Those concerns, it should be emphasised, are both institutional and personal. They certainly have to do with the fact that the HHS mandate would require most Catholic institutions to act in ways contrary to the Catholic Church's teaching on the morally appropriate ways to plan families. But the bishops have also taken up, as they should, the cause of Catholic owner-employers who accept the Church's teaching and would be forced to act against their conscientious convictions or suffer heavy financial penalties. More-over, the bishops and their allies among Catholic intellectuals and activists have been deeply worried by the administration's attempt to define a "religious employer" (who might be exempted from the mandate) so narrowly that hardly anyone would seem to meet the definitional strictures. The government, it seemed, was unable to imagine religious freedom encompassing anything other than freedom of worship — freedom to engage in a certain kind of recreational activity on weekends. That any coherent theory of religious freedom had to include the educational and charitable activities that religious communities carried out because they believe it to be God's will that they do so, seemed beyond the administration's comprehension. 

That, however, should not have been so surprising, for over the past three years, the Obama administration had been quietly hollowing out religious freedom in its international human rights policy. In that arena, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other administration officials often speak of freedom of worship, but never of religious freedom. Now, to be sure, religious freedom rightly understood includes the freedom to worship. But if that is all religious freedom means, then there is "religious freedom" in North Korea and Saudi Arabia, as long as the worship in question is conducted clandestinely behind closed doors. And that is manifestly absurd.

This dumbing-down of the first liberty has been paralleled by other administration policies that have been singularly tone-deaf to religious freedom. Thus the Obama administration challenged the decades-long "ministerial exception" to the federal equal employment laws, a waiver that permitted religious communities to hire according to their own internal standards (thereby allowing the Catholic and Orthodox Churches to ordain only men as priests, and all religious communities to choose teachers for their schools who agree with the doctrines of the community in question). When a congregation in Michigan, Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School, challenged in court the administration's attempt to bring all hiring of religious personnel under the ambit of the equal employment opportunity laws, the administration fought on, arguing that the First Amendment's religion clauses were irrelevant, and that religious organisations had the same status as bridge clubs. The Supreme Court resoundingly rejected that argument in a January 2012 decision, Hosanna-Tabor vs EEOC. The court voted 9-0 in favour of the congregation, with President Obama's two court nominees joining in the unanimous rejection of the administration's position, and Chief Justice John Roberts writing that the court could "not accept the remarkable view that the Religion Clauses have nothing to say about a religious organisation's freedom to select its own ministers". That this stinging rebuke took place a few days before the administration announced the "contraceptive mandate" suggests just how deeply constricted a view of religious freedom runs in the Obama administration. 

That depth of ideological conviction is also demonstrated by one of the more bizarre episodes of the Obama years. In this case, the law in question is the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) which defines marriage as the legal union of a man and a woman for purposes of the provisions of federal law. Challenged in the federal courts by gay activists and other proponents of redefining marriage, the constitutionality of DOMA (a federal law passed by both Houses of Congress in 1996 and signed by President Clinton) ought to have been defended in court by the US Solicitor General's office as a matter of accepted practice. But the Obama administration has refused to do its constitutional duty and defend DOMA, presumably because the administration agrees with DOMA's critics that support of marriage as traditionally understood is irrational bigotry — especially if that "bigotry" is shaped by religious conviction.