UNITED STATES
Salon

PATRICIA MILLER

Adapted from “Good Catholics: The Battle Over Abortion in the Catholic Church”

From a father in Missouri who’s looking to keep his daughters from accessing birth control, to the refusal of key contraception mandate plaintiffs to accept the Obama administration’s latest “accommodation,” the Hobby Lobby decision continues to reverberate.

But while the Green family who filed the Hobby Lobby suit objecting to the mandate are evangelical Christians, the road to Hobby Lobby wasn’t paved by the Christian Right. It was the Catholic Church, more specifically the U.S. Catholic bishops’ conference, that largely engineered Hobby Lobby to block the legitimization of contraception as a standard health insurance benefit—a last ditch effort to prevent by law what it couldn’t prevent from the pulpit: women from using birth control.

The Catholic bishops’ interest in “conscience clauses” that would allow employers to opt out of reproductive health care…