Robbie George and Shirif Girgis won’t accept the compromise on birth control:
[T]he Obama administration’s proposed changes would really change nothing that matters morally. To begin with, neither before nor after the February 10th “compromise” would the mandate require religious objectors to cooperate formally in what they considered wrongdoing—i.e., to intend that their employees make use of contraceptives, sterilization, or abortion-drugs. Both would, however, require material cooperation.
And that material cooperation would have substantially similar bad effects.
Marty Lederman is shocked by the implications:
[T]hink of the implications of this view: To be sure, it would mean that there’s little or no moral difference between the “before” and “after” HHS proposals — but then, there’d also be no difference between either of them and the compelled assessment of taxes. Since we know, to a 100% certainty, that our tax dollars will in fact be used, thanks to the decisions of others (legislatures, administrators, private actors), for activities that we believe to be immoral, we are just as morally culpable for those actions as we are for those that are done with our much more “proximate” material assistance…Indeed, wouldn’t this also mean that Catholic employers act immorally if they do not prohibit their employees — on penalty of discharge — from using the wages they receive for the purchase of contraception? Am I missing something? If not, is this really what Catholic doctrine teaches and, if so, is it really something the state should accommodate?
George goes another round.
I suspect that Marty’s error is in assuming that George shares the general notion of a liberal political order, where government moral neutrality – or as close to neutrality as possible – is in any way defensible. But George doesn’t. He believes that all law should subscribe to his Catholic notion of natural law. And he is such an extremist on these matters that even remote material and not formal acquiescence to anything Catholic doctrine regards as immoral could in principle be barred by law. What George argues is that by merely allowing insurance companies to bypass Catholic-run hospitals and give contraception directly to patients, the government is still promoting the idea that contraception is morally fine, in insurance policies provided by Catholic institutions, and therefore this is an attack on religious freedom. What you have to consider, in such a case, for George, is
all the wrongs that would have been averted if you hadn’t played a role; their toll on others; and the false beliefs about right and wrong that people infer from your involvement.
That’s a fantastically broad standard – including the “toll on others” who have nothing to do with the Catholic organizations at all but who might just infer that contraception is ok – essentially 
ending any idea of the law as a neutral means for citizens with radically different moral views to choose for themselves what is good or bad. The law must reflect morality and that morality must be based on Catholic “natural law” which George asserts is plainly evident to anyone with a brain.
Hence this hissy fit about Obama’s compromise is just the tip of the iceberg. George backs laws that make masturbation illegal – even though he concedes such laws would be prudentially impossible to enforce. Hence his view that no society should allow heterosexuals their rights and homosexuals theirs’ and live and let live. Because such neutrality would encourage the idea that gays are equal to straights – which is material if not formal acquiescence to evil. That’s how gay marriages hurt straight ones, in his view. He believes that government therefore has a right in principle to recriminalize gay sex and abortion – simply because it sends the wrong moral signal to others.
The theocon project is a radical attack on the core of modern freedom. George would ban secular hospitals from providing contraception as well, if a democratic majority could be mustered for it. Again, if you want to absorb the profound and anti-modern theoconservative project that is Rick Santorum’s politics, and Robbie George’s theology, you can download “The Conservative Soul” here.
The Dish 