It’s one thing to believe in the “sexual revolution,” take a little pill and profess your convictions to your heart’s content. It’s another thing to force those of other creeds to pay for it.

In America, we do not have an established religion. But wait. Enter the “Affordable Care Act,” radically re-defining health “care,” where individual choices in a free and competitive market are supplanted by administrative fiat. For under compassionate, humanitarian sounding promises of “care” for women, we now have the state ramming the “sacrament” of contraception down the throats of everyone, including those whose consciences find this morally repugnant.

Blessed John Paul II understood this deception well: states, ideologically driven in the name of benevolence, claiming right by might against citizens. Count the hundreds of edicts, many of them discretionary, the Act empowers the HHS Secretary to make from day to day. Politics is amenable to “accommodation,” conscience is not.

Some suggest Catholic behavior implicitly “blesses” the administration’s contraceptive creed. They lift quotes from White House blog posts like one citing a Guttmacher Institute study that “most women, including 98% of Catholic women, have used contraception.” How irrelevant! As if statistics determine what is moral. If a survey found that 98% of people had smoked weed or fornicated, would it justify government subsidizing such behaviors because they helped people feel better? But the blog’s claim mangles the data to create a false impression. The study actually says this is true of 98% of “sexually experienced” women.

Let’s cut to the chase. What bizarre notion is it of “care” for women — or men or children for that matter — where the state forces citizens, in effect, to underwrite free sex with anyone at will and without legal, social or financial consequences? How does it liberate or affirm a woman’s dignity to engage for “free” in what the oldest profession at least charged for?  How does it build a man’s character to flee responsibility for being faithful, nurturing and supportive to a woman whose endowments he enjoys? This is not “care” but a poison pill dehumanizing us all.

Contraception is the central dogma of the “sexual revolution.” So we are forced to worship and subsidize it as the health “care” that saves us all — an absurd result that violates conscience rights! Unforeseen consequences of greater “access” to contraceptives could well be to spread STDs (no “free” condoms — yet).

How much healthier and caring, as Paul VI pleaded, “to ensure that there is enough bread on the tables . . . and not to encourage an artificial control of births, which would be irrational, in order to diminish the number of guests at the banquet of life.”

Planned Parenthood, America’s largest abortion chain — to which taxpayers contribute half a billion dollars annually — forewarns potential non-conformists, “we will be vigilant in holding the administration and the institutions accountable for a rigorous, fair and consistent implementation of the policy, which does not compromise the essential principles of access to care.” PP is a major force behind this ideology driven agenda.

PP touts the purported health “care” benefits to women from the “Affordable Care Act,” which serves its agenda. Consider PP’s track record on “care” for women and children. One has good reason to be suspicious of what “care” means to an outfit that sells abortions to 98.14% of women seeking pregnancy related “care” from it. Compared to its “prenatal services,” that makes about 69 abortions for every one prenatal care client.

Should doubt persist about the irreconcilable meanings of “care” at stake here, would that a field trip to your neighborhood Planned Parenthood were as simple as to any local Catholic health care institution. Witnessing firsthand the different types of “care” would be a revelation!