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The Vatican’s timing was ironic. While Roman Catholic bishops in the U.S. were trying to revive their moral and political clout last week by battling President Obama over contraception coverage and religious liberty, a papally endorsed symposium was underway in Rome on how the Church has to change if it wants to prevent sexual abuse crises, the very tragedy that has shriveled the stature of Catholic prelates worldwide over the past decade, especially in the U.S. One monsignor at the Vatican gathering even suggested the hierarchy had been guilty of “omertà,” the Mafia code of silence, by protecting abusive priests.

The Roman forum was a reminder—and the birth control clash is turning out to be one as well — of just how much influence the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has lost in the 10 years since the abuse crisis erupted in America. It hopes that its protest of a new federal rule requiring religiously affiliated institutions like Catholic hospitals and universities to provide no-cost contraception in their health insurance coverage, even if church doctrine forbids birth control, will help restore the bishops’ relevance. They did win a partial victory last Friday when Obama, acknowledging the uproar, said those institutions would no longer have to pay for the contraception coverage themselves. But the President did not fully genuflect: The compromise will still oblige religious-based employers to offer the coverage, while their insurance providers foot the bill.

Although major Catholic groups like Catholic Charities and Catholic Health Services accepted that revision, the bishops are holding out for more. But their crusade to be exempted from the mandate is likely to fall short of its grail. If so, it’s because Obama read the Catholic flock better than its shepherds did.

Granted, the bishops, led by New York Archbishop and Cardinal-elect Timothy Dolan, did get the White House to acknowledge how high-handedly and ham-handedly it had managed the contraception debate—confirming along the way the public’s wariness of the so-called liberal elite—and convinced it to craft a deal that should have been policy in the first place. Yet in his refusal to cave completely to the religious liberty campaign, Obama has illustrated the reality that the bishops no longer speak for most U.S. Catholics—the nation’s largest religious denomination and a critical swing-voter group—on a host of moral issues, according to polls.

Not on abortion or the death penalty (a majority of Catholics believe those should remain legal); on divorce or homosexuality (most say those are acceptable); on women being ordained as priests and priests getting married (ditto); or on masturbation and pre-marital sex (ditto again, Your Excellencies).

And especially not on contraception. Ever since Pope Paul VI reaffirmed the Church’s senseless ban on birth control in 1968, few doctrines have been as vilified, ridiculed and outright ignored by Catholics – evidenced by a recent study showing that 98% of American Catholic women have used some form of contraception. It’s hard to believe, as the bishops would have it, that those women simply succumbed to society’s pressure to do the secular thing. They’ve decided, in keeping with their faith’s precept of exercising personal conscience, that family planning is the moral and societally responsible thing to do—for example, preventing unwanted pregnancies and therefore abortions. And it explains why a recent Public Religion Research Institute poll found most Catholics support the contraception coverage mandate even for Catholic-affiliated organizations. Presumably most endorse Friday’s compromise.

Far more Evangelical Protestants, according to the PRRI survey, back the bishops than Catholics do. But that hardly makes the bishops, when it comes to the more independent Catholic vote, the same force to be reckoned with that they were in the 20th century. That is, before 2002 and the horror stories of how prelates like Cardinal Bernard Law, then Boston’s archbishop, had serially shielded alleged pedophile priests. It’s true that some bishops, like Washington Archbishop Donald Wuerl, confronted rather than coddled accused priests. But when it became clear that so many of the men in miters cared more about safeguarding the clerical corporation than about protecting kids, episcopal “authority” vanished like so much incense smoke—and Catholics increasingly abandoned the 2,000-year-old notion that their church and their religion are the same thing.

That’s essentially what Catholics like me are asking for, especially from my colleagues in the media, during episodes like the contraception and religious liberty fracas: Stop equating what the bishops say with what we think, because we’re not the obedient, monolithic bloc that newspapers and cable news networks so tiresomely insist is in “jeopardy” for this or that party whenever they smell church-state friction. When a hardline U.S. bishop calls for withholding communion from a Catholic politician who supports legalized abortion, stop assuming all Catholics have the prelate’s back rather than the pol’s. When Catholic politicians draft legislation like the religious liberty bills popping up on Capitol Hill right now, stop accepting their assertion that the birth-control ban is “a major tenet” of Catholic faith, as Florida Senator Marco Rubio called it this month. For the vast majority of Catholics, it isn’t.

And for that matter, stop forgetting that in the 2008 election, 54% of Catholic voters ignored their bishops and backed a pro-choice presidential candidate like Obama. I certainly don’t point that out as some kind of endorsement of Obama in 2012. I’m simply noting that pundits and politicians need smarter criteria for gauging the Catholic vote—just as advisers in Obama’s White House shouldn’t have been so clueless about religious issues when they first decreed the contraception mandate. If the tragedy of the 2002 abuse crisis reminds us of anything, it’s that religion does matter in politics. Just ask the church leaders who are still paying a political price for their religious code of silence. http://swampland.time.com/2012/02/13/birth-control-debate-why-catholic
-bishops-have-lost-their-grip-on-u-s-politics-and-their-flock/

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Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich acknowledged on Thursday that his support for a “fetal personhood” constitutional amendment would make some forms of birth control illegal.

The New York Times determined that a similar plan in Mississippi to declare a fertilized egg a legal person, also promoted by Personhood USA, would have banned some forms of birth control like IUDs and morning-after pills. http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/12/15/gingrich-post-conception-birth-c
ontrol-should-be-illegal/ on Monday that he believes states should have the right to outlaw birth control and sodomy without the interference of the Supreme Court.

In an interview with Jake Tapper on ABC News, Santorum reiterated his opposition to the Supreme Court’s 1965 ruling that prevented Connecticut from banning contraception.

“The state has a right to do that, I have never questioned that the state has a right to do that," he said. "It is not a constitutional right." http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:laxCww1tUGwJ:www.
outsidethebeltway.com/rick-santorum-favors-making-birth-control-illegal/+would+make+contraception+illegal&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country, the whole sexual libertine idea ... Many in the Christian faith have said, 'Well, that's okay ... contraception's okay.'

It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.” http://www.religiousrightwatch.com/2012/01/rick-santorum-the-dangers-o
f-contraception-in-this-country.html essentiall contradicted himself when called on it by saying

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the idea I’m coming after your birth control is absurd. I was making a statement about my moral beliefs, but I won’t impose them on anyone else in this case. http://michaelscomments.wordpress.com/2012/02/13/no-santorum-is-not-co
ming-for-your-birth-control/, his saying states have the right to make contraception illegal, and backing the Mississippi "personhood" law are a dichotomy. He IS backing making contraception illegal, since that's what the proposed Mississippi law does, specifically.

And, as they have been doing with abortion,

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If Christian Right activists can ensure that pharmacists don’t have to provide access to contraceptives, this will open the door to putting pressure on pharmacists to refuse to provide contraceptives no matter what they think. The situation for contraceptives would be analogous to the current one for abortion: legal, but providers labor under intense pressure to get out of the business. The Christian Right may not be able to make birth control illegal, but they may could make it unavailable. http://atheism.about.com/od/abortioncontraception/p/BirthControl.htm law they tried to pass in Mississippi would make some birth control methods, including IUDs, illegal, period.

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...might "even open the door to investigating women who have suffered miscarriages." http://gothamist.com/2011/10/26/latest_threat_to_womens_right_to_ch.ph
p don't kid yourself that the far right isn't trying to make birth control illegal...they already ARE, and will try to find more ways to do so. Each step they take which succeeds will be followed by other states following them, and more stringent laws, if they have their way.

The far right DEFINITELY wants to make birth control illegal; one of their candidates is close to it, Santorum is very clear that if he had his way, birth control WOULD be illegal. There can be no argument as to whether they not only want it, but are working toward it right now. Hopefully they can be stopped, but their intent is quite obvious.

As to it being a phony election-year ploy, of course it is in some respects. The Republican candidates have latched onto it to pander to their far-right base, but that is NO guarantee what they would do if they were to get into power. All this has already EXISTED since April of 2011, so why is it suddenly the right's raison d'etre, if not to use it against Obama?

Mississippi already tried. End of story.