Politico reports that Health and Human Services has a new deputy assistant secretary for public affairs. He is Tait Sye, media director for Planned Parenthood for the last four and a half years. At HHS, according to Politico, he will handle communications for the public health portfolio--the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention--areas "where you can be pretty sure abortion and contraception issues will come up."Sister Mary Ann Walsh, head of media relations for the USCCB, was considered for the job but HHS decided that hiring a religious sister would violate the First Amendment and, besides, it might annoy the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. No, I just made that last sentence up.Anti-abortion groups are outraged by the new HHS hire, Politico reports. If all this is true, I'm not exactly outraged myself, just fairly dismayed.Here's the Politico story:

Peter Steinfels, a former editor of Commonweal and religion writer for the New York Times, is a University Professor Emeritus at Fordham University and author of A People Adrift: The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America.

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