For a guy who grew up in Chicago politics, Obama’s broadside against the Catholic Church is incredibly stupid and like most of his politically inept maneuvers has an admixture of evil. Everyone must be the same. Religion does not matter. Public Health equals total control.
Basically he’s forcing Catholic schools, hospitals, and the like to fund insurance plans that pay for contraception. I listened to the annoying Judy Waxman wax ineloquently on Diane Rehm this morning about why this was an important “public health” issue and a question of women’s rights as if that settled the matter. The Catholic guy held his own. This has nothing to do with public health. Pregnancy is not a disease. Pregnancy is not particularly dangerous. For some reason, if the blank check of “public health” required Jewish schools, employers, nursing homes, etc. to serve pork, not least because it’s super tasty and good for you, I think she and most of leftist America would see the moral issues much more clearly. But anti-Catholicism is in the blood with certain people, and Obama apparently has the bug too.
Incidentally, one her arguments was that lots of Catholics use birth control and that we can ignore the Bishops who are out of touch with their own laity. The factual premise has some truth. Some think it’s right. Some don’t think much about it either way. Like lots of other sins, many think it’s wrong but figure they’ll get straight with God before they croak. But even not-terribly-devout Catholics have respect for the Faith, its teachings, and the historically precarious position of the Church. They may not always walk the walk, but that’s what Catholic guilt is for. They certainly know when their Church is being bullied, as it has been by pretty much every regime since the French Revolution. So they will take notice, particularly the Catholics that actually go to Mass and care a little about Church teachings, many of whom have a lot of other idiotic liberal views, but who won’t bring themselves to vote for an anti-Catholic bully, which is what Obama is showing himself to be.
I find this all pretty rich since this guy went to a Black Panther Rally masquerading as a Church for so many years. He clearly doesn’t understand the dynamics of normal, apolitical faith that most Catholics have. But it should take him two seconds to figure it out, as it is the same tribal loyalty that blacks feel when an OJ Simpson or Rodney King is in the news. They don’t want to air their dirty laundry or turn on their own in public, and Catholics have a bit of that too. Just as the US is inadvertently doing its best “nationbuilding” by unifying tribal backwaters like Afghanistan in opposition to our presence, Obama may be uniting American Catholics in his ham-handed move on contraception. Thanks Obama!
PS Perhaps Obama forgot all those guys named Kowalski out in Beverly and thought the Catholics of Hyde Park Chicago were pretty representative. I can assure everyone, they are not. We used to jokingly call the main Church St. Thomas the Apostate (nee Apostle) due its numerous and flagrant breaches from Church teaching and practice when I was there. Then again, I’m assuming Obama is thoughtful and deliberate, when he appears actually kind of lazy and instinctual on most matters of policy.
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How is this playing in the Hispanic community whose votes both major parties say are so crucial to winning the election?
Is it possible that their reaction to this “anti-Catholic bullying” might trump the immigration issues which everyone assumes are most important to them?
Who knows. Lots of Hispanics are Catholic, but many are only nominally Catholic and they tend to lean left. They’ve voted about 2/3 Democrat in every election going back to Eisenhower. Florida is a little exception, as Cubans lean Republican. Plus, they’re not this enormous block as they’re made out to be, since so many are noncitizens or nonvoters. Contrary to our expasperated media’s obsessions, this election won’t turn on the Hispanic vote. It will turn on the working class white vote, which broke for Obama in 2008. I think they’ve grown disillusioned on the whole, and thus Obama’s in trouble.
I am a lapsed Catholic, and I have no interest in returning to the Faith, being agnostic. However, almost all my family and my wife’s family are Catholics of one sort or another, and I regard attacks on the Church as attacks on my family. It’s personal, and it’s blood.
I even go so far as to support the Catholic League and other traditionalist Catholic groups that harass pseudo-Catholic colleges like Notre Dame and the feckless, often heretical clergy. Again, it’s personal, and it’s blood.
I’m an Episcopalian, but Obama’s attacks on Catholic hospitals and such really ticks me off. I’ll bet I’m not the only non-Catholic Christian who feels this way. When it comes to religion, Obama just has a tin ear. I guess hanging around Rev. Wright will do that to you…
Re: Hispanics, I dug up the statistics once. US Catholic numbers have inched up slightly (5% +/-) as Latino immigration has skyrocketed. The numbers are way out of proportion and this seems to confirm my personal experience that most Latinos are areligious or protestant. And of course when we say ‘Latinos,’ what we really mean are Meso-Americans, not Iberians.
Insofar as there are ‘Latinos’ in US Catholic churches, they seem to be middle and upper class Iberian-descended.
The issue for a lot of people is not their position on birth control; it is “if the government can do this, what can’t it do?”
“Separation of church and state,” properly understood, means that the church is protected from the coercive powers of the state (and implicitly, of other churches, who if they were allowed to use coercion, would become states). Unfortunately, when our current leaders discuss it what they really mean is secular humanism as the established state religion.
“The issue for a lot of people is not their position on birth control; it is “if the government can do this, what can’t it do?””
Absolutely. I don’t think that birth control is a sin and I spend zero time thinking about it, but if Catholic hospitals do not wish to dispense it, that is their right. This is an anti-religious power play, pure and simple, and anyone who has any religious convictions at all should be outraged.
By the way, if these were Muslim hospitals, what do you want to be we’d be getting lectured by Obama on the need to respect their culture and belief…
Some, including apparently the Church, have resorted to lies to in their efforts to oppose the health care law. Contrary to wild-eyed cries to the contrary, IT DOES NOT FORCE EMPLOYERS TO ACT CONTRARY TO THEIR BELIEFS.
Questions about the government requiring or prohibiting something that conflicts with someone’s faith are entirely real, but not new. The courts have occasionally confronted such issues and have generally ruled that the government cannot enact laws specifically aimed at a particular religion (which would be regarded a constraint on religious liberty contrary to the First Amendment), but can enact laws generally applicable to everyone or at least broad classes of people (e.g., laws concerning pollution, contracts, fraud, negligence, crimes, discrimination, employment, etc.) and can require everyone, including those who may object on religious grounds, to abide by them. Were it otherwise and people could opt out of this or that law with the excuse that their religion requires or allows it, the government and the rule of law could hardly operate. When moral binds for individuals can be anticipated, provisions may be added to laws affording some relief to conscientious objectors.
Here, it may be questioned whether there is real need for such an exemption, since no one is being “forced,” as some commentators rage, to act contrary to his or her belief. In keeping with the law, those with conscientious objections to providing their employees with qualifying health plans may decline to provide their employees with any health plans and pay an assessment instead or, alternatively, provide their employees with health plans that do not qualify (e.g., ones without provisions they deem objectionable) and pay lower assessments.
“Some, including apparently the Church, have resorted to lies”
You know, some people, including people on this board, are deliberately conflating differences of interpretation with lying.
Well, if someone asserts that the law forces employers to provide certain types of health plans even though they know the law actually does not force employers to do so, what would you call it? Exaggeration?
This is the second- and totally unrelated- blog I’ve found Dougie pushing this angle at. Spooky.
Wow, doug, I wonder why you think you can judge the requirements of Catholic religious obligaiton better than bishops, but I guess you can. I understand RFRA, Oregon v. Smith, and all the relevant case law. But the question is why promote this policy. Obama is in the tank for radical feminisnts and wants to stick it to Catholics.
Like I said above, if Jews were required to buy, prepare, serve, and sell pork under some spurious “public health” grounds everyone would understand the issues and line up on the side of religious freedom.
Mr. Roach,
If the law required Jews–or Catholics–to act contrary to their religious beliefs, I would line up with them, BUT IT DOES NOT. In the end, it requires only that employers who do not provide qualifying health plans pay assessments to the government. Unless one supposes that the employers’ religion forbids payments of money to the government (all of us should enjoy such a religion), then the law’s requirement to pay assessments does not compel those employers to act contrary to their beliefs.
That does not mean they may not like paying the assessments or what the government may do with the money it receives. But that is a garden-variety gripe common to most taxpayers–who don’t much like paying taxes and who object to this or that action of the government. It is no justification for an “exemption” from the law. Should each of us feel free to deduct from our taxes the portion that we figure would be spent on those actions (e.g., wars, health care, whatever) each of us opposes?
“Contrary to wild-eyed cries to the contrary, IT DOES NOT FORCE EMPLOYERS TO ACT CONTRARY TO THEIR BELIEFS.”
I must be missing something in your argument. The Catholic employers believe in providing health insurance to their employees, but they don’t believe in providing them health insurance that covers contraceptives.
This law, quite explicitly and obviously, forces them to act contrary to their beliefs, because they are compelled to pay a fine rather than provide their employees with health insurance that covers everything but contraception, which is what their belief system compels them to do. You can argue the merits or constitutionality of this law, but to say it doesn’t force them to act contrary to their beliefs is just silly.
Your arguments are rather illustrative of the emerging secular belief system that defines religious freedom as letting people go to church on Sunday but leaving no trace of religion in any other aspect of their lives. This is a natural result of the impossibility of divorcing law from the concept of moral value, especially in a society where law permeates nearly everything. There is always a moral value used as justification in the creation of any law, and since the mistaken Leftist view of the separation of church and state holds that Christian moral values cannot even influence law, you instead end up with laws explicitly formed by the modern secular religion. It is, in practice, the imposition of a new official church on our country, and the end of real religious tolerance.
David M,
Yes, you are missing something. It is important to recognize the difference between taking an action (like using contraception or providing it to others) contrary to one’s beliefs and paying money to the government (which the government–not the employer–may then use for purposes both conforming and not conforming to the employers’ beliefs). The former is not forced on employers by this law. The latter does not force employers themselves to do anything contrary to their beliefs. As for their dislike of actions the government may take, in part with the benefit of “their” money, how is that any different from the dislike many (nearly all, I dare say) taxpayers feel about actions the government takes, in part with the benefit of “their” money? By the logic of the US Bishops Conference, nearly all of us, I suppose, deserve to be exempted from all sorts of laws and taxes.
David M. makes a good point. You cannot have a large, activist welfare state and also maintain separation of Church and State. Those who claim to do so usually get around this by claiming that the State infringing upon the Church is not a violation of religious freedom (or, in fact, that the spirit of the 1st amendment requires it). In practice, these people want an established religion, it’s just that the religion is secular humanism.
Your arguments are rather illustrative of the emerging secular belief system that defines religious freedom as letting people go to church on Sunday but leaving no trace of religion in any other aspect of their lives.
Or, alternately, as freedom of denomination, but not freedom of actual belief – with the beliefs that you are actually allowed to live being determined by whichever member of your denomination has the beliefs most favorable to secularists.
(As an example, when someone complains, e.g., about not being allowed to foster children if they refuse to tell them that homosexuality is A-OK, the common response is, “well, I have lot of Christian friends who have no problem with homosexuality,” as if the existence of homosexual-condoning Christians somehow invalidates the religious freedoms of the non-condoning ones).
David M and Glaivester,
Do you mean to argue that the government must exempt from any law those who say their religion allows or forbids something contrary to the law? If so, how would you suppose the government and the rule of law is to operate?
Doug, are you reading anything here? There is no money going to governmnet; it is forced as a condition of providing health insurance to go from one private party, the employer, to another, the insurer, for the benefit of insureds. It is not like money going to the government for some nefarious purpose like promoting gay sex in elementary schools or some other PC atrocity.
This is at the heart of the FIrst Amendment, which forbids established Churches for the same reason: it is considered a serious affront to the human conscience to require payment to something as sensitive as an established church even if you’re not required to go or believe. That’s why it’s in there. Read Madison on this some time.
If the government wanted to do this it would also be bad, but government should generally steer clear of telling religions what to do, whom to hire, what to fund or not, etc. It’s an easily abused power, and Obama and Doug from California and other liberal assholes who don’t know how believing Christians think and act shouldn’t presume to tell them they and their bishops are wrong.
Inform yourself. http://pnhp.org/blog/2011/03/15/employer-sponsored-health-plans-under-the-affordable-care-act/
The money flows from private Catholic employers to private insurance into a pool that pay for things that are opposed to Catholic teachings. If the federal government feels contraception is such an important public health concern, then it can subsidize it from general tax revenue. This is different.
Doug, insisting you’re right when you’ve been proven wrong does not make you a great debater. It makes you an asshole. Dave M above explains the issue, namely, that as a condition of providing health insurance, one must provide contraceptive coverage through private insurers to one’s employees. You cannot provide health insurance otherwise without a prohibitive fine. The policy clearly is to dragoon all private employers into doing this thing, even religious employers that disagree with it. The link you provided above does not say otherwise.
No. Contrary to your assertion, the law does not say that an employer “must provide contraceptive coverage through private insurers to one’s employees.” Again, the law affords employers the option of not providing any health plans (or even providing non-qualifying health plans that do not provide contraception) and paying a corresponding assessment. Contrary to your further assertion, the assessment is not a “prohibitive fine.” Please read the material placed under your nose. Some employers are considering this option because they see it as economically preferable–hardly “prohibitive.” This option is there for the taking, and it relieves religious employers of any moral bind. True, without an exemption, employers cannot (without paying the assessment anyway) tailor the choices they make available to their employees to fit their own religious views, rather than leave such matters to their employees. But that’s not really the purpose of an exemption.
Perhaps the difficulty is your misunderstanding of the point of an exemption. Its purpose is merely to relieve an employer of a moral bind–i.e., being forced to do an act contrary to one’s moral beliefs. Its purpose is not simply to let those who never liked the health law to somehow revisit its merits and take another political shot at trimming it back a bit.
Doug, your mistake is that you are forgetting that the health care plans are still private contracts between parties – the employer and the employee. You are treating the new health care law as if it were already a national single-payer health system, rather than just its precursor. As Roach and I have already pointed out, the law prohibits church-run institutions from offering their employees a private service because they don’t provide it in the manner the government wants them to. This is a clearly an act of the government compelling them to act against their conscious in a way that goes well beyond tax collection.
As an analogy, let’s elaborate a bit on Roach’s pork analogy. Imagine a Jewish run soup kitchen that serves healthy, delicious meals – sans pork. The government then decrees that pork is an absolutely essential element of a healthy diet, and demands that the soup kitchen now include pork in its daily menu or instead pay a fine and not offer any meal at all. This would clearly be an example of forcing the Jewish soup kitchen to act against its beliefs, because it would face a choice of not serving the poor or serving them pork. Even if they opted out and didn’t serve pork, they would then no longer be able to serve the poor meals, which would also be against their beliefs.
Now, let’s say the government has already nationalized health care and soup kitchens. In both these cases the services have become explicitly government run entities. In our current climate, they would obviously be directed under the principles of the secular humanist religious faith. This wouldn’t necessarily violate the separation of church and state in legal fact, as the Catholic Church and the Jewish soup kitchen would only be forced to pay taxes to the state, and the state would manage these enterprises separately. I hope you can see how this is a different case than the current law, which compels certain behavior in a private contract between two parties.
Of course the end result of the increasing government control over society is that there is a de-facto official church, as Glaivester and I pointed out earlier. Since the government’s actions are driven by secular religious values, and at the same time the government’s actions have such an enormous influence on our daily lives, we are in reality now living under an established secular church. The founders’ intentions are increasingly irrelevant to the discussion, as their idea of separation of church and state can’t even be applied to a government-run society.
One thing I must credit this Waxman chick on NPR for, and something Doug does not do that is something I’ve found typically with uneducated and dishonest people, is that Waxman and her interlocutors accepted roughly what was happening, that it created a condition, that it went contrary at least to institutional Catholic beliefs, and that the issue was one of an alleged public health benefit from claims of conscience. Doug here is nearly impossible to argue with as he is moving the goal posts, changing his position (he assumed implicitly above that this was a quasi-single-payer regime), and getting bogged down in whether a $300K fine is a prohibitive matter without addressing the merits. What a waste of time.
Okay, let’s try this another way–one that may appeal to your small government ideas.
Our laws have long made health plans available to most people in the form of “employee benefits” received through their employers. Apart from political expediency, employers really did not need to be involved at all, but since the law put them in that position, they effectively have had a say in what types of plans are available to their employees. Some employers have even taken advantage of their position to tailor the plans they make available to fit their own religious views, rather than leave such matters to their employees.
Now that the government has prescribed that health plans provide some services that do not conform to the religious views of some employers, those employers have complained they face a moral bind–that is they are forced to provide plans that include services they find objectionable. This moral bind could have been avoided if the law had not required employers to provide such qualifying health plans and, instead, simply made such plans readily and directly available to everyone, funding them, at least partly, through taxes or assessments paid by employers relieved of the burden of providing health plans. Had the government done that, employers would not face a moral bind and health plans would be widely available as the law intends.
Oh. Wait. Does the current health law afford employers that very option? Why, yes, it does. http://pnhp.org/blog/2011/03/15/employer-sponsored-health-plans-under-the-affordable-care-act/ Eureka! No moral bind! (And the assessments, by the way, are hardly prohibitive as some commentators suppose. Some employers, indeed, are considering that option on the basis that it is economically advantageous.)
Problem solved–except perhaps for an employer who really desires not just to avoid a moral bind, but rather wants to retain control of his employees’ health plans, limit their choices to conform to the employer’s religious beliefs, and avoid paying the assessments that otherwise would be owed. For that, the employer would need an exemption from the law.
Oh. Wait. Aren’t some employers clamoring for just such an exemption, so they can do just that? Why, yes, they are.
Right, so now that there’s a government-run soup kitchen serving pork open down the street, shutting down the Jewish soup kitchen isn’t forcing them to act contrary to their beliefs, because hey, now everyone can just get fed down the street at the government-run place.
I will give you some credit though, you don’t try to hide the real intent and end result of Obama-care, which is the complete government take-over of health care.