“I am pleased that the White House has taken further steps to ensure that all women have access to affordable contraception and to ensure that religious organizations will not be asked to violate their beliefs in the process,” said Tim
By DONNA CASSATA
Associated Press
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama’s opposition is now the divided one.
For three weeks of heated rhetoric, Republicans cast the president’s new rule that religious schools and hospitals must provide insurance for free birth control to their employees as an attack on individual liberty. The contentious issue united recently fractured Republicans, Catholic bishops and religious groups while badly splitting Democrats who feared an election-year fallout.
Obama’s leading GOP rivals — Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich — had sensed a political opening and were relentless in criticizing the president.
Obama caved to the pressure Friday, announcing a compromise that allows employees at religious-affiliated institutions to get free contraception directly from health insurance companies rather than employers who say it would violate their long-held convictions.
Almost immediately, Democrats who had disagreed with the White House backed the revised policy. So did Sister Carol Keehan, president and chief executive officer of the Catholic Health Association of the United States and a crucial player in both this debate and the fierce fight over Obama’s health care overhaul law. The nation’s bishops renewed their call for passage of legislation that would allow a health plan to decline coverage of specific items and services, based on religious beliefs.
The once formidable coalition against the president had splintered. Factions that had stood with the GOP cautiously backed Obama’s midcourse correction. It was a necessary policy change that reversed the political dynamic.
“After the many genuine concerns that have been raised over the last few weeks, as well as, frankly, the more cynical desire on the part of some to make this into a political football, it became clear that spending months hammering out a solution was not going to be an option, that we needed to move this faster,” Obama said in announcing his retreat and compromise.
The comment was a clear acknowledgment that his administration needed to move away quickly from an all-consuming battle that pitted Obama against the Catholic Church, hardly the fight a president wants to pick when he’s seeking another term.
“At the end of the day, Church one, White House zero,” said Sara Taylor Fagen, a Republican strategist and White House political adviser in George W. Bush’s administration.
The policy and the fury underscored the difficulty for the administration in implementing elements of Obama’s sweeping health care law, which remains highly divisive nearly two years after it became law and within months of the Supreme Court rendering its judgment sometime in late spring. It reflected the nervousness among congressional Democrats and candidates who want to avoid alienating working-class voters and suburban women critical to their fate this November.
“I am pleased that the White House has taken further steps to ensure that all women have access to affordable contraception and to ensure that religious organizations will not be asked to violate their beliefs in the process,” said Tim Kaine, a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
