OPINION:
I am a pro-choice non-Catholic but even I applaud the Catholic plaintiffs who have filed 12 federal lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the Obama administration’s birth-control mandate (“Inside the Beltway: Lawsuit, what lawsuit?” Web, Tuesday).
The idea that contraceptive services are not readily accessible and affordable to American women, posited by the Obama administration to justify its intrusion into First Amendment freedom of religious expression, cannot survive even a cursory examination.
What’s more, the notion that sexual politics would lead the administration to traduce religious expression is appalling - but that is what fear of electoral defeat will do. Mr. Obama obviously feels more votes will be garnered by this sly maneuver than will be lost, a Faustian bargain that may not bear out.
While many of us understand Mr. Obama’s reluctance to be paired with former President Jimmy Carter in the history books as a failed one-term president, we cannot accept the violence done to religious expression by his ill-considered birth-control mandate.
PAUL BLOUSTEIN
Cincinnati
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