No end to selective outrage

Those crazy clerics and their crazy hats. The things they get ruffled about, and the things they don’t. Apparently, they’re not going to give this contraception-coverage thing a rest. Here’s Washington’s Catholic archbishop shocked all to pieces because the head of Georgetown University has asked Kathleen Sebelius to be among the commencement speakers.

Sebelius, as secretary of Health and Human Services, helped write the 2010 health-care law requiring that employers provide contraception coverage. The bishops, complacent about so many other things, raised hell. So the administration decided to make insurance companies pay for the coverage, rather than employers. But that has not assuaged the delicate moral sensibilities of the church hierarchy. It’s not about birth control, the clerics say. It’s still a shocking attack on religious freedom.

Whatever. It’s their religion. But I won’t be the first or last to point out that the church was a quite bit more circumspect on the issue of priests buggering boys, which to a lot of laypeople was pretty shocking too. A bit more so than anything to do with birth control. Cheap shot? Sure. But when an institution lets an issue like felony sex abuse slide for a couple of decades, any moral authority it tries to assert immediately afterward isn’t very convincing. In fact, it’s laughable.

Not to mention the idea of telling a top-tier university that it shouldn’t engage speakers who hold divergent views. Kathleen Sebelius: godless bomb-thrower. Have any atheists ever spoken at Georgetown? Any Presbyterians? When you start vetting speakers based on how their personal beliefs diverge from those in Rome, eventually you’ll narrow the field to those guys in the crazy hats.