It was just weeks ago that the US Supreme Court delivered a unanimous rebuke to the Obama administration by ruling that religious groups must be allowed to retain exclusive control free of government interference over employment decisions regarding their spiritual leaders and teachers. Yet incredibly within days of the Court’s decision the administration seemed to thumb its nose at the nine justices announcing that the Obamacare requirement for employers’ health insurance policies to cover prescriptions that violate religious dictates would include only the narrowest possible exemption for religious employers.

Under this regulation any religious organization that either employs or provides services to people beyond its own faith will be forced to provide insurance coverage that violates its own religious principles. This understandably has ignited an unprecedented firestorm of controversy. Catholic bishops whose hospitals treat one out of every six patients in America and who run the country’s largest network of private schools took to pulpits across the country to proclaim that they “cannot — will not — comply with this law ” and minority leader Mitch McConnell took to the floor of the US Senate to denounce the regulation as “abhorrent to the foundational principles of our nation.”

One must concede that Barack Obama deserves credit in all this for consistency which isn’t a particular strong suit of his. This is after all someone who until just recently was calling the use of Super PACs to fund political campaigns a “threat to democracy” — until that is he decided that he needed a couple of those nifty funding vehicles for his own campaign (which isn’t quite the picture of poverty having raised close to a billion dollars for his 2008 run).

But in regard to the First Amendment’s Religion Clause the president has been a model of consistency. The clause states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” setting forth in those few words two important prohibitions: that government shall not endorse religion but neither shall it curtail religious freedom — and the president has done both.

The examples abound of Mr. Obama’s ready disregard of the first principle when it suits his agenda. Just last week at the National Prayer Breakfast he said that his desire to soak the rich with ever-higher tax rates is based on “[Christian] teaching that for unto whom much is given much shall be required.” And back in January Obama senior advisor Valerie Jarrett delivered a blatantly political speech in a famed Atlanta church followed by a congregational voter registration drive. So if only for consistency’s sake it makes perfect sense that the president would likewise trample on the second of these principles too by compelling religious communities to offer insurance coverage that is morally repugnant to their deeply held beliefs. 

Yet it would be a mistake to view this latest move as aimed solely at religion because it represents much more than that. Question: Why did Mr. Obama’s health secretary draw the religious exemption narrowly so as to exclude from its protection the hundreds of Catholic hospitals that service multitudes of patients of other religions? If the regulation’s purpose was to express disdain for the faithful then one would expect that the less insular the group and the more it reaches out to serve the broader society the more favor it would find in the administration’s eyes.

But there’s the rub. So long as religious groups preach to their own choir impacting only their own tightly circumscribed circle of believers they pose no threat to Obama’s plans for “fundamentally transforming” American society. But the more a religious or for that matter any other private organization seeks to benefit — even in a purely nonsectarian manner — those outside its confines the more it finds itself in Obama’s crosshairs. As Yuval Levin perceptively notes

what is at issue in the controversy over the administration’s rule is … the question of non-governmental institutions in a free society.… In this arena as in a great many others the administration is clearly determined to see civil society as merely an extension of the state and to clear out civil society — clearing out the mediating layers between the individual and the state — when it seems to stand in the way of achieving the president’s agenda. The idea is to leave as few nonindividual players as possible in the private sphere and to turn those few that are left into agents of the government.

This is the logic of a lot of the administration’s approach to the private economy not just to civil society. It is key to the design of Obamacare (which aims to yield massive consolidation in the insurance sector leaving just a handful of very large insurers that would function as public utilities) … and of much of the regulatory agenda of the left.… It is an attack on mediating institutions of all sorts moved by the genuine belief that they are obstacles to a good society.… It is perhaps the gravest threat to freedom in American life today.

It is precisely this goal the elimination of nongovernmental institutions that compete with government in contributing to societal welfare that underlies Mr. Obama’s repeated but as-yet unsuccessful efforts to lower the charitable tax deduction which would cost charities billions in contributions.

Secular Jewish groups celebrate Obama as a champion of — pardon my English — tikun olam. But in truth their hero would like nothing better than to chase private volunteerism and charitable works from the public square forcing America’s most vulnerable citizens to supplicate hats in hand exclusively at government’s doorstep and coincidentally to provide a pool of reliable Democratic votes every four years.

And so a peculiar irony emerges: The White House for its part would prefer to portray the current conflict as a narrow one over the limits of freedom of religious conscience from government regulation. Indeed one suspects the administration relishes its exposure of the Catholic bishops’ supposed hypocrisy in fighting to protect their faith’s opposition to family planning even as a purported 98 percent of their flock has abandoned that particular precept. The bishops’ position is of course not hypocritical in the slightest — at least not if one believes that religious doctrine and the constitutional protection it is granted ought not to be determined by surveys and focus groups. Would then a law mandating driving on Shabbos pass Constitutional muster simply because 90 percent of American Jews sadly do not uphold the halachah?

But in truth the larger issue raised by this Obamacare regulation is not compulsion of religious communities but compulsion period. It is about the progressive agenda to bring the institutions of civil society and all of its citizenry under the governmental thumb. 

TAKE THE HINT It’s been a few months since I’ve made a certain rather ambitious learning program part of my daily Torah regimen. I first learned of the program several years ago having read about it in the newspaper. I was intrigued by the description and called the program’s founder for more information. He spent quite a bit of time explaining the program’s concept to me and even sent me some literature for further reading.

But I didn’t take it on.

Years passed and I received a call from this same fellow in my capacity as a long-term care insurance planner. I helped him and his wife address their needs in that area and after we concluded our business dealings I listened to him speak yet again with quiet passion about what this learning program has done for him and countless others and could do for me as well if only I willed it.

I didn’t will it.

Then this past November I had the pleasure of attending Agudath Israel’s annual convention and found myself seated throughout Shabbos next to a Yid named Avrohom Jaffe. As it happens Reb Avrohom has been following a variation of this learning program for well over a decade and as a result recently celebrated a truly major milestone of Torah learning.

Reflecting back a pattern emerged: the Borei Olam had first sent me a newspaper column; then He had the program’s founder become my business client; and eventually He saw to my being seated all weekend long with nowhere to go right next to one of the program’s success stories. 

In Michtav MeEliyahu (4:273) Rav Dessler quotes several Chazals to illustrate the difference between tzaddikim who take note of the hints Hashem sends them sometimes filing them away for many years until the time comes to act upon them and reshaim who rush right past the Heavenly signals intended for them.

Moral of the story: Take the hint.