The latest TIME features National Review editor Rich Lowry‘s take on the recent furor surrounding the Obama administration’s mandate involving contraceptive coverage and the Catholic Church.
Even Catholic laypeople who ignore the church’s teachings on birth control don’t enjoy seeing their church treated with such high-handedness.
The rule betrays a disturbingly pinched view of religious liberty. On Jan. 11 the Administration was rebuked 9-0 by the Supreme Court in the Hosanna-Tabor decision. In a case involving employment-discrimination law, the Administration maintained that the Constitution gives religious institutions no protections in choosing their faith leaders. The court reacted with incredulity.
In Obama’s decision (and yes, he did okay it), we see again an encroachment of secular government, with its web of rules and regulations, on a free, civil society. It is an expression of the unyielding “tutelary power” of the administrative state foretold by Alexis de Tocqueville. Such a state seeks what it imagines to be our happiness, he wrote, “but it wishes to be the only agent and sole arbiter of that happiness.”
