Obama Administration's New Contraception Rule Puts Key Catholic Vote at Risk

(Wall Street Journal) - WASHINGTON -- If you want to find the absolute center in American politics, you could do worse than look at the nation's Catholic vote.

In nine of the past 10 presidential elections, the Catholic vote has gone with the candidate who ultimately won the election. Five times it has gone to a Republican; five times to a Democrat. And in five of those elections, the percentage of the Catholic vote taken by the winner has been within a single percentage point of the share he won overall.

In 2008, 54 percent of Catholics went for President Barack Obama and he won; in 2010, 54 percent voted Republican, and the GOP took control of the House. In short, Catholic voters, who make up about a quarter of the electorate, represent the ultimate swing vote.

Which is why Obama has to be worried about the reaction to his administration's decision that could compel many Catholic institutions, like other employers, to offer contraception services in their health insurance policies.

The negative reaction of the church's bishops -- important allies of the president on other matters, notably immigration reform -- is one thing. As a political matter, the bigger question is whether rank-and-file Catholics, even the majority who tend to disagree with their church's teaching on contraception, will nonetheless view the administration's actions as a case of overreach.

As a result, the administration now faces a delicate question of whether to mend fences, seek a new compromise, or assume the flap will blow over without affecting broader Catholic views.

The cause of this rift is a set of guidelines the Department of Health and Human Services issued last month as an outgrowth of the 2010 health care law, detailing which preventive health services employers are required to cover without a co-payment in health-insurance policies. The HHS guidelines said that birth control has to be covered, though they also gave churches that consider contraception immoral an exemption.

The crux of the matter, though, is that religious institutions that employ and serve people outside their faith -- hospitals, elementary schools, universities -- have to comply with the requirement to cover birth control if they offer health insurance coverage for employees. That means such Catholic institutions, which employ and serve wide swaths of non-Catholics across the country, will not be exempt, despite church teachings against use of contraception.

The nation's bishops are complaining bitterly that they will be forced either to cover health benefits they consider immoral, or limit their services to Catholics to qualify for the exemption, turning away the millions of non-Catholics their schools and hospitals now serve.

As a policy matter, the administration contends that nonpartisan health experts pushed strongly for including contraceptive coverage as a public health issue, and that the guidelines are required to ensure that all women have fair and equal access to services that most Americans support. As a political matter, the administration has blunted the effect by giving religious institutions until August 2013, well past the coming election, to comply.

The year's delay in enacting the rules may provide time to find a way out of the box. Indeed, spokesman Jay Carney said Monday the White House "will work with institutions…to allay the concerns that are there."

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