Fox News inadvertently blew the cover off the issue, and it's exactly as I maintained in my earlier column.

Here's what I said:

There is nothing preventing the Church from organizing groups and soliciting health insurance quotes for those groups.  Being comprised of "faithful" people, that policy might include the provision that one could obtain these services but with the membership being comprised of faithful individuals who do not believe in such things there would be no use and thus the rating would not include that which is not used!  Contrary to popular belief all health insurance ratings are in fact simply a composite of the risk factors of each participant. (I know this to be factually true as I negotiated and purchased same for my company when I ran it.)

Yep.  The Church could put together a group of faithful that would not want to buy such services, and they thus would not pay for them.  Oh sure, they'd be required to "make them available" but that which you don't use you don't pay for, and if nobody in your group uses them they won't be part of the rating either.  In other words, it would be a nullity.

Well, if there was such a group....... and that's the problem.

A report last year from the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit sexual health research organization, found that 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women have used birth control despite the church's teachings. According to a Reuters report on the study, only 2 percent of Catholic women rely on natural family planning.

Ding ding ding ding ding ding.

There you have it folks.  The truth.  There is no ability to create such a group because if you actually required people to live to the Catholic Church's view on these matters the pews would be empty and so would the donation plate on Sunday.

So the Bishops can whine and scream like petulant children all they want but the facts are something else entirely.  They can't excommunicate everyone who uses birth control as they'd wind up with 2% of their current population of Catholics and the Church (at least in America) would instantly collapse.

They know this as well, despite their screaming from the pulpit.  These Bishops are not stupid people.

What they are, in fact, is dishonest and in this dishonesty they dishonor the faith, they dishonor their office and they dishonor The Church as an institution.

In point of fact were the issue as stated the Bishops would have, as I noted, also been opposed to Obamacare from the start because the very act of requiring someone to pool funds to buy someone else's health care inevitably leads to you funding someone's personal decisions you have a moral problem with, whether it be sloth or gay sex.  But they had no quarrel with and in fact supported Obamacare's forced individual mandate, along with Medicaid and its forced transfer payments and mandated tax structure, even though both did and do support medical treatment for various diseases that are either in the main or even only contracted through behavior that wantonly violates Catholic dogma, along with both birth control and abortion.

Among these treatments, incidentally, are those for essentially all sexually-transmitted illnesses.  Oh sure it's technically possible in some cases to contract them without having sex, but it's difficult and in the most-egregious of cases (e.g. HIV) the remaining non-sexual vectors that are statistically significant are also prohibited behaviors (e.g. IV drug abuse.)

This much is certain -- if both parties to the sexual act adhere to Catholic teachings then it is impossible for them to contract a STD since neither of them would have ever slept with anyone other than the spouse to which they were married, both being virgins at the time of marriage.  If neither party ever sleeps with any other person than their spouse, and both spouses are virgins at marriage, those two people by definition will never contract a STD.  So why should they pay (monetarily) for someone else's sin and why has that never been an objection over the years of Medicaid and in fact when Obamacare was debated?

Well?

Here's what I believe the truth to be and my evidence is here and in the previous article. The Bishops and prelates have been agitated about birth control and (of course) abortion for a very long time.  The latter is a shared position of many people, including Catholics.  The former, however, is definitely not -- virtually all Catholics who are sexually active, married or not, despite the Church's protest and catechism, use artificial birth control, and that's a fact.

So this little brouhaha gave the Bishops the opening on an issue they have not been willing to take on before.  The Church has, of course, been against artificial birth control and abortion forever.  That's not new, but it's also almost-universally ignored among Catholics, whether the Church likes it or not.

What the Church has never been willing to do, however, is raise a conscientious objection under the First Amendment to the provision of these services with employment tax dollars, even though they've been paying into said funds for decades.  Nor have they been willing to agitate for the congregation to also find an objection of conscience predicated on the First Amendment, to paying taxes (at both a State and Federal level) that go into Medicaid, which provides not only artificial birth control but also abortion.

In fact, the Church was for Obamacare for everyone, including the general congregation of Catholics, even though they knew damn well that it would pay for not only birth control but abortion services along with treatment for STDs that can only be contracted by acts that violate Catholic Canon, and none of this was concealed at the outset of the Obamacare debate.

It was only when the Church as an employer was tagged in the same way they were willing to have silently shoved down everyone else's throat, including the faithful that fill the pews on Sunday (myself included) that suddenly they became exercised over the issue of both birth control and abortion services to the degree that they state they "won't" comply.

Hypocrisy is a terrible thing, especially when it comes from the leaders of a powerful and influential group.  What the Bishops owe their congregations is both an apology for being willing to foist off on the congregation "acceptance" of these taxes for the last couple of decades along with an explanation for exactly why the faithful should comply with something they themselves claim is a rank Constitutional violation, and why they've advocated that Obamacare specifically, and Medicaid and other government-provided health care generally that happens to include both abortion and birth control services, is a social good and thus worthy of not only vocal but monetary support.