LOS ANGELES It is too early to tell whether President Barack Obama ended the debate over a contraceptive mandate Friday by announcing that the federal department of Health and Human Services would require insurance companies, not employers, to pay for the disputed coverage. What is clear is that the nation's Roman Catholic bishops wrested at least a partial victory from the administration after years of setbacks at both the state and federal level.

"It's just one case after another after another where the government is coming in and saying you have to do things that are contrary to your conscience," said the Rev. Thomas Reese, a Jesuit priest and senior fellow at Georgetown University's Woodstock Theological Center.

Many civil libertarians, women's health advocates and liberal religious leaders would take issue with Reese's description. But he was expressing a viewpoint that resonates with many Catholics, liberals and conservatives, as well as with Protestant conservatives who see the Obama administration as hostile to people of faith.

State mandates vary

In choosing to wage its high-profile campaign against the mandate on contraception coverage, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops was revisiting a battle it had largely lost at the state level and in court. Twenty-eight states have some form of mandate for contraception in health insurance policies, with a range of rules regarding exemptions for religious institutions.

Some states use similar language as the new federal rule, only granting exemptions to institutions that primarily employ and serve people of the same faith and whose primary mission is to inculcate faith. That has led to an outcry, particularly from Catholics, who say they put their faith into practice by reaching out to other people, regardless of faith, through hospitals, schools and social service agencies.

"It's not the role of government to define what is or is not a religious institution," said Lori Dangberg, vice president of the Alliance of Catholic Health Care, an association of Catholic hospitals in California.