HHS Mandate: It’s not about …

economics or cost effectiveness. It’s also emphatically not about truth:

There would be no consideration of cost effectiveness.

That was the explicit condition that the Department of Health and Human Services imposed on the panel of health-care experts it commissioned to develop the “preventive services” mandate that will require virtually all health-insurance plans in the United States to cover sterilizations and contraceptives—including those that cause abortions.

The fact that HHS prohibited the panel from considering the cost effectiveness of the mandate it developed contradicts President Obama’s declaration at the White House last Friday that his administration had adopted the panel’s recommendations precisely because they will “make the overall cost of health care lower”

In short, even if the Mandates were counter-productive, our God King was bound and determined to push it through.

For the same reason, it’s also not about health (because pregnancy is not a disease and babies are not tumor). Nor is it about legitimate concern for the poor, or peace, or all the other stuff that Progressive pols yak about when they are suckering their base into supporting them. As Michael Sean Winters, one of the rare honest people on the Catholic Left to really confront Obama’s duplicity and hostility to the Church instead of folding like a cheap suit and kowtowing to him like Pharaoh says:

I confess I no longer understand Obama. He did not go to the mat to end the Bush tax cuts for the super-rich. He did not go to the mat for comprehensive immigration reform. He did not go to the mat to close Guantanamo Bay. He did not go to the mat for Card Check. He did not go to the mat for a public option in the health care reform. But, he went to the mat over the principle that a Catholic college or charity or hospital is not really religious.

The answer is not really that far to seek. But it requires abandoning a myth as cherished by lefties as by righties: that the issue is left vs. right and not our Ruling Class vs. the rest of us. The reason Obama only makes a show of caring about these issues so beloved by sincere Progressives is that he is as sincere about liberal shibboleths as Mitt Romney is about conservative ones. His real goal is to protect the interests of his class: the Ruling Class. And Public Enemy no. 1 for that class (and those who are brainwashed by it) is the Catholic Church, with its annoying advocacy of the unborn; its taking seriously of the alien, orphan and widow, not merely as useful tools, but as actual human beings; its insistence on human rights vs. leviathan, its tiresome function as a living argument against the proposition that all works of mercy are the province of the State, and, above all, it’s insistance that God is greater than Caesar. Caesar and Mammon are jealous gods. Of course, when push comes to shove, the overweening pride of Caesar will, with unerring aim, focus its *real” energy on trying to destroy the Church that acts as a permanent barrier to and enemy of the latest attempt to build Babel. In the end, you are with the secular totalitarian or against him–and the Church, by her nature, must be against him when he sets his face against God and demands that we deny Him. The question now is “How far is Caesar willing to go to try to crush the Church and how much damage is he willing to do to American–and ultimately himself–before he surrenders or is destroyed by his own folly?” Not that the Church can destroy him. We are as weak as Christ and may well share his Cross before this is over. But crucifixion can’t stop the gospel while human folly always destroys itself in the end. My prayer is that our people repent of that folly.

We’ll see.