The Obama Birth-Control Mandate: A Constitutional Abortion

Michael Novak, a noted Catholic author and distinguished visiting professor at Ave Maria University in Naples, launches a powerful attack at National Review Online against the Obama administration's mandate -- maybe we should say diktat -- about insurance coverage of birth-control services for employees of religious institutions, particularly those run by the Catholic Church.

(Before I get to that, though, a short aside. Is there any institution in America -- could be the world, but I don't know that -- that's easier to attack without risk of retaliation than the Catholic Church? But even in Hollywood, when you get down to basics, when you really need to get Satan out of a 13-year-old girl, who do you go to? Let me know when you call a Unitarian Universalist.)

Anyway, the gist of the Novak column follows:

"This despised mandate is, then, a violation by one most powerful political institution, the state, against the integrity of those other major institutions that are outside the power of the state the churches and synagogues and mosques. The Constitution in its First Amendment insists that Congress shall make no law... and it clearly does not mean that the president or his Department of Health and Human Services has the constitutional power to do so either."

The full article is here.