Obama's Catholic hospital decision

[Wiz in Wis]

Lost in all this discussion of the federal government requiring religious hospitals and universities are a few key points that should really be addressed.

1) The vast majority of those who use birth control are women between 18-40. Do we really think that Barack Obama who won nearly 55-60% of this demographic in 2008, would fall back and risk pissing them off? Upsetting a few conservative Catholics who were already disinclined to vote for Obama is worth the benefit of looking like you care about a key constituency that has voted for you in the past. With the compromise, and the dramatically overblown GOP response (see McConnell today) these women know who has their back, and who wants to take away their yasmin.

2) The salience of this issue is very low. Yes, it got a lot of media coverage... in February, during a lull in the coverage of the GOP Primary. In the fall, this will not be an issue that comes up. Obama has proposed a reasonable compromise, and the GOP, like always, has overreached. Do you think Mitt Romney will want to talk about birth control in the fall? This won't move as many votes as last month's job report did... not even close.

3) While this is a politics board, I will say that the real issue here is the civil war in the Catholic Church. Conservative elements, under the direction of Rome, have spent the better part of the last decade taking a big juicy dump on the social justice wing of the Church. The result has been the mass aging of the general Catholic population, as hundreds of thousands of young people (look up the most recent ARIS study to see the age/religion shift) have abandoned the church... sometimes for more conservative evangelical churches, but more often for the church of I'll sleep in as late on Sunday as I damn well please. These people will not come back. I remember living in Milwaukee when Timothy Dolan was the Archbishop there. There were TV ads literally begging disaffected Catholics to come back to church... He was on there basically saying " PLEASE COME BACK... PLEASE! PLEASE! PLEASE!.  This issue will only further divide the church between the hardliners who just cant seem to enter the 21st century, and those who  are perfectly happy being a new Episcopalian or agnostic. Dolan has a lot more to lose here than Obama does.