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Catholic bishops and the shrieking Right will tell you this whole business about requiring even church-run businesses to provide contraception as part of their health care plan is an “attack on religion.”
They're wrong, although with the economy ticking up and GOP presidential hopefuls needing a new line of attack , expect them to continue equating a sensible policy rule from the Obama Administration with a march to the guillotine (thanks, Rick Santorum) or an all-out attack on the First Amendment.
For starters, no one's ordering Catholics to use birth control — even though the fact is some 98 percent of Catholic women do at some point in their lives. The rule would only require all employers to provide contraception as part of their health plan — just like, say, Lipitor or Viagra — and employees can take it or not. There's an exemption for actual employees of churches, but not for, say, Church-owned hospitals or colleges which employ plenty of non-Catholics.
There's no First Amendment issue here, since the only thing that law says about religion is that the state shall not promote a particular religion or prevent free exercise of same. See point above about not mandating contraception, and last I checked, contraception is not a religion. It is, of course, great fun for conservatives to wail about trumped-up Constitutional violations whenever they hear something they don't like, but that's their problem.
Presumably one can't budge the Catholic Church's out-of-step proscription against all birth control, but that doesn't mean the Church can flout the law of the land. After all, if they own a hospital, they must abide by U.S. labor laws regarding things like minimum wage and non-discrimination rules. I would also take issue with the notion that any religious organization can create rules of its own that run counter to U.S. law. It's a slippery slope from there to anything they want to say is contained within their faith — perhaps the Church of Libertarianism would argue paying taxes runs counter to its beliefs?
The hypocrisy behind all of this is that the Catholic Church and the American conservative say the most important thing to them is taking abortion off the table for American women, yet they're always setting up more roadblocks to the one thing (besides abstinence) that would most assuredly reduce the number of abortions performed. These bishops and other abortion foes should be handing out condoms and birth control pills in the pews and street corners of this country if reduced abortion is what they really want.
The reality, of course, is that the “attack on religion” bludgeon is too handy a weapon to relinquish that easily in an election year. Most women would say contraception is a basic human right in this day and age, and that one group (workers in Catholic universities, say) should not be subject to a different set of rules than the rest. More than anything, the whole flap boils down to institutional power, not an individual's right to practice their faith how they choose. It also smacks of the ongoing conservative attack on women, as played out just recently in the Planned Parenthood/Komen imbroglio. How long will even the most conservative of women countenance this kind of treatment by their elected representatives and religious leaders who, presumably, have all their flock's interests at heart?
All that aside, the whole thing reminds us of one glaring problem across the entire U.S.: the right to health care is a human right that should be afforded to all citizens (and, yes, paid for collectively by us all) — not something tied to our employers who can exercise onerous or arbitrary conditions or rules on us. Or, of course, that becomes something we lose when we change jobs.
The saddest thing of all is that we're still even talking about contraception's value and place in society in 2012. Some want to scare us into thinking the pill will undermine the country, when in fact its ready and increased availability is the one thing that can simultaneously reduce abortions, help the environment, lower the number of folks on welfare and aid women's independence and family planning. And by the way, paying for birth control is a whole lot cheaper than paying for pregnancies.
Despite Obama's “accommodation” tweak of the policy announced last week, expect this one to play out for months. Ultimately, though, the GOP and the bishops are on the wrong side of history and the culture war, and the politics of it all will mean all those “anti-contraception” sound bites now on file will haunt whichever candidate is fated to face Obama.
Summit Daily editor Alex Miller can be reached at amiller@summitdaily.com or (970) 668-4618.
They're wrong, although with the economy ticking up and GOP presidential hopefuls needing a new line of attack , expect them to continue equating a sensible policy rule from the Obama Administration with a march to the guillotine (thanks, Rick Santorum) or an all-out attack on the First Amendment.
For starters, no one's ordering Catholics to use birth control — even though the fact is some 98 percent of Catholic women do at some point in their lives. The rule would only require all employers to provide contraception as part of their health plan — just like, say, Lipitor or Viagra — and employees can take it or not. There's an exemption for actual employees of churches, but not for, say, Church-owned hospitals or colleges which employ plenty of non-Catholics.
There's no First Amendment issue here, since the only thing that law says about religion is that the state shall not promote a particular religion or prevent free exercise of same. See point above about not mandating contraception, and last I checked, contraception is not a religion. It is, of course, great fun for conservatives to wail about trumped-up Constitutional violations whenever they hear something they don't like, but that's their problem.
Presumably one can't budge the Catholic Church's out-of-step proscription against all birth control, but that doesn't mean the Church can flout the law of the land. After all, if they own a hospital, they must abide by U.S. labor laws regarding things like minimum wage and non-discrimination rules. I would also take issue with the notion that any religious organization can create rules of its own that run counter to U.S. law. It's a slippery slope from there to anything they want to say is contained within their faith — perhaps the Church of Libertarianism would argue paying taxes runs counter to its beliefs?
The hypocrisy behind all of this is that the Catholic Church and the American conservative say the most important thing to them is taking abortion off the table for American women, yet they're always setting up more roadblocks to the one thing (besides abstinence) that would most assuredly reduce the number of abortions performed. These bishops and other abortion foes should be handing out condoms and birth control pills in the pews and street corners of this country if reduced abortion is what they really want.
The reality, of course, is that the “attack on religion” bludgeon is too handy a weapon to relinquish that easily in an election year. Most women would say contraception is a basic human right in this day and age, and that one group (workers in Catholic universities, say) should not be subject to a different set of rules than the rest. More than anything, the whole flap boils down to institutional power, not an individual's right to practice their faith how they choose. It also smacks of the ongoing conservative attack on women, as played out just recently in the Planned Parenthood/Komen imbroglio. How long will even the most conservative of women countenance this kind of treatment by their elected representatives and religious leaders who, presumably, have all their flock's interests at heart?
All that aside, the whole thing reminds us of one glaring problem across the entire U.S.: the right to health care is a human right that should be afforded to all citizens (and, yes, paid for collectively by us all) — not something tied to our employers who can exercise onerous or arbitrary conditions or rules on us. Or, of course, that becomes something we lose when we change jobs.
The saddest thing of all is that we're still even talking about contraception's value and place in society in 2012. Some want to scare us into thinking the pill will undermine the country, when in fact its ready and increased availability is the one thing that can simultaneously reduce abortions, help the environment, lower the number of folks on welfare and aid women's independence and family planning. And by the way, paying for birth control is a whole lot cheaper than paying for pregnancies.
Despite Obama's “accommodation” tweak of the policy announced last week, expect this one to play out for months. Ultimately, though, the GOP and the bishops are on the wrong side of history and the culture war, and the politics of it all will mean all those “anti-contraception” sound bites now on file will haunt whichever candidate is fated to face Obama.
Summit Daily editor Alex Miller can be reached at amiller@summitdaily.com or (970) 668-4618.
