Guest Column by Brian Westrick

Quick: how many actual Catholics support Obama’s new policy regarding contraception being provided by employers, even religious employers? After all, if Republican candidates are all going to outwardly condemn Obama’s policy, it ought to be a supremely low amount, wouldn’t you think? It must certainly be a minority. Or is it even that a majority of Catholics support the president’s contraception policy?

Yet, the three remaining GOP candidates are making the policy out to be a largely unsupported measure that the general public opposes. Not only this, but this law has unleashed a firestorm of opposition, even though 29 states already have similar statutes in place.

For a party so staunchly of the opinion that President Obama has a laundry list of faults, they sure are having a hard time finding things to criticize that are true. It’s very tough for a presidential candidate to be taken seriously when 59 percent of Catholic women support a new contraception measure. Especially when the very group that is supposed to be a whimpering, oppressed minority in the fetal position, in a corner, pleading for some tolerance has a solid majority of people in support of the measure that is being declared the first step toward a major shift in the political climate in this country.

The Republican Party has turned this into another one of Obama’s “wars.” This one is a fabricated war on religion.

Presidential candidate Rick Santorum stated earlier this month, “This is a president who, just recently, in this Hosanna-Tabor case was basically making the argument that Catholics had to, you know, maybe even had to go so far as to hire women priests to comply with employment discrimination issues. This is a very hostile president to people of faith. He’s a hostile president, not just to people of faith, but to all freedoms.”

The only problem with Santorum’s claim is that it’s, you know, entirely false (on a slightly unrelated note, 53 percent of Catholics support a mandate for more female priests), as can be found in the Obama administration’s own brief of the Hosanna-Tabor case. Santorum would go on to state that the introduction of socialized health care would lead to the mass slaughter of religious people á la French Revolution.

The insanity is not limited to Rick Santorum, however. Romney has also bluntly misrepresented the policy to a rowdy Maine crowd.

“Today he did the classic Obama retreat all right, and what I mean by that is, it wasn’t a retreat at all. It’s another deception,” Romney said, arguing that religious organizations still will have to pay for contraception after insurance companies pass the costs along to employers. “Companies consist of people, and someone has to pay — the owners, the employees or the customers, and they pass those costs on to the customers.”

Romney is, of course, neglecting to mention that everything he just said is entirely false. Since employers do not want to provide contraceptives, their premiums will not go up and the health insurance companies will be providing the contraceptives anyway. Health insurance companies are essentially absorbing the cost that Mitt Romney is claiming caused a massive injustice to private employers who will not have to pay one dollar for contraceptives for their employees to receive.

So, in essence we have a group of candidates opposing laws they don’t understand. They’re trying to discredit a president who isn’t doing what they claim he’s doing in order to help a group of Americans who agree with what the president is already doing. And somehow they’re all running for president.