Chris Matthews, MSNBC journalist and commentator, a man who once described a feeling a "thrill go up" his leg at hearing Barack Obama speak, has taken a stand against the President on the subject of the HHS mandate in regard to Catholic institutions.
Yesterday on his interview program, Hardball, Matthews ended his "Let Me Finish" segment with the following,
"Let me finish tonight with this: It is about the obama administration's decision to require as part of the new health care bill that religious institutions, colleges, universities and hospitals, provide full insurance coverage for birth control, including IUDs and morning after pills, in addition to those methods strictly defined as contraceptive. The Catholic church teaches that birth control and IUDs and birth control bills are abortive and morally wrong. Here they are being required by law to pay for them. This is how the church sees it and something the church believes it morally cannot do. The conflict is between the right of the government to protect what it views as the public health and the right of a religion in this case, the catholic church, to practice its deepest moral beliefs in this free society, one in which the first amendment does guarantee religious freedom. We are watching a real conflict here. It will be the duty of religious leaders to follow their consciences. It will be the work of politicians, the president on down to do what they do best, work this out. There are millions of liberal catholics who did not wish for this conflict but can see with powerful clarity its validity. It is not about the number of catholics who use birth control, or the number of non-Catholics who attend catholic colleges or universities or receive help from Catholic charity, it is about what the church itself teaches. This regulation is telling you to do by law what it teaches should not be done. That's the issue. And that is the real conflict here."
Or, as Matthews later summarized it, "If the church teaches it's morally wrong to use birth control, how can you make the teacher pay for the birth control without losing their authority, their moral authority? ...If you can make them do it, they can't teach it anymore."
When commenting on where his views came from, he cited two movies that he grew up with. The first was Beckett, featuring Richard Burton as the Saint Thomas Beckett, a British priest who was assassinated for standing up to King Henry II in the twelth century. Matthews also mentioned the film A Man for All Seasons, based on a play by Robert Bolt, about Sir Thomas More, a Catholic saint martyred by Henry VIII, because More refused to sign a loyalty oath that put the King above the Catholic church. Matthews also compared it to the state ordering the Maccabees to eat pork against their religion.
"It gets to that interesting point for me, which is frightening, when the state tells the church what to do," Matthews concluded.
UPDATE (2/10/12): Chris Matthews has even more to say about the subject on this morning's Morning Joe.
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