Check out more on this action below, and the articles from Raw Story and Huffpost......
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Now anti-family planning politicians in Congress are getting in on the action and trying to reverse the President's critical decision, which would ensure access to birth control for millions of women.
We must stand with President Obama — believe me, he's hearing from the other side, starting with Speaker Boehner who has pledged to reverse this rule.
Tell your members of Congress: Stand up to right-wing efforts to use religion to discriminate and deny millions of women urgently needed access to birth control.
Let's be clear. The current law does not require religious institutions like churches or synagogues to include birth control in their employee's health insurance.
But, when lobbying groups — led by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops — insisted that the exemption be expanded to include religiously affiliated hospitals, universities and other institutions, jeopardizing coverage for millions of women, the Obama administration drew a line in the sand.
If the lobbying groups get their way, a woman teaching at a Catholic university could not get coverage. Or, a nurse working at an evangelical Christian hospital could be denied access to basic health care.
Tell Congress to stand with the President and American women.
Anti-choice forces are screaming that the Obama administration's efforts to protect women's access to birth control are part of a "war on religion." This explosive accusation is untrue but their hope is that if they repeat it often enough, they can get Congress to roll back our rights. We can't let that happen.
Religious freedom is about protecting people of all faiths, not imposing the values of some on the rest of us.
 | Thank you for acting quickly in this critical moment, Laura W. Murphy Director, Washington Legislative Office |
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© ACLU, 125 Broad Street, 18th Floor, New York, NY 10004
More Catholics support contraception coverage than other Americans
Catholics in the U.S. are more likely that other Americans say that employers should be required to provide insurance that covers free contraception, according to a recent poll.
A survey released by the Public Religion Research Institute on Tuesday found that 58 percent of Catholics think businesses should be required to provide health plans with free birth control, compared with 55 percent of all Americans who agreed with the requirement. At 38 percent, white evangelical protestants were the least likely to agree free contraception should be provided by employers.
Religiously unaffiliated Americans, at 68 percent, were the most likely say that company health plans should cover birth control for free.
Among political parties, 73 percent of Democrats and 51 percent of independents said health insurance should include free birth control. But only 36 percent of Republicans agreed with that point of view.
The poll also uncovered a significant gender gap. Overall, 62 percent of women said contraception should be provided at no cost, while only 47 percent of men thought it should be a requirement.
In recent weeks, a controversy has erupted over the issue of employers being required to provide birth control coverage, with Catholic leaders and many conservative politicians taking the view that it should be optional.
The Obama administration announced last month it would stand by a policy that requires virtually all private insurance policies to cover family planning, including female contraceptives, essentially guaranteeing near universal access to birth control once all the provisions of the Affordable Care Act are implemented.
Last week, thousands of Catholic parishioners were read letters by Catholic Bishops in the U.S. that condemned the Obama administration for that decision.
“We cannot — we will not — comply with this unjust law,” Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted wrote in just one of the numerous letters. “People of faith cannot be made second class citizens. We are already joined by our brothers and sisters of all faiths and many others of good will in this important effort to regain our religious freedom. Our parents and grandparents did not come to these shores to help build America’s cities and towns, its infrastructure and institutions, its enterprise and culture, only to have their posterity stripped of their God given rights.”
David Axelrod, a top adviser to President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, suggested on Tuesday that the administration was open to working with Catholic hospitals and universities over their objections to providing birth control services to women.
Contraception Mandate, Five Reasons Why Obama Is Losing The Fight
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/08/obama-contraception-losing-fight_n_1263919.html
By David Gibson
Religion News Service
(RNS) The White House has surprised observers and disappointed some liberal allies by signaling that it is willing to compromise and provide a broader religious exemption in its controversial regulations requiring all employers to provide free contraception coverage.
Given that birth control use is almost universal -- even among Catholics -- many wonder why the Obama administration could wind up retreating on its pledge.
Here are five reasons that may help explain the political dynamic the president is facing:
1. It's about religious freedom, not birth control
U.S. Catholic bishops, who led the battle against the Health and Human Services Department mandate, know that they long ago lost their own flock on the contraception issue -- 98 percent of Catholics use birth control, according to surveys.
So they have carefully reframed the issue as a fight for religious freedom -- an effort to keep the government from forcing the Catholic Church and other religious groups to subsidize something that goes against their teachings. That makes it a violation of conscience, a sacred principle that transcends any specific tenet of faith.
That argument also lends itself to the kind of heated rhetoric that plays well in today's supercharged political atmosphere. For example, bishops and their allies are accusing the president of "anti-Catholicism" and worse: "The Obama administration has just told the Catholics of the United States, 'To hell with you!'" Pittsburgh Bishop David Zubik said after the HHS regulations were announced.
The bishops don't have as much credibility with the laity as they used to, thanks to the clergy sex abuse scandal, among other things. But Catholics are still a potent tribe, and if outsiders are seen as attacking the church, Catholics can get defensive -- and they can get even.
2. Obama has lost even the support of his liberal Catholic allies
Case in point: the HHS mandate has been opposed by liberal and centrist Catholics who have supported the administration on a range of other issues -- including the Catholic Health Association and the NETWORK social justice lobby -- and even went to bat to help pass health care reform despite threats from the bishops.
The president "utterly botched" the religious exemptions issue, wrote Washington Post columnist and liberal Catholic E.J. Dionne, and "Obama threw his progressive Catholic allies under the bus."
"J'accuse!" Michael Sean Winters, a columnist for the liberal National Catholic Reporter, wrote in a florid column that channeled Emile Zola's famous 1898 letter accusing the French government of anti-Semitism in the Dreyfus affair. "The issue of conscience protections is so foundational, I do not see how I ever could, in good conscience, vote for this man again."
3. It's not just Catholics
Even though evangelicals and other conservative Protestants generally don't have religious objections to contraception, they do have a big problem with "big government" and with perceived infringements on religious freedom.
Evangelicals -- both their leaders and their troops -- have never been big Barack Obama supporters anyway, so they were happy to provide any electoral and rhetorical muscle the Catholic hierarchy could not muster.
"We do not exaggerate when we say that this is the greatest threat to religious freedom in our lifetime," evangelical leaders Timothy George and Chuck Colson wrote in an open letter to their fellow believers on Wednesday (Feb. 8). George and Colson compared the administration mandates to policies enacted in Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler.
4. It gives Republicans a potent campaign wedge issue
Mitt Romney wasted no time in accusing Obama of launching an "assault on religion" by way of the contraception mandate, and he declared that his first act as president would be to overturn the HHS regulations. "Remarkably, under this president's administration, there is an assault on religion, an assault on the conviction and the religious beliefs of members of our society," Romney said.
Romney's rivals, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, were not to be outdone, and ramped up their rhetoric against Obama -- while also noting that Romney had accepted similar policies while he was governor of Massachusetts.
In short, this is a political fight that the White House neither wants nor needs in an already tough re-election campaign.
5. Obama needs the Catholic vote
In particular, he needs the support of white Catholics, which is the core of this large swing vote (nearly one-quarter of the electorate). They are concentrated in crucial battleground states like Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, and while Obama won the overall Catholic vote 54 percent to 46 percent in 2008, he lost the white Catholic vote, 47 percent to 53 percent.
"To the extent Catholic voters think of this as a religious liberty issue, it does have the potential to pull Catholic voters toward Republicans or away from Democrats," John Green, an expert on religious voting patterns and director of the University of Akron's Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics, told Bloomberg Businessweek.
A poll on the contraception mandate released Tuesday by the Public Religion Research Institute showed Catholics overall tended to support free contraceptive coverage, but white Catholics were evenly split on the issue. The Obama campaign can't afford to sacrifice any of those votes, or risk watching the issue grow as a political liability when the election season heats up.
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