George Weigel nails it on National Review Online regarding the USCCB’s lawsuit against the Obama administration regarding the HHS Mandate:
This is not an argument about birth control, nor is it part of some “War on Women” waged by misogynistic clerics and their political allies from the fever swamps of the Right. The mandate is being legally challenged, in twelve different federal district courts, on the grounds that it violates the provisions of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the First Amendment’s guarantee of the free exercise of religion. If those legal protections mean anything, they must mean that neither religious institutions nor individuals can be compelled to provide “services” that are readily available through means other than coercing religiously informed consciences. Contraceptives are more readily available in the United States in 2012 than either cigarettes or beer. There is no compelling public need to dragoon institutions and individuals who conscientiously object to providing them into doing so — with the threat of ruinous financial penalties if they do not.
I could not agree more. Read it all. The fate of civil society in the United States truly is at stake, and we move into a dangerous laicization (rather than the religious pluralism America has traditionally enjoyed) should this last-dtich effort by the Catholic bishops fail.