By Albert Maslar — President Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod has said religious institutions have a grace period to find a way to include health insurance coverage for contraception as part of the U.S. healthcare overhaul without going against Catholic Church doctrine.
This is not a first for Obama as at the Notre Dame infamous commencement speech, he sought to find the middle ground between the life or death extremes on the abortion issue. But compromise and the middle ground for Obama have proven to be “My way or the highway.”
Besides the Notre Dame incident, Obama has a history of butting heads with the Catholic Church — and winning.  When he gave a commencement speech at Catholic Georgetown University, he insisted that religious symbols of Jesus Christ be covered up so as not to be seen in his background, and Georgetown acquiesced.
Now, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is writing and mandating heinous regulations that mandate religious institutions to pay for birth control and related services of ObamaCare even if they disagree with it. The irony is that these mandates are not part of the original law but constitute arbitrary unconstitutional legislation by a Cabinet member.
Obama does not even allow freedom of religion in the house of the Church itself. In another incident, military chaplains were not allowed to read a message from their Bishops regarding forced payment of contraception and related issues to be paid for by Catholic institutions in defiance of their carved-in-stone religious doctrines.
Jim Messina, Obama’s campaign manager, in a Feb. 7th fundraising email, stated that: “The stakes are too important to play by two different sets of rules.”
But Obama is notorious for his version of two different sets of rules; Obama’s rule #1 is that the rules of the other side are invalid; while his rule #2 is that his will overrides the people, Congress, the Supreme Court and the First Amendment. God appears to be a distant second to Obama, almost a non sequitur, when he disrespects religious liberty this thoroughly.
Albert Maslar is a contributing writer to the Liberty Features Syndicate.