Bill Donohue — no sane adult’s idea of a clear-headed thinker — snipes at Obama’s condemnation of religious profiling during last night’s State of the Union address as hypocritical on the grounds that the HHS contraception mandate is — GASP! — religious profiling. I am not kidding you: He actually says that.
The Health and Human Services (HHS) mandate is a classic case of religious profiling. Not only does it cherry pick Catholic non-profits by forcing them to pay for abortion-inducing drugs, it redefines what constitutes a Catholic entity: Catholic social service agencies that hire and serve large numbers of non-Catholics—that is what truly Catholic institutions do—are deemed to be no longer Catholic. This explains why the Little Sisters of the Poor were declared to be non-Catholic by the administration; it also explains why the nuns sued them.
The Little Sisters of the Poor were told they have to fill-out a form saying their religious beliefs proscribe provision of contraception as part of their health plan; they refuse, claiming that completing a form burdens their religious freedom.
I am reminded of Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous dismissal of theologians, and more generally of the godly:
Whatever a theologian feels to be true must be false: this is almost a criterion of truth. His most basic instinct of self-preservation forbids him to respect reality at any point or even to let it get a word in.
The Antichrist, §9