Writing in this weekend’s Wall Street journal, former Reagan speech writer and current opinion columnist , Peggy Noonan, drops a rhetorical bombshell when she says that the Dept. of Health and Human Service’s Sec’y Kathleen Sibilius’ administrative ruling that Catholic Hospitals and other institutions must offer health care plans that offer abortion and contraceptive products may have just caused Obama to lose the election.
Because the ruling needed Obama to sign off on it before it could be implemented, the President has just gone on record that he has flip-flopped on his earlier promise that he would not violate the “conscious clause” that allows the Catholic Church and it’s affiliates to follow Church teaching on the sanctity of human life.
Mz. Noonan believes that a significant percentage of this nation’s 35 million Catholic voters are outraged by this intrusion by a ham-fisted government into their private lives and into the practice of their faith.
For my own part, I could see this coming from the outset of the legislative circus that surrounded the passage of this un-Constitutional bill. Whatever his promises were at the time, I felt certain that as soon as he thought that the bill was out of the limelight for a sufficient period of time for the American people to forget about some of it’s especially toxic provisions, that Obama would allow this long anticipated assault on Catholics to be launched with a vengeance.
As to why he would do this nine months before a Presidential election…only Obama can answer that question.
Having said that, I am very grateful for the timing of this ruling and the President signing off on it when he did. It gives the Republican Presidential candidates plenty of time to incorporate this issue into upcoming debates and to make sure the voters know full well that, whatever their religious denomination, they will not be allowed to follow their consciences in this mater of the rights of the pre-born, if this law is not repealed.
So now its up to Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul to use this issue as one more in a long list of reasons why Barack Obama needs to be ushered out of the Oval Office in January 2013.
~~John Cronin~~
His decision on Catholic charities makes Romney’s big gaffe look trivial
BY PEGGY NOONAN
What a faux pas, how inept, how removed from the essential realities of America. Yes, I’m referring to President Obama. But let’s do Mitt Romney first.
He’s taken heavy fire for his interview with CNN’s Soledad O’Brien, in which he said, “I’m not concerned about the very poor.”
Every criticism has been true. It was politically inept, playing into stereotypes about Republicans and about his own candidacy. It was Martian-like in its seeming remove from the concerns of everyday citizens. We’re in a recession here! It was at odds both with longtime American tradition and with rising conservative concern over …Read more @…….http://online.wsj.com/article/declarations.html?mod=WSJ_topnav_opinion
