While the Catholic bishops, other clergy, House Speaker John Boehner, Senator Marco Rubio and presidential candidate Rick Santorum have spoken out vehemently this week on the Obama administration’s directive that Catholic hospitals must provide birth control and abortions, one voice has been missing.

Mitt Romney has been quite quiet on the subject. Wonder why?

Yesterday Rush Limbaugh came across this information from December 9, 2005 Life Site News:

“In a shocking turn-around, Massachusetts’s Governor Mitt Romney announced yesterday,” which would have been December 8th, 2005, “that Roman Catholic and other private hospitals in the state will be forced to offer emergency contraception to sexual assault victims under new state legislation, regardless of the hospitals’ moral position on the issue. The Republican governor had earlier defended the right of hospitals to avoid dispensing the ‘morning-after pill’ on the grounds of moral dissent. The Boston Globe reported that Romney’s flip on the issue came after his legal counsel, Mark D. Nielsen, concluded Wednesday,” again, we’re talking 2005 here, “that the new law supersedes a preexisting statute related to the abortifacient pill.” The morning-after pill.

What we have here is another telling sign of just how similar, if you will, Romneycare is to Obamacare. What is the legislation they are talking about here? I’m gonna read this to you again. It’s December 9th, 2005. The site is LifeSiteNews.com. “In a shocking turn-around, Massachusetts’s Governor Mitt Romney announced yesterday that Roman Catholic and other private hospitals in the state will be forced to offer emergency contraception to sexual assault victims under new state legislation.” Now, it’s sexual assault victims, not everybody, but there’s a similarity here.

And what this does… One of the reasons why I have often stated, to chagrin of the establishment and the Drive-By Media… One of the reasons that I have been of the opinion (let’s put it that way) that Obama wants to run against Romney… It’s not just Occupy Wall Street, which I think was created to run against Romney and to define Romney. But I think they know that there’s a connection between Romneycare and Obamacare. Romney’s two advisers helped the White House put theirs together, and here is another link to something happening today vis-a-vis Obamacare that has linkage to Romneycare. What this does is it takes another issue off the table.

I mean, hypothetically speaking here if Romney gets the nomination. An issue that we gotta go tread lightly on when criticizing Obama on this mandate that Catholic schools and everybody else give away the morning-after pill, contraceptives and all that against their moral conscience. The word is “denude.” It denudes us of another issue against Obama. See, this is the kind of thing the establishment in the Republican Party just doesn’t seem to penetrate. Even though people may not have known this specific bit of information, there still is this unsettledness in the conservative base about Romney because of things like this.

What the conservative base knows is that we have the most radical, far-left president this country’s ever seen. And the contrast to that is who we are naturally. And to denude that contrast, to have a campaign where there doesn’t appear to be that big a difference in something as fundamental as Obamacare, from him to our nominee? This something the conservative base just is roiling against. And the establishment doesn’t quite get it.

Yes, that causes me a great deal of worry about the real Romney. Mark Levin found other troubling information.

In a presentation about his health-care reform plan delivered at the Heritage Foundation on Jan. 6, 2006, then-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney said that for his plan to work it would be necessary to first subsidize health insurance for a segment of the population not already receiving government health-care subsidies and then mandate that everyone in the state buy health insurance.

To do otherwise, Romney said, “would be crazy.” His speech was accompanied by a Powerpoint presentation that graphically laid out some of the basics of his proposal and the health insurance situation that then prevailed in Massachusetts.

On April 12, 2006, three months after he spoke at Heritage, Romney signed his landmark health-care reform proposal into law. The law said that people earning up to 300 percent of the federal poverty level would get subsidies to buy insurance. (The federal poverty level for a family of four is now $23,050, according to the Department of Human Services. That means a family of four earning up $69,150 per year now qualifies for health-insurance subsidies in Massachusetts.)

“And then, finally, something I am going to call the personal responsibility principle,” Romney told the Heritage Foundation. “You may call this an individual mandate. I don’t. I call it the personal responsibility principle.

“Let me make it real clear: To tell people in our society today that they have to go out and buy insurance would be unfair and wrong. Because right now, they don’t have products they can afford,” said Romney. “And if people are poor, they don’t have any subsidy that they can rely on to help them get a product. So, it would be crazy to say to people, hey, you’re [un]insured, you better go get it. They can’t afford it.

“But once we put in place the reforms I am describing, with new affordable products as well as a subsidized product, where your premium can be as low as $2.30 a week, now everybody can get insurance,” said Romney. “And that’s basically what this slide says. And that is, look, now that we have these products available for you, we want everybody to get insurance and you have responsibility of having insurance, and we are going to mandate that you have insurance.

“Now, how do we mandate it?” said Romney. “Well, I won’t spend a lot of time on this, other than to indicate that we are going to insist that everybody be covered one way or the other and that those who don’t comply have certain problems. They are going to lose their personal tax exemption. We will withhold any of their tax refund. We will keep it in an account at the state level which we will be able to tap to pay the hospital if they go there for free care. The legislature has also put in place consideration of not providing drivers’ licenses to people unless they can show their health insurance coverage, and so forth.

“We also, I just note there, we also, if people go and get free care and don’t pay for it, we go after them,” said Romney. “We garnish wages if we have to make sure that we get paid. People are either going to buy insurance or they are going to pay for their own care. They’re not going to say, I got care and you, Mr. Taxpayer, or you Mrs. Premium Payer, you have to pay for me.”

Later in the presentation, Romney said: “The money follows the person not the institution. We give money to individuals to allow them to buy insurance. We do not give Medicaid money to hospitals, and say, gosh, you got a lot of uninsured that you care for so we are going to give you a check this year for $50 million. No, the state and the federal government give the money to individuals to buy insurance and they get to go to whichever providers they want to go to.”

Sheesh. And this man is even in contention to get the Republican nomination?

Remember the movie “A Man for All Seasons” in which St. Thomas More stood up to Henry VIII? Romney’s more like a man for any season. You couldn’t depend on him to stick with the promises he makes.