Solidarity with the nuns — a tipping point moment?

Remember back in 1980 when something happened in Poland that seemed little but had enormous consequences?  That was the year that Lech Walesa started to lead the Gdansk shipyard workers.  Their trade union eventually led in a straight line to the Soviet Union’s downfall.  From a trade union, those shipyard workers morphed into an enormous, non-violent protest against the Polish government (a Soviet proxy).

When the Polish government blinked, people throughout the former Soviet Empire realized that the Communist monster was weakening and could be challenged.  Aided by Reagan’s, Thatcher’s, and Pope John Paul II’s moral support, as well as political and financial aid from Western countries fighting in the Cold War, communist bloc citizens suddenly had real hope — not the phony stuff Obama and his media acolytes socialists have always peddled, but real hope that the decades they’d spent imprisoned in their own countries were finally ending.

Let’s call the Solidarity movement a tipping point.

For reasons best known to itself, the Obama administration has seen fit to wage war against these ladies:

These gals, of course, are the Little Sisters of the Poor.  For more than 150 years, this order has been serving the elderly poor.  And when I say “serving,” I mean that.  They aren’t just conduits for funds.  They go out every day and work amongst the elderly poor, especially the ones who are sick and alone.  As you can see from the picture above, the little sisters are mostly elderly themselves.  They are grandmotherly types whose deep and abiding faith carries them to places most people don’t even think about.  And to the extent they do think about them, they cut a check to charity or, when they’re paying their taxes, try to minimize the pain by saying, “I guess it helps fund Medicaid.”

Being good Catholics, the Little Sisters were in the forefront of groups refusing to abide by the Obamacare mandate that they provide insurance for their employees that includes contraceptives and abortifacients.  Aside from the fact that the nuns don’t need either contraceptives or abortifacients, to the extent that they might hire a receptionist or accountant, they weren’t about to condemn their immortal souls by providing those services for her either.

The Obama administration, recognizing that this was a fight it couldn’t win, came up with an illusory compromise:  Religious institutions can sign a slip of paper saying that they won’t buy those “benefits” for their employees.  However, their insurance company must still provide those same benefits for employees.  In that way, said the administration, the nuns weren’t violating their consciences.

Nuns, however, are not as stupid as the Obama administration seems to think they are.  They understand that, if their insurance company must provide those benefits, someone needs to pay for them — and that’s going to be the insured.  In other words, even though the nuns will no longer directly pay for contraceptives and abortifacients, they will still indirectly pay as the insurance company hikes their fees to pay for unidentified “sundries.”  Whether the nuns pay directly, or the insurance company pays on their behalf, the nuns are still paying.

You’d think, at this point, that the Obama administration would have the intelligence to back down.  Nobody, however, has ever accused committed ideologues of intelligence, nor have I ever made the mistake of accusing the Obama administration of having any intelligence greater than a feral manipulative ability, gilded by an adoring and complicit press.  They are in this to win.

The question is whether the public will side with the Obama administration or with the nuns.  The hardcore NARAL crowd, of course, will side with the president and claim that the nuns are just being pointlessly fussy.  You and I, of course, will side with the nuns, because we recognize that they’re not being fussy at all.  If they sign the paper, they are giving their insurance company permission to use their money to fund something doctrinally prohibited and repugnant.

It seems to me, though, that the masses will not like seeing Obamacare used to pummel little nuns who work tirelessly for the elderly poor.  There’s no way that you can paint these nuns as wild-eyed Todd Aikins who believe that pregnancy negates rape.  Since the roll-out, those who have lost insurance and lost their doctors and spent fruitless hours trying to use the exchange have been the face of Obamacare’s victims.  Employers, however, haven’t had a face . . . until now.  These nuns exemplify the villainy of forcing America’s employers to buy insurance antithetical to their values or even impossible for their budgets.

I would love to see nuns across America descend on Washington, D.C., for a “Million Nun March.”  Nothing would put a clearer face on Obamacare’s trampling of individual rights than seeing elderly nuns protesting at the White House.  Arrayed behind them should be priests (of course) as well as Americans of all creeds who believe in religious freedom.  Were that to happen, I think we might see the same tipping point that started in a Polish shipyard a long, long time ago.