Sometimes, the Obama administration can’t help itself, so devoted to a libertine ideology are they – even at a potentially huge political cost to the president’s re- election efforts.

That’s why it isn’t really a surprise that, so far, the federal government hasn’t backed off a move that has American Catholics up in arms and threatening to challenge the Obama administration even up to the possibility of taking to the streets in protest.

What the Obamaites are trying to pull, of course, is to force all employers, including Catholic-owned hospitals and other institutions, to pay for birth control. Catholic leaders upped the ante this week, threatening to challenge the Obama administration on this particularly heinous part of Obamacare.

Catholic leaders are furious and determined to harness the voting power of the nation’s 70 million Catholic voters to stop a provision of President Barack Obama’s new heath care reform bill that will force Catholic schools, hospitals and charities to buy birth-control pills, abortion-producing drugs and sterilization coverage for their employees, as CBS-2 TV News in New York reported.

“Never before, unprecedented in American history, for the federal government to line up against the Roman Catholic Church,” said Catholic League head Bill Donohue.

Already Archbishop Timothy Dolan has spoken out against the law and priests around the country have mobilized, CBS 2 said, reading letters  from the pulpit. Donohue said Catholic officials will stop at nothing to put a stop to it.

“This is going to be fought out with lawsuits, with court decisions, and, dare I say it, maybe even in the streets,” Donohue said.

Why are we at Unreported World News not surprised that Obama’s acolytes would pursue this course even when it should have been obvious to them that it could cause incalculable political damage to the president’s re-election efforts. After all, not only are Catholics a numerous portion of the electorate, but they’re easily the largest cohort of potential swing voters from election to election.

And in nearly all of the presidential elections of the past half-century, the balance of the Catholic vote has lined up with the winner.

2 Timothy 3:1-4 describes this matter: The federal officials mandating this, and their left-wing supporters, are lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God, a primary marker of the last days in which we’re living.

It is an abomination to the purity of the gospel and all moral values held by civilized societies. It is an outrage to youth, parents and for any person with moral values.  And even if Obama backtracks for reasons of political expediency, this move has telegraphed what he really thinks. That’s no surprise, either.