HOW a political party, movement -- or nation -- thinks is more important than WHAT it thinks.  This is the larger lesson to be learned in the dispute between President Obama and the Catholic bishops over birth control.

With  the President's reasonable compromise announced on Friday the controversy with the Catholic leadership has been resolved in ways that I think strengthens the President's hand and exposes the Republican Party, yet again, as the faction of reactionary anti-women extremists.

Some have mocked the President for stumbling into a dispute with a powerful religious constituency, which conventional wisdom says is the last thing a president up for contract renewal wants to do in an election year.  I am not so sure and think critics of the President -- both liberal and conservative -- reveal their own bias in favor of the Catholic hierarchy at the expense of the Catholic faithful when critics speak so confidently about what "the Church" believes about anything in this controversy.

Nevertheless, the deeper and more important issue in the present controversy between Obama and the bishops is this: What are we to make of the claim by an absolutist institution, the Catholic Church, that a republic's guarantee of freedom of religion gives to that church absolute sovereignty over all those areas of society where the Church's interests intersect?

Fundamentalism is not a religion. It is a mindset. A liberal society can accommodate the demands of radical freedom expressed by the Catholic Church just so long as liberalism itself remains the dominant governing mentality. But a society in which the radical freedom of religious fundamentalists prevails would be a society that sooner or later descends into either anarchy or tyranny.

The reason this issue matters is that we are talking about the governing mentality of our republic -- HOW our republic will think as it tries to solve the problems we face, not only WHAT we eventually do think about the possible solutions to embrace. And it matters a great deal whether that overriding mentality is a liberal one or is one authoritarian, fundamentalist, or absolutist in nature.

The Founding Fathers were not anti-religious. But the wall of separation they built between church and state recognized that the absolutism so necessary in giving church followers the comforting sense of certainty they require was death to democratic republics where secular authorities had to accommodate and reconcile many such faith-claims. As James Madison said when talking about the system of federalism within the Constitution and of the mediating and political qualities thus necessary in democratic office-holders: When you "extend the sphere you enlarge the views." 

When they are working to attain power, and before they do attain it, "the fascist and communist parties invoke all the guarantees of the bill of rights, all the prerogatives of popular parties, of elections, of representation of the assemblies, of tenure in the civil service. But when they attain power, they destroy the liberal democratic institutions, as on a broad staircase, they climbed to power."

That was written by the great American journalist Walter Lippmann in his 1955 classic, Essays in the Public Philosophy, and it applies equally to all illiberal political parties that seek to impose a faith or political ideology on an unwilling audience.

It was a book Lippmann started when Hitler's rise in Germany threatened Western civilization and concluded during the height of the Cold War. Lippmann's aim was to better understand the inner dynamics and pathologies by which liberal democracies were nearly made extinct in the 20th century -- and often with the connivance of those democracies' own citizens.

Democracy, Lippmann concluded, is for those who are for it. Democracy is for those willing to do more than simply claim a democracy's freedoms for their own but to protect those freedoms for others. And this requires, first of all, recognizing the danger which non-negotiable and absolutist faith-claims by anyone pose to the fabric that supports the democratic way of life.

And the "borderline between sedition and reform," writes Lippmann -- the borderline between legitimate and illegitimate politics -- is the boundary between a mindset that says there can be only one "Truth" and another that accepts the "sovereign principle" that in a democracy "we live in a rational order in which, by sincere inquiry and rational debate, we can distinguish the true and the false, the right and the wrong."

Indeed, using a religious metaphor, Lippmann says that "rational procedure is the ark of the covenant of the public philosophy" of democratic republics. There are no election laws or constitutional guarantees which cannot be changed, says Lippmann. But what must always be unchangeable if a democracy is to survive "is the commitment to rational determination."

The counter-revolutionists, says Lippmann, will in the end try to "suppress freedom in order to propagate their official doctrine."  They will, he says, "reject the procedure by which in the free society official policy is determined."

And among these counter-revolutionaries I would include the present right wing, politically aggressive Catholic Church hierarchy that is now demanding the entire society give to the Church the same deference in the political realm which the Church demands of the faithful in the religious one, by accepting and accommodating the Church's non-negotiable and absolutist faith-demands on birth control wherever the writ of the Catholic Church runs -- whether in the sphere of religious worship or wherever the Church has business interests of any kind -- as it uses its resources to carve out little Vatican Cities within our republic where the Church claims ultimate sovereignty and might as well start appointing ambassadors.

It is not possible to reject this faith in the efficacy of reason over absolutist faith, says Lippmann, "and at the same time believe that communities of men enjoying freedom could govern themselves successfully."

It it not possible, in other words, to give the Catholic Church the power it seeks to shape a political agenda based on its own internal dogmas alone and at the same time still believe we have a democratic republic, not really.

Conservatives have tried to change the subject in order to deflect criticisms of them that they are ideologues who seek to impose reactionary beliefs on an unwilling American public.  They have done this by trying to redefine liberalism -- or "secularism" -- to be somehow a competing "religion" itself so as to assert that liberals are equally dogmatic in trying to "impose" their "religious beliefs" of religious tolerance, open-mindedness and official state neutrality regarding all forms of religious worship on an unwilling traditionalist or fundamentalist audience that thinks Judeo-Christian orthodoxy ought to be the law of the land.

Like all religious fundamentalists and absolutists who seek political power, the Catholic Church is showing us again that the undermining of the freedoms of others begins with the demands for absolute freedoms for themselves.