Ever heard of Pine Mouth Syndrome? It’s this strange condition some people get when they eat pine nuts — in the opinion of some, though, it only happens with pine nuts harvested in China (which account for most in the US market). In 2010, we made some pesto, but I was the only one who ate it. I had this awful metallic taste in my mouth for a couple of weeks. (“Metallogeusia” is the condition of having a metallic taste in your mouth). We found out later, at our food co-op, that some people have had these complaints with Chinese-grown pine nuts. They switched back to the more expensive European pine nuts, and had no complaints. If you read the linked-to article  above, you’ll see that scientists have been able to find no chemical difference between pine nuts that trigger metallogeusia, and those that do not.

I bring this up because that happy little Lunesta butterfly who is supposed to be in my bedroom right now putting me to sleep has instead given me metallogeusia. I hate that butterly now. And Chinese pine nuts.

But I wonder if the small number of people who are subject to metallogeusia in Lunesta are also subject to same in Chinese pine nuts? (N.B., this week my wife made a chicken, spinach, and pine nut pie with Mediterranean pine nuts. I ate two pieces, and nothing happened.)

David Brooks sees the problem:

If Rick Santorum weren’t running for president, he would still be saying the same things he is saying today. Very few people believe that about Mitt Romney. If he can’t fix that problem, he may win the Republican nomination, but it won’t be worth much.

A controversial bill in Virginia:

Next fall, Patrick, 17, would like to try out as a kicker on the football team at Freedom High School in South Riding, Va., but he is home-schooled and thus ineligible.

“My parents pay the same exact taxes as my next-door neighbor who plays varsity sports,” he said. “I just want to be part of the community. You shouldn’t have to pick between athletics and academics.”

A hotly contested bill that passed the Republican-controlled House of Delegates in the Virginia General Assembly on Wednesday would change that, permitting home-schooled students to play varsity sports at public high schools. The Virginia bill is the latest attempt by home-schooling advocates around the country to gain greater access to extracurricular activities at public schools.

The reader who sent that story along asked what I thought. Here’s what I think: I’m pleased that the state of Virginia is trying to accomodate homeschoolers in this way, and I would be grateful if my state did the same. If Florida hadn’t done this, we’d have no Tim Tebow. That said, I understand the objection to it, and believe, as does my reader, that when people opt out of the public school system, there are certain consequences that come with that choice. Not being able to participate in varsity athletics is one of them. My point is that while I would be thankful if this privilege were extended to homeschooled kids, I don’t expect it. From the Times story:

William Bosher, a professor of public policy and education at Virginia Commonwealth University and a former state superintendent of public schools who advocated for home-schooling, said: “I support choice, but if you’ve chosen that, you can’t use public schools as an à la carte system. It’s football today. Tomorrow it’s a National Academy of Sciences project. The next day it’s homecoming queen. Where does it begin and end?”

Again, that’s a good point … but it makes me wonder: “Why can’t you use public schools as an a la carte system?” Some places let homeschooled kids take math and science courses in the local public schools. If homeschooling parents are taxpayers, why not? Understand I ask that as a theoretical question. I am satisfied to have the right to homeschool my children, and don’t expect special privileges from a school system that I’ve opted out of. Still, given that my taxes support this school system, it doesn’t seem to me to be unreasonable to ask the question.

It’s not just the Catholic bishops. The Southern Baptist theologian and leader Richard Land says that Baptists should be prepared to go to jail as an act of civil disobedience to the Obama administration’s HHS mandate. In an op-ed, Land wrote:

Our Baptist forebears died and went to prison to secure these freedoms. It is now our calling to stand in the gap and defend our priceless First Amendment religious freedoms.

Similarly, Ross Douthat shows why the standard liberal view, as articulated best by Kevin Drum, that this issue only matters to the Catholic bishops because everybody else uses contraception shows an incredible lack of understanding about how religious belief actually works, at least within Catholic circles. Excerpt:

But of course [Catholics who don’t use contraception] aren’t the only Catholics who have objected. Here Drum glosses over the complexities of religious faith and practice, which ensure that many Catholics’ relationship to the teachings of their Church is more complicated than a simple “agree or disagree.” There are Catholics who accept the Church’s view on contraception but simply don’t live up to it. There are Catholics who respect the general point of the teaching while questioning its application to every individual case. (My sense, elaborated here, is that the current pope has some sympathy for this perspective.) There are many American Catholics, as Daniel McCarthy noted in a perceptive interview recently, who are neither devout nor dissidents — Catholics who practice their faith intermittently, drifting away and then being tugged back, without having any particular desire to see its teachings changed to suit their lifestyles. And then there are Catholics (and this is a large category) who do explicitly dissent from Church teaching, but who also don’t want to see secular governments set the rules for what Catholic institutions can and cannot do. These are people who have been particularly vocal in the current debate (to their great credit), and their voices undercut the entire Drum thesis. If this issue a matter of conscience only for the “formal hierarchy of the Catholic Church,” then why is the White House taking so much criticism from Catholics with a reputation for disagreeing with the hierarchy — from Commonweal Catholics andNational Catholic Reporter Catholics, from famous Catholic liberals like E.J. Dionne and Chris Matthews, Catholic Democrats like Tim Kaine and Bob Casey, Jr., and so on? The answer can’t be that they’re all afraid of the bishops, since we’ve just established that most Catholics don’t agree with the bishops on this issue. Something else is going on here.

Southern Baptists have no problem with non-abortifacient forms of birth control. And yet you have one of the top Southern Baptists in the US saying the question of religious liberty raised by the Obama administration’s HHS move is so great that it’s worth going to jail over. Something else is definitely going on here.

Kevin Drum and his fellow liberals are suffering from a lack of imagination and empathy. As a Christian, I believe sex outside of marriage is wrong. I don’t engage in it, and I morally disapprove of it. By their logic, I should also approve of, for example, anti-sodomy laws. But I don’t. Not everything that is wrong should be outlawed. Similarly, Team Drum should understand that it makes perfect sense to disagree with the Catholic position on contraception — as most Americans do — and still believe that the government has no business forcing the Catholic Church, or any religious organization, to fund something it finds abhorrent.

Evangelical leaders Chuck Colson and Timothy George call for Christian unity:

Catholic institutions aren’t the only ones affected by this mandate. Prison Fellowship, for example, which employs 180 people, could not purchase insurance for its employees that covers abortifacients. Nor could the world’s largest Christian outreach to prisoners and their families afford the fines we would incur.

Three years ago, when we co-authored the Manhattan Declaration, we predicted that the time would come when Christians would have to face the very real prospect of civil disobedience—that we would have to choose sides: God or Caesar.

Certainly for the Catholics and for many of us evangelicals, that time is already upon us.

Terry Mattingly observes that the (secularist) media is still not grasping the other side in reporting this issue:

My point is not that the “religious liberty” camp should be covered and the “birth control” arguments ignored. In fact, I will say this again: There is no way to cover this story without hitting the birth-control angle and hitting it hard. There is no way to cover this story without covering its political angles.

From a journalistic perspective, this is not doctrine vs. politics. It’s both-and. This is not “religious liberty” vs. the sexual revolution. It’s both-and. The journalistic framing in this story must take seriously the line (currently) coming out of the White House and the voices of observant Catholics, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Orthodox Jews, evangelical Protestants and others who believe that the U.S. government is trying to punish those who refuse to edit centuries of tradition and law in order to conform to Caesar.

I think I understand what Rick Santorum is trying to say when he defends the Crusades, as he did once again today as he did last year [Note: the person who sent it to me also thought it was a current statement by Santorum; I was wrong, and apologize to your readers — RD] in a political appearance. He seems to be arguing that it’s nonsense to speak of Islam as a quietistic religion of peace that was set upon by bigoted Christians in the Crusades. And in that, he is correct. Islam spread by the sword. The indigenous Christian population of the Holy Land were conquered by Muhammad’s armies. The armies of Islam swept through Christian north Africa, and conquered Christian spain. They would have gone further had Charles Martel not stopped them in the eighth century at Tours. The relationship between the Muslim powers and Christian powers has always been fraught with hostility, even war. The Crusades were only one episode in this historical drama. Santorum is right to insist on seeing them in context.

But it is really dumb to defend them today, or to be seen as defending them. To say the Crusades were perhaps understandable in historical context is not the same thing as defending them. The slaughter of Jerusalem’s Jewish and Muslim civilians by Christians in the First Crusade was abominable. The sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusaders was also abominable, and, in a point that ought to be thoughtfully considered by Santorum, greatly weakened the Byzantine (Christian) Empire, and made the fall of Christian Constantinople to Muslim armies all but inevitable. The Fourth Crusade, at least, was not about advancing Christendom, or Christianity; it was about rape, plunder, and European politics.

The dumbest thing about all this is you have an American presidential candidate actually talking about the Crusades as part of his campaign. What is the point? Why is it the case that to defend Western civilization in this day and age, you have to agree that the Crusades were splendid, or at least morally unproblematic? Worse, Santorum is using this idea of the innocence of historical Christian jihad to support the idea of contemporary American imperialism in the Middle East:

Santorum also suggested that American involvement in the Middle East is part of our “core American values.”

“What I’m talking about is onward American soldiers,” Santorum continued. “What we’re talking about are core American values. ‘All men are created equal’ — that’s a Christian value, but it’s an American value.”

Disaster! Santorum is blatantly endorsing here exactly the same things Islamic radicals accuse us of: anti-Islamic imperialism — and he’s connecting it to the Crusades. Does he not recognize that this is a very big problem? This is unhinged.

UPDATE: Thanks to reader Matt for pointing out that Santorum made this statement a year ago. I didn’t notice that when I first posted. Nevertheless, insofar as it offers us insight into Santorum’s thinking about American foreign policy, Santorum’s pronouncment about the Crusades on the stump a year ago is useful to consider even today.

My friend Amy Sullivan, a liberal Evangelical, tries to talk some sense into fellow progressives on the HHS ruling. Excerpt:

Abortion rights organizations, pro-choice Democrats, and the media have all characterized the debate over this contraception coverage rule as a struggle between the White House and the Catholic bishops. In its editorial supporting the decision, the New York Times praised the Obama administration for “with[standing] pressure from Roman Catholic bishops and social conservatives.” But that’s not accurate.

The list of Catholics who have lobbied the administration to consider a broader definition of “religious employer” than now exists — one that would cover institutions like Catholic universities and hospitals — includes politically progressive Catholics who have been close allies of the White House, like Father John Jenkins, the president of the University of Notre Dame who stood up to conservatives who wanted Obama disinvited from giving the school’s commencement address in 2009. It includes pro-life Catholic Democrats like Senator Bob Casey, who now faces an even tougher reelection campaign in Pennsylvania because of his vote in favor of Obama’s health reform plan. And it includes precisely those Catholic hospital officials and progressive nuns whose support of health reform provided reassurance and cover for the holdout Catholic Democrats who voted to make it law. In doing so, they made possible the largest expansion of contraception access in U.S. history.

Without the work of women like Sister Carol Keehan, president of the Catholic Health Association, and Sister Simone Campbell of the Catholic social justice group NETWORK, there would be no health reform and therefore no contraception coverage mandate to argue over — not just for the employees of Catholic hospitals and universities, but for the estimated 24 million other women who will benefit from this aspect of the law.

So, yes, a little gratitude from women’s health advocates and other liberals would be appropriate. Instead, when these Catholic sisters and others asked for some flexibility with regard to the mandate, the advocates pooh-poohed as irrelevant their concerns about religious liberty and insisted that “the bishops” were the only ones who had a problem with contraception coverage.

Watch this eight-minute interview from back during the health reform debate with Sr. Keehan. This is the woman Barack Obama sandbagged to placate Kathleen Sebelius, Barbara Boxer, and Planned Parenthood.

Over at Andrew Sullivan’s place, Patrick Appel makes this observation about Maggie Gallagher’s immovability on the same-sex marriage question:

Gallagher’s declaration that her mind cannot be changed is the statement of a fundamentalist. There is no greater sin against open debate than to preemptively seal oneself off from evidence.

I wonder what evidence would convince Patrick, or his boss, to change their minds about same-sex marriage. I’m confident that there is none, that they are as committed to their position in favor of it as Gallagher is against it. This is not to say that the positions are equally rational, but only that at bottom, each side reasons from first principles about the way the world works — principles that are not ultimately derived from reason, but that reflect a religious, or quasi-religious, interpretation of the world. Karl Popper said that in matters of empirical observation — which is to say, in science — a claim has to be in principle falsifiable. That is, it has to be able to be proven wrong, in theory. If there is no way to demonstrate empirically that the hypothesis is wrong, then the claim becomes something other than science.

Similarly with the matter of gay marriage. I’ve never met Maggie Gallagher or spoken to her, but from her writing, and knowing something about her Catholic background, I’m fairly certain that even if all arguments she makes against same-sex marriage were proven to be incontrovertibly wrong, she would hold her ground because of her religious convictions. Patrick calls that “fundamentalist,” but I contend that nearly all of us are “fundamentalists” in this way, about the things we most care about. If it were possible to prove, in logic and through empirical observation, that Maggie’s views on same-sex marriage were correct and sensible, and the other side was simply wrong, I am certain that most same-sex marriage supporters would not give an inch on this. And you know, this makes sense to me: theirs is a deeply felt moral position, based on an ideal, same as Maggie Gallagher’s. Same as mine.

It tells you something about the dominance of the cultural left in our media that whenever these issues are discussed, those on the cultural right tend to be characterized as the irrational, uncompromising “fundamentalists” — hardcore believers who are utterly immune to rational persuasion, whose belief in their position is unfalsifiable. Yet I have never met any pro-choicer for whom the abortion issue mattered a lot (this as distinct from those who are pro-choice but not emotionally engaged by the issue) who hasn’t been every it as “fundamentalist” on the matter as their counterpart in the pro-life movement. In 1995, the feminist writer Naomi Wolf caused a stir with an essay in The New Republic arguing that pro-lifers are correct in calling the fetus a human life, and that her fellow pro-choicers ought to admit this, and develop a defense of abortion rights based on this fact. It’s really an interesting piece, even today, and I encourage you to read it. For Wolf, then, the right to abortion is unfalsifiable: it must be defended even if it is the taking of a human life. Abortion is absolute. Her mind cannot be changed by facts — indeed, she concedes the justice of pro-life arguments on biological facts:

While pro-lifers have not been beyond dishonesty, distortion and the doctoring of images (preferring, for example, to highlight the results of very late, very rare abortions), many of those photographs are in fact photographs of actual D & Cs; those footprints are in fact the footprints of a 10-week-old fetus, the pro-life slogan, “Abortion stops a beating heart,” is incontrovertibly true. While images of violent fetal death work magnificently for pro-lifers as political polemic, the pictures are not polemical in themselves: they are biological facts. We know this.

Is Wolf a fundamentalist? Yes, plainly, if by “fundamentalist” one means someone whose belief is so fixed that no argument or evidence can change it.

The abolitionists, who found slavery so appalling — and such an affront to their religious convictions — that they were willing to take the country to war to end it — were they fundamentalists? Of course they were. They were immune to any arguments from morality or prudence. “Slavery is evil” was an unfalsifiable proposition to them. That is not to say it was an irrational position — only that it was unfalsifiable.

In his new book, Charles Murray writes:

Data can bear on policy issues, but many of our opinions about policy are grounded on premises about the nature of human life and human society that are beyond the reach of data. Try to think of any new data that would change your position on abortion, the death penalty, legalization of marijuana, same-sex marriage or the inheritance tax. If you cannot, you are not necessarily being unreasonable.

David Frum, whose general critique of Murray’s book makes some strong points (more on which later; I’m reading the Murray book now), observes:

As a matter of fact, if you announce that there can exist no possible information that might change your mind about abortion, the death penalty, marijuana, same-sex marriage, and the inheritance tax, then yes you are an unreasonable person—or anyway, an unreasoning one. I’ve changed my mind about same-sex marriage as experience has dispelled my fears of the harms from same-sex marriage. If somebody could prove to me that marijuana was harmless or that legalization would not lead to an increase in marijuana use, I’d change my mind about marijuana legalization. And so on through the list.

I think David is wrong about this, or at least not entirely right. To be sure, Murray’s list strikes me personally as overly broad. Like David, I am open to persuasion, to varying degrees, on most of these issues, and for different reasons on each one. For example, I am impossible to persuade that abortion is morally licit, but I am open to persuasion that as a matter of prudence, outlawing abortion in this time and in this place is unwise policy. David was open to changing his mind about same-sex marriage because his reason for opposing it was that he worried about its social effects. If someone believes that same-sex marriage is intrinsically wrong — and not just wrong because of its presumed effects — then that person will be unpersuadable. Similarly, if someone believes that same-sex marriage is intrinsically moral, indeed a moral right, then no evidence will change their mind. If it were possible to demonstrate with social science data that desegregation has been a disaster for the United States, you would find very few people supporting resegregation, the prospect of which would be morally intolerable. Are they being unreasonable? Why or why not? This is the core of Murray’s point.

So often we flatter ourselves that our own position is obviously the correct one, and if the other side weren’t so irrational and “fundamentalist,” they would see things the way we do. The left does it. The right does it. Everybody does it. But it’s untrue. The best person to read on this is, and has been for a long time, the UVA social scientist James Davison Hunter, whose landmark  1991 book “Culture Wars” painted a compelling portrait of the irreconcilability of competing moral visions in contemporary American life. As Hunter points out, our most heated conflicts are not disputes over facts, but over meaning, and identity. As Hunter writes in his introduction, the people he profiles in the book derive their understanding about the meaning of life and their own responsibilities within the community from their identities: as an Orthodox Jew, as a progressive Episcopal clergywoman, as a traditional Catholic, as a secular liberal, and so on. “Remove these commitments and you take away that which engages them as neighbors and citizens,” Hunter writes. “Separate them from these understandings, and you take away their hearts and souls.”

What does “reason” have to do with heart and soul? Very little. But reason does tell us that we live in a pluralistic society, and that we have to find some way to negotiate a peaceable accommodation with our neighbors who may have very different commitments than we. That isn’t possible if we see ourselves and our allies as the only ones with reasonable moral commitments, and our opponents as driven solely by “fundamentalism.” On the other hand, we shouldn’t deceive ourselves into thinking that all issues are ultimately resolvable through a reasoned compromise. Everybody is a fundamentalist about the things that are most important to them. This is why we have the culture war.

[Note: I am not approving any more comments premised on the belief that the HHS regulation at issue would only apply to religious employers who take government money. This is not true. This is factually incorrect. The HHS rule would apply across the board, to every employer lacking an exemption.]

Now, here’s a telling piece from Bloomberg, on how the president arrived at his decision to stick it to the Catholic Church:

President Barack Obama ended months of internal White House debate by siding with a group of mostly female advisers who urged him not to limit a health-care law mandate to provide contraceptives, even at the risk of alienating Catholic voters in November, people familiar with the discussions said.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, a Catholic and a two-term governor of Kansas, was joined by several female Obama advisers in urging against a broad exemption for religious organizations. To do so would leave too many women without coverage and sap the enthusiasm for Obama among women’s rights advocates, they said, according to the people, who spoke about the deliberations on condition of anonymity.

Vice President Joe Biden and then-White House chief of staff Bill Daley, also Catholics, warned that the mandate would be seen as a government intrusion on religious institutions. Even moderate Catholic voters in battleground states might be alienated, they warned, according to the people familiar with the discussions.

Fascinating. So Biden and Daley warned him of the potential backlash, but he chose to listen to the feminists in his inner circle. This tells you the man’s priorities. Even a principle as important as religious liberty did not trump feminist priorities in his mind. And now he finds himself being waylaid by prominent liberal Catholics, and having handed the eventual Republican nominee a powerful, energizing culture war issue to use against him this fall. Pennsylvania Democratic US Sen. Bob Casey, a liberal Catholic, has publicly called on Obama to stand down on this issue. Pennsylvania is a battleground state this fall, by the way.

If the legality of contraception were at issue, I not only could see the rationale and the justice in the feminists’ position, I would agree with them. But this does not involve the legality of contraception. This involves a government mandate that religious employers (and everybody else) provide access to it, even though it deeply violates the teachings of that religion. Protestant churches, which generally have no problem with contraception, have been put on notice by this that if they don’t stand with the Roman Catholic church on this issue, they will have given significant ground on religious liberty — and it will likely be used to attack them soon. David Brooks has a commonsense view on this controversy:

The truth is that institutions with a strong sense of mission often attract diverse groups of people who want to attend or work there. Those schools and hospitals and charities are strong precisely because of their distinct mission and in the real world everybody involved tries to preserve that mission while respecting the diversity of those who aren’t members of that group. These accommodations are often messy, but they are worth making. We all make accommodations. It happens every day in a pluralistic society.

He’s saying: look, you may think the Catholic Church’s teaching on contraception is loony, but the Church takes it very seriously — and the Church does a lot of good in this society. It makes sense to compromise with them on this issue. It’s not going to kill anybody to give them an exemption on this HHS rule. 

I could be wrong, but I find it hard to believe that any women who weren’t already ardent feminists — and therefore likely to be strongly pro-Obama anyway — would have held it against Obama to yield on this issue by granting a conscience exemption to the Catholic Church. Doesn’t Obama understand that there are plenty of women in this country who value religious liberty? If the only women you surround yourself with are Barbara Boxer-Kathleen Sebelius types, maybe you don’t understand that. As Michael Sean Winters and other liberal Catholics have pointed out, health-care reform of the sort Obama pushed for has been a huge priority for liberal Catholics, and indeed for many of the Catholic bishops. My sense is that most liberals and Democratic voters — Catholic or not — would not have batted an eye, or much of one, at a conscience exemption over birth control. Why should they have? Contraception remains affordable and widely available. To have preserved the status quo would have imposed a relatively trivial cost on women who worked for employers that refused, on conscience grounds, to fund contraception — a cost that could easily have been picked up by the billion-dollar philanthropy Planned Parenthood, if it wanted to. And it would have refrained from imposing a catastrophic moral cost on the Catholic Church. With that in mind, it’s hard to see that this pointless, stupid controversy was about anything more than feminists wanting to stick it, and stick it hard, to the Church — and a president who, despite previous rhetoric to the contrary about how much he respected religion, was happy to go along with them.

This debacle has forced me to rethink my “pox on all their houses” political position. I have no love for Obama and his administration, though I don’t hate them either. I have no love for any of the likely GOP nominees, or the least bit of enthusiasm for the prospect of a Republican restoration in the White House. I am just that alienated from mainstream American politics. But the fact that Obama was so eager to placate the priorities of the cultural left on this relatively small issue (for him, but huge for the Catholic Church) tells me how things are likely to go on the matter of religious liberty in a second Obama term, as legal battles over same-sex marriage heat up. This was a warning shot from Obama and the cultural left. Well, it woke me up.

UPDATE: “Bonhoeffer” author Eric Metaxas on government overreach and the slippery slope:

Man, this guy has just passed E.J. Dionne to be my favorite liberal Catholic polemicist. Excerpts from his latest excoriation of the Obama administration for its HHS mandate:

Mr. Obama and his advisors decided to walk out on this limb, I didn’t. They chose to punch us Catholics in the nose. If they are now feeling the heat of a backlash they were warned about, that’s how politics works. Their political predicament was foreseeable and they made their choice. I do not want to sit down to negotiations with them unless and until there is a little blood coming from their nose too. Negotiations are more honest when both sides have some essential parity in the bloody nose category. And, if the White House and Mr. Axelrod think the heat is too much for them, they should reverse this decision, not seek negotiations. It is never fun to admit one was wrong. Certainly, as the Komen Foundation brouhaha showed, there will be hell to pay on the other side if the administration reverses course. This is not an issue on which there is an obvious consensus everyone can live with, and because the issues raised entail first principles, there are limits to what any negotiators can achieve.

More:

The editors of Commonweal admirably recognized that such very fundamental issues are at stake when they wrote: “The HHS decision comes perilously close to insisting that the government should determine what is or isn’t a religious organization or ministry. The reasoning behind restricting the exemption to institutions that primarily employ and serve coreligionists appear to be based on an essentially sectarian, and historically Protestant, understanding of ‘religion.’ The Catholic Church, which understands its public presence to be vital to its identity and mission, should not be forced to abide by such restricts.” Amen to that. Religion is not something we only do on Sunday morning and do amongst ourselves. And those who have been castigating the big, bad, bishops on this score need to be reminded of the scores of decisions made by scores of bishops to keep inner city schools open even when the Catholics they were built to serve had fled for the suburbs because, as Catholics, we believe helping the poor is part of our religious mission. Those who fret about Catholic hospitals operating in a pluralistic society should ask themselves why NARAL and Emily’s List have not opened any hospitals. The administration’s logic seems to be that when a poor person comes to a Catholic soup kitchen, we should not ask if he is hungry, we should ask if he is Catholic. Sorry, but that is not how we conceive of our Catholic mission and social justice Catholics should be the first to recognize this instead of shamefully making apologies for the administration or bashing the bishops or shifting the conversation away from these first principles into a defense of contraception.

And:

Make no mistake about it – those who support denying Catholic institutions a more robust exemption have placed their commitment to pro-choice orthodoxy above their commitment to health care reform. Is that progressive? Is that something progressive Catholics, who fought so hard to pass the ACA, want to defend? It is time for so-called progressive Catholics to stop serving as chaplains to the political status quo and recognize a first principle when they see one. It is time for Catholics to insist that a conscience exemption that only applies to religion on Sunday and no help for the poor unless they are also Catholic is no conscience exemption at all. And, if the White House doesn’t see it that way, let them pay the political price for it.

Run over to the National Catholic Reporter and read the whole thing. Reminds me of a progressive version of the orthodox Catholic blogger Mark Shea ripping into his conservative Catholics for supporting the Bush administration on torture.