The Catholic State

So the Health Commissar, Kathleen Sebelius, has decided that, under Obamacare, religious institutions, like any other employer, will be required to offer their workers free contraception, sterilization, and abortifacients. Well, there's a surprise.

This entirely predictable news was received with stunned bewilderment by Obamaphile rubes such as the Reverend John Jenkins of Notre Dame, who in 2009 gave the president both an honorary degree and his imprimatur in exchange for the promise of a "sensible" approach to conflicts between church and state.

Now that they're on the receiving end of Obama's good sense, many of America's Catholic bishops have issued protests, characteristically anguished and hand-wringing but betraying little understanding of the stakes.

In a land of Big Government, everything else gets real small.

In the U.S., the Catholic Church, aside from abortion, is generally on board with the "social justice" agenda.

It never seemed to occur to them to ask themselves, If health care is a "human right" in the debased contemporary sense (i.e., not a restraint upon the state — as in Magna Carta — but a gift of the state), then who gets to define what health care is?

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