Democratic representatives used a Thursday hearing to further escalate their campaign-trail strategy of portraying mainstream U.S. churches as heartless villains.
The Democratic representatives accused five clerical and five lay witnesses of being tools for the enemies of President Barack Obama, suggested they oppose anti-cancer drugs, dismissed their answers, compared them to racists and walked out of the hearing.
Republican legislators repeatedly tried to focus the hearing on Obama’s announcement that religious employers must provide insurance policies that cover contraceptives.
The Democrats’ remarkably aggressive strategy came as a new CBS/New York Times poll showed 61 percent of registered voters support Obama’s position.
The poll bolstered the Democrats’ strategy of spurring election-day support among women by portraying Obama’s unprecedented effort to regulate religious employers as an effort by churches to deny contraception to women. If successful, the strategy can partially shift voters’ focus from the stalled economy, the nation’s $15 trillion debt and an under-employment rate of roughly 15 percent.
This anti-clerical strategy is similar to the Democrats’ strategy of blaming Wall Street for the mortgage bubble that was partially inflated by Democrats’ own regulation of the housing sector from 1994 onwards. That Wall Street strategy, however, has partly faded as the Occupy protests fizzled out amid media reports of violence, drugs and riots.
The Democrats’ use of religious groups as a political target is especially risky, because other polls show that it has alienated critical blocs of swing-voters.
A Rasmussen poll, conducted before Feb. 12, showed Obama’s approval among Catholic at only 40 percent, down from 54 percent in 2008. Opposition among Catholics to Obama is at 59 percent. Hispanic Catholics have supported Obama at higher rates than white Catholics, so the Rasmussen poll suggests that Obama’s support among Catholics in the swing-states of Ohio and Pennsylvania is below 40 percent.
Also, the CBS poll is suspect, partly because it asked only about contraceptives — not the “morning after” pill, as Obama’s policy would also require. It also ignored the underlying issue of church-state regulation and was weighted to include five Democrats for every four Republicans.
Thursday’s clerical and lay witnesses responded defensively to the Democrats’ invective.
However, Matthew Harrison, president of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod challenged the Democrats. “I really loathe the partisanship of this. … This is hard-core politics,” he said. “This is very dangerous to religious people.”
Harrison’s response came after Democrats aimed a barrage of criticism at the witnesses, who were invited to testify by California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House oversight committee.
The Democrats portrayed the five clerics’ uniform opposition to the regulation as broad opposition to contraception. The Democrats also focused on the Catholic Church, rather than on the other Christian denominations, which do not oppose contraception.
The Democrats also used their allotted question-times to make statements, and in nearly all cases, ignored the clerics’ answers, even when they indicated support for contraceptive medication either for birth control or for treating other ailments.
Several Democrats argued the clerics had no reason to object to the federal mandate. Obama’s Feb. 10 “accommodation” toward critics “provides the widest possible health care coverage for all Americans, and it allows Catholic institutions to continue their faithful work,” said Missouri Democratic Rep. Bill Clay. “We have a politicized and unbalanced hearing … against the president,” he said.
The clerics, however, said they were worried that the regulation’s language would force them to pay for abortions, even for the employees of churches.
“You are being used for a political agenda…. your participation in the panel makes you complicit in a trampling of freedom,” Virginia Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly said. The panel is designed “to try one more time to embarrass the president … and serves no purpose except demagoguery,” he declared, adding that the panel was a “sham.”
The clerics, including Harrison, denied being partisan, and repeated their concerns about federal regulation of religious groups.
Illinois Democratic Rep. Mike Quigley compared the clerics’ opposition to the federal mandate to racists’ use of religious justifications to oppose towards interracial marriages. “Where do we draw the line with something like this?” he said.
“We’re not trying to impose our beliefs,” responded John Garvey, the president of the Catholic University of America. “The question is where we shall be forced to pay” for actions they abhor, he said.
“Women who take the [contraceptive] pill have a much lower chance of developing ovarian cancer,” said Connecticut Democratic Rep. Rosa DeLauro, who survived ovarian cancer two decades ago. “Over 15,00 American women die because of ovarian cancer just last year… are you morally opposed to allowing women who work in your facilities… to take or a pill or take an IUD in the case where their lives depend on it?”
DeLauro did not response when the clerics, including Catholic Bishop William Lori, who said he supported the use of contraception-related drugs to treat ailments.
Several Democrats also said that the clerics’ credibility was reduced because the witnesses were not female. “I don’t think a bunch of guys should be making the decisions about whether contraception is available,” said Connecticut Democratic Rep. Christopher Murphy. “To have a women’s perspective would be a lot more useful than to have a bunch of males,” he said, while portraying the dispute over church regulation as a dispute over contraception.
New York Democratic Rep. Carolyn Maloney and D.C. Democratic Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton walked out of the hearing after Issa declined to seat a Democratic witness.
The witness, according to ranking member Elijah Cummings, would have provided camera-ready testimony about a friend at Georgetown University who fell seriously ill while trying to persuade the university to ameliorate her condition with free contraceptive pills. Her testimony, as described by Cummings, did not discus the topic of federal regulation of religious groups’ activities.
The clerics, however, said they accommodate such health problems.
Catholic moral theology “recognizes that the same drug can be used for the different purposes… we should be given credit for the nuance and understanding that we have already brought to the table,” said Lori.
Outside the hearing room, however, Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi supported a mandate requiring religious groups to pay for contraceptives. “I think that all institutions… who give health insurance should cover the full range of health insurance issues for women,” she said, after being asked about abortion mandates for religious groups that run their own insurance policies.