An inward closure may not be an option for the American Catholics."
What the government would do doesn't really matter. The majority of Catholics and all other Christians in this country had already made it clear they'd rather hang separately than yield enough personal sovereignty to hang together with anyone for any reason.
That is because the economic reality hasn’t sunk in yet. It usually takes a generation. People think that the industrial base will come back somehow by itself and that the deficit will somehow shrink by itself, that the fab weirdos in San Francisco and New York are not going to demand anything of them, that the welfare class will somehow get on with their lives without burning down their neighborhoods, that we can all get along as soon as we master some Spanish, — middle class lethargy, in short.