Politico (emphasis is mine):
Hours after calling the Obama administration’s contraceptives compromise a “first step,” the Catholic bishops said Friday night they have “two serious objections” to the new policy and will fight its enactment.
First, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said the administration’s plan still includes a “nationwide mandate of insurance coverage of sterilization and contraception, including some abortifacients.”
“This is both unsupported in the law and remains a grave moral concern,” the bishops said in their statement. “We cannot fail to reiterate this, even as so many would focus exclusively on the question of religious liberty.
And it’s not about this, either…
And while Obama’s new plan allows religious-affiliated employers to refrain from paying for contraceptive coverage — insurers would be obligated to provide the coverage for free — the bishops said the change doesn’t go far enough.
“It would still mandate that all insurers must include coverage for the objectionable services in all the policies they would write,” the bishops said. “At this point, it would appear that self-insuring religious employers, and religious insurance companies, are not exempt from this mandate.”
…because even if Pres. Obama made it so that only non-religious insurance companies had to pay, the bishops would STILL oppose it on the grounds that there should be no national mandate for birth control coverage at all, whether Catholics and other religious institutions have to pay for it or whether they don’t. This is about the bishops’ and the Catholic Church’s implacable hostility to the concept, the very idea, that women have the right either to an independent sex life, or to basic preventive health care. It’s about an ancient Catholic, and Christian, and traditional Jewish, dislike for and distrust of women’s sexuality, and a view in general that women are less than men, that women’s natural, God-given role is to have their reproductive lives subject to the will and domination of men.
Left-Handed Nib 