceptives will not, ultimately, fall to religious employers. This is not zealotry; this is not culture war. This is talking turkey at a dull roar.<\/p>\n Some of the other objections raised in the document \u2014 particularly the question of how an employer that is also an insurer can avoid offering \u201cthe objectionable coverage\u201d \u2014 won\u2019t be easy to overcome. Nevertheless, the brief uses the word \u201cdialogue\u201d for the exchanges the Obama administration expects to have with the bishops. In Catholic usage, dialogue is a non-adversarial practice \u2014 one meant, in fact, to stymie the construction of barricades. <\/p>\n In 2009, not long after Bishop John D\u2019Arcy of Ft. Wayne-South Bend boycotted Notre Dame\u2019s graduation ceremonies<\/strong><\/a> to protest Obama\u2019s receipt of an honorary degree, Pope Benedict met with the president.<\/strong><\/a> Obama pledged to reduce the number of abortions in America; Benedict presented him with a copy of Dignitas Personae.<\/em> It was at least the beginning of a dialogue, and it put a sliver of daylight between Obama and his harshest critics.<\/p>\n So far we\u2019ve got energized and united Republicans, and a (perhaps grudgingly) legitimized Democrat. That leaves swing voters; what\u2019s this business offer them? Maybe nothing. Questions of contraception and consicence aside, this upcoming contest may finally boil down to the economy, stupid.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Here\u2019s an old joke: Sometime in the 1930s, one Jew spots another Jew scanning an issue of Der St\u00fcrmer, the Nazi party\u2019s official newspaper. He asks, \u201cHow come you\u2019re reading that trash?\u201d \u201cWell,\u201d says his friend, \u201call the Jewish papers talk about is how we\u2019re being beaten up and oppressed. This one says we control […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":192,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[27,49,63,332,325,188,192,333,235],"class_list":["post-2821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-barack-obama","tag-catholicism","tag-contraception","tag-mike-huckabee","tag-patient-protection-and-affordable-care-act","tag-politics","tag-pope-benedict-xvi","tag-timothy-dolan","tag-united-states-conference-of-catholic-bishops"],"yoast_head":"\n