As Washington Post targets Catholic hospitals, every religious institution needs to build defenses

The Washington Post has joined in a broad culture-war offensive to crush religious institutions that don’t subscribe to elite morality.

The headline of the latest Post article reads, “Spread of Catholic hospitals limits reproductive care across the U.S.” The sloppy subheadline reads, “Religious doctrine restricts access to abortion and birth control.”

And the editor who let this through tweets out a dark warning.

One point never made in this story is how the consolidation of hospitals is a direct, and arguably intentional, result of government growth in the healthcare system.

THE FUTURE OF WORK REALLY IS FEMALE

More importantly, there’s the misguided notion that religious institutions are somehow “imposing their morality” on others by operating their own institutions according to their moral teachings. This is rooted in an impossibly narrow and uninformed understanding of what religion is. You cannot have a religion whose adherents do not let their religion affect how they act in real life, including toward others who may not share their religion.

This mindset holds that the Little Sisters of the Poor should be forced to provide contraception coverage for employees, religious schools must be forced to treat boys who identify as girls as if they were actually girls, and Catholic hospitals should have to perform elective abortions.

The increasing animosity toward religion in the public square deserves deeper treatment. But for now, let’s zoom out. We need to look at the context of this Washington Post piece attacking Catholic hospitals.

Two issues here are hospital consolidation and federal funding of religious institutions. Neither of these is an easy discussion. But as a religious conservative with a broad media diet, I see a larger pattern here. The largest media institutions are at the forefront of a broad campaign against conservative religious institutions that don’t subscribe to elite morality on sex, gender, family, marriage, and which human lives deserve to be protected in law. The goals of this campaign are primarily to bully religious institutions into dropping their religious character or, alternatively, to drive them out of business altogether, using Big Government and Big Business as enforcers.

The tools of Big Government and Big Business include deplatforming, defunding, taxation, regulation, and, ultimately, police powers.

Look at the stories published by major news outlets in the past two months.

For example, here’s NBC News bullying a small Christian school for running itself according to Christian teaching on sexuality and gender.

Second example: Here’s a massive, yearlong New York Times story targeting Orthodox Jewish Yeshivas.

Third example: Here’s a Time magazine piece warning of “unregulated, faith-based” crisis pregnancy centers “that have exploded across the U.S. in the past two decades, fueled by an increasingly powerful anti-abortion movement.”

In each of these stories, you can find some fault with a religious institution or say that there are real issues to debate. But that’s why it’s important to look at the whole picture.

There are patterns in these articles. One trope is to talk misleadingly as if religious organizations or their teachings are some innovation or something new. These journalists write as if the baseline is total acceptance of abortion, gay marriage, and transgender ideology and that the scary new thing is the religious hospitals or teachings that have been around for centuries or millennia.

“Spread of Catholic hospitals” is a funny headline because Catholics were the ones who invented hospitals. If you wanted to write a trend piece, you should really write about the spread of laws and lawsuits threatening Catholic hospitals, which are actually new.

But of course, the major media have chosen to make themselves part of that culture-war offensive. They have no interest in reporting on their own campaign objectively.

Most of these articles also dangle taxpayer funding as a red herring. The taxpayer benefits to Brooklyn’s Yeshivas are tiny — a subsidy for bus routes. The taxpayer money to Catholic hospitals is a result of a constant increase in the federal and state role in healthcare. If you make the federal government the largest payer in the healthcare sector, you don’t get to turn around and complain that some federal dollars are going to religious hospitals, which long predated both Medicaid and Medicare.

Religious conservatives rightly read these articles as part of a broad campaign to smash our institutions — our schools, our charities, and our hospitals.

We know what comes next is the government targeting us personally.

President Barack Obama went to court against the Little Sisters of the Poor for their insistence on following Catholic teaching. Attorney General Merrick Garland is going after pro-life leaders while ignoring a pro-abortion terrorist campaign against pro-life crisis pregnancy centers that Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren have verbally attacked. Every religious and conservative institution should expect and prepare for a culture war attack.

Lawyer up. Button down. Run a clean ship. Give them nothing to grasp at because biased reporters and Democratic attorneys general will come after you, no matter how clean you are. Prepare for your deplatforming and have a plan to stay in touch with your clients and friends.

How do you process payments? Can they take that away? Do you have a backup? Who hosts your website or your internal network? Can they drop you? How do you get health insurance?

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Any one of these corporations could drop you tomorrow for not following their dogma, so you’d better be prepared.

It’s a culture war, and the Washington Post is on the offensive with the rest of the cultural Left. Make sure your defenses are in place.