With his back to the wall over his proposal to force religious organisations to cover abortifacients, contraception and sterilisation in their insurance plans, President Barack Obama offered a compromise last Friday that wasn’t really a compromise.

He told religious organisations, primarily though not exclusively Catholic, that while their insurance plans would still have to cover such services, they will not have to pay for them. Instead, the insurance company will provide them for ‘free’.

The reason this is a non-compromise compromise is because religious employers, e.g. a Catholic hospital or school, will still have to put their employees in insurance schemes that cover items the employers find morally objectionable, especially the Morning-After-Pill which acts as an abortificient.

The only way out of this is to permit religious employers to put their employees into schemes that don’t cover these things.

The trouble is that under the Obama plan this will now be impossible because all insurance plans must cover these services with no exceptions.

This means a religious employer will no longer be able to buy an insurance plan from an insurance company and stipulate that the plan doesn’t cover the above-mentioned services.

In addition, it will be now be impossible for someone to set up an insurance company with the express intention of selling insurance plans to religious employers that are suited to their ethos.

Basically, the Obama administration is declaring that access to free (to the user) contraception, the Morning-After Pill and sterilisation is an absolute right to be paid for by private employers regardless of any moral objection.

P.S. In this editorial on the matter, The New York Times declares hospitals run by religious organisations to be “nonreligious”.  But how in the world does it arrive at such a conclusion? A Christian hospital is a hospital run (one hopes) along Christian lines, not a hospital that just happens to be owned by Christians.

What is worrying about the NYT logic is that it reduces religious organisations simply and purely to those organisations which exist directly to promote their faith and nothing else. The service arms of these organisations, however, are deemed by fiat to be “nonreligious”.

It’s no wonder the NYT doesn’t believe this to be a religious freedom issue at all when it defines religion so narrowly.