Barack Obama
YOU’RE ON: Timothy Cardinal Dolan says he’ll appeal President Obama’s birth-control mandate to the highest court. (
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Timothy Cardinal Dolan is ready to take his fight with President Obama on birth control all the way to the Supreme Court.
The New York archbishop and de-facto leader of the American Catholic Church slammed the president’s contraception policy as a violation of the First Amendment, saying the only way to stop it is through the court of last resort.
Asked whether the church would petition the high court, Dolan told WPIX/Channel 11 on Friday, “I think we are going to have to. What recourse does any citizen have?
“Like any other citizen that feels aggrieved,” he said, “we go to the judiciary, and I don’t think we’ll be reluctant to do that.”
Obama’s mandate requires all employers — including religious hospitals and universities that are self-insured — to pay for contraception as part of their health-care plans.
“It’s not about contraception, not about a Catholic issue. It’s not about partisan politics,” Dolan said. “This is a radical violation of the First Amendment.”
The cardinal had urged the president to reverse the decision, to no avail, and called the policy “morally toxic and an intrusion into the internal life of the church.”
Dolan also has wrestled with Congress on the topic, asking Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) to write a bill to put the sticky issue to an end.
Rubio and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) introduced legislation in February that would allow any employer the right to deny birth-control coverage if it goes against the employer’s religious beliefs.
In the TV interview, Dolan also lamented New York’s same-sex marriage law, saying he was “betrayed” by members of the Legislature.
“Many of them led us to believe that this bill wasn’t going to go anywhere,” he said. “We should have probably been a lot more vigilant had I not had those assurances.”
But Dolan said he wouldn’t ask people not to support the president because of his health-care policies.