The federal government finally kept its promise to provide a revision
to its contraceptive coverage policy under ObamaCare. The U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services is being challenged in 44
lawsuits over its mandate that employers, even religious organizations,
provide coverage for contraception, including the kind that can induce
abortion. The announcement of the so-called accommodation came on a
Friday. It was too convoluted — really — to explain on the nightly news.

This new policy was supposed to be the miracle that relieved concerns
of the Catholic Church and all the religious groups and Christian-owned
companies who objected to providing contraception and/or abortion-
inducing drugs under their health plans. Washington Post columnist
Michael Gerson wrote of it: “Upon reflection, it seems less like the
parting of the Red Sea than a parlor trick.” “Accounting gimmick” is
what others are calling it.

Churches have been, and still are, fully exempt from the HHS mandate.
Like the last accommodation for charities, colleges and hospitals run
by religious organizations, this one exempts these institutions from
having to pay directly for contraceptive and sterilization coverage. It
says, instead that the insurance company will do the providing of the
coverage. The objection to the last accommodation was that if I as a
religious organization provide my employees with insurance and that
insurance provides abortion-inducing contraceptives, I am paying for
something that violates my deeply held faith-based principles.

This accommodation stipulates that a stand-alone insurance policy that
the religious organization will not pay for will provide the contraception
for free. Free? Really? Columnist Cal Thomas warned that “only
the naive can possible think the cost won’t find its way back to the
institution in the form of higher health premiums.” And this policy is
still tied to the person’s employment.

Michael Gerson says this latest accommodation “is a shell game useful
only for those who want to deceive themselves….the administration,”
he writes, “views access to contraception as an individual right to be

guaranteed by the government, and institutional religious rights as an
obstacle and an inconvenience.”

Such an exchange — such a sellout! Religious liberty, purchased at such
a dear cost and carefully enshrined in our First Amendment, so easily
traded for every woman’s right to have the few dollars that is the cost of
birth control, or an emergency “fix” for last night’s sexual indiscretion,
provided for free. If this is not evidence of the administration’s hostility
toward faith, it at least shows those in power simply don’t get loyalties
that extend beyond government.

This accommodation does not even attempt to deal with Christian-
owned businesses, like Hobby Lobby, the crafts chain. Hobby Lobby
actually lost its challenge to the mandate at the Tenth Circuit Court of
appeals and now faces penalties of over a million dollars a day for not
providing abortifacients to employees through their health insurance.
Religious organizations and businesses are fighting a now-or-never
battle for religious freedom.