While listening to all the fuss on the news in the past few days, it has become clear to me that this issue is being presented backwards. The Republicans, along with the bishops, are arguing that this is an attack by the government on religion. The truth of the matter is that this is just the opposite: their response is religion's attack on democracy.

The Democrats need to point this out. The HHS ruling is simply that public policy, determined through the democratic process (regardless of the claims by the Tea Party folks) is that medical coverage must be made available to all persons and this includes preventive medicine. The department went out of its way to allow for an exception for those organizations that are clearly religious.

They can certainly represent their point of view and they have not been denied that right. Freedom of religion is included in the First Amendment because it is an extension of freedom of expression. They have expressed their point of view but now want to take it another step. They want to not just teach that contraception is wrong, they want to enforce that decision.

By the way, I am rather weary of hearing the news media and others buy into the statement that this is a matter of Catholic doctrine. It is not doctrine because it has never been so declared. It has been identified as a teaching. Since it does not pass muster with the sensus fidelium, it cannot be considered doctrine.

We need to look at this as part of a larger set of issues, not just contraception. The religious right wants to impose their faith tradition's view of marriage on to the public sector. They want to impose their view of sexual morality on to the public sector. Now they want to impose their idea of reproduction on the rest of us.

If we allow this, then we are ceding our control over our own bodies and a significant part of our democracy over to a medieval aristocracy. It is clearly established that the church has long been opposed to democracy because it undermines their ability to control the people. Their greatest fear is that even the congregations might push for democratic principles within the church itself. That would result in transparency and more honest reflection on what is genuinely part of what it means to be Christian.

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Not only are the massive majority of U.S. Catholics who use birth control not committing "sin," they are following traditional Catholic moral teaching in so deciding.

This is not the position of some wimpy, left-leaning far-out rejected theological opinion. This is the standard, most-favored moral theological position traditionally taught for over a hundred years in Catholic seminaries. See the standard text used in Catholic seminaries when my former colleague at the Catholic Theological Faculty of the University of Tubingen, Josef Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) and I studied in the 1940-50s: Ad. Tanquerey,Theologia Moralis Fundamentalis, 1902. On pp. 297 ff. it treats of the favored doctrine of Probabilism.

In brief, Probabilism is the Catholic moral theology teaching that in cases of dispute among moral theologians (that is, learned theologians who study matters of right and wrong actions), one may in good conscience follow an opinion that a significant number of moral theologians support, even if only a minority hold that position.

Now, in fact, the vast majority of Catholic moral theologians have in the past almost half century favored the position that artificial birth control may in good conscience be used. One need only recall that the Vatican Commission (all named by the pope) given the task of addressing precisely that question almost fifty years ago overwhelmingly answered it in the affirmative: One may in good conscience use artificial birth control.

Nevertheless, Pope Paul VI in 1968, rejecting this position of 95% of his commissioners, issued his encyclical Human vitae in which he said that birth control was not morally licit. However, the matter did not end there for Catholics. In response, the national bishops' conferences of Belgium, Germany, Canada and the United States issued public statements saying that, in the end, individual Catholic couples may follow their own consciences on the matter of artificial birth control, even if that led them to oppose Pope Paul VI's position (according to current polls, over 90% of American Catholics approve of birth control). The U.S. bishops explicitly stated that "the expression of theological dissent is in order." (see: http://arcc-catholic-rights.net/dissentlen.htm)

Doubtless the bishops then were remembering what they (including the bishop of Rome, Pope Paul VI) had all passed just three years before at Vatican Council II, the "Declaration on Religious Liberty," Dignitatis humanae: "Nobody is forced to act against his convictions in religious matters in private or in public....Truth can impose itself on the mind of man only in virtue of its own truth...The search for truth should be carried out...by free enquiry...and dialogue.... Humans are bound to follow their conscience faithfully in all their activity.... They must not be forced to act contrary to their conscience, especially in religious matters." (emphasis added).

Thus, if Catholic laity are convinced that birth control is morally right for them, they may practice it is good conscience by 1) following the traditional Catholic moral theology doctrine of Probabilism, 2) following the 1968 National Conference of U.S. Bishops teaching on the acceptability of "theological dissent," and 3) following the teaching of all the Catholic bishops of the world at Vatican Council II that "Humans are bound to follow their conscience faithfully in all their activity.... They must not be forced to act contrary to their conscience, especially in religious matters."

Hence, over 90% of U.S. Catholic laity may claim their right of Religious Freedom to being afforded access to birth control equal to that of non-Catholic Americans.