Contraceptive Confoundment

President Obama is suddenly getting applauded by Catholic Democrats and some independent Catholics who supported him in 2008 for his announcement earlier today that he would continue the policy of guaranteeing contraceptive and birth control supplies to women who work in Catholic schools or hospitals (the same guarantee to female employees in other institutions), but with the proviso that health insurance companies must provide coverage when Catholic institutions refuse to do so out of conscience. People are already talking about how he defused a political issue with this move especially by showing respect for matters of faith, but I'm not sure about that. First of all, he galvanized the right. Second of all, he made himself look foolish by doing now what he should have done a few weeks ago. And third of all, while some Catholic clergypersons such as Sister Carol Keehan, the nun who runs Catholic Health Association, is pleased with this, the bishopric is reserving judgment pending further review. And Obama's change of course may have opened a new can of worms. He's essentially telling insurance companies to issue certain policies, playing into the hands of accusations of a "government takeover of health care."

Still, this is a good plan.  Obama did the right thing by women and he did the right thing by himself; he owed up to a mistake, corrected the mistake, and now he seeks to move on. But - do you think reactionaries in the Republican party will let him? He may have lit the match, but Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich are going to fan the flame into a firestorm. in fact, at the annual Nuremberg rally - uh, Conservative Political Action Conference meeting, they're already at it. And (picking up on where I left off yesterday), while a majority of American Catholics support and use birth control, the fact that Obama had already issued a directive to put the onus on birth control coverage on the Church may have left a bad taste in people's mouths.

I hope I'm wrong about all this, and that this is the end of the issue for awhile with Obama having the advantage. But the righties going to exploit this issue for as long as they can. The Republicans were never going to support the revised version of this policy anyway. But they now have all of the media attention on the issue to milk it for all it's worth.