The point has been made several times today, Sunday Feb 12, 2012) in national news and discussion programs that insurance with contraception paid costs insurance companies less than insuring without it. Childbirth and childbirth-related health issues are much more expensive than contraception. What also is not being discussed by the mostly male opponents to contraception is that some medical conditions are greatly helped with birth control pills without regard to the contraceptive effects. Below is a forum comment that neatly put together the idea that this is primarily an economic, social, and health issue rather than a basic religious and first amendment issue. I am quoting it here with permission , but was requested to not use the original writer’s name.
I think this fuss about health insurance, contraception, and the RC Church is as much an economic issue as anything else. If there are to be major loopholes in federal regulation of employer/employee relations, why not in regulation of everything else?
If the groundskeeper at a Catholic (or other church) cemetery cannot use proscribed fertilizers and herbicides, doesn’t that intrude on the church’s interpretation of the “faithful stewardship” doctrine? Can a priest on his way to perform last rites on a dying parishioner be ticketed for speeding?
Why should church buildings, including hospitals, schools, and even parking garages be subject to building codes? Either these exceptions to the rules apply only to organized churches, or to everyone, including lay employers with strong “religious” scruples against paying legal wages, etc.
In the first case, we have established churches–religious bodies enjoying legally established rights not enjoyed by others. In the second, no effective economic regulation at all.
Consider that, in interpreting the Selective Service Act, the Supreme Court extended the definition of “conscientious objection to war” to include beliefs arising from any system of thought which played the same role in the life of a non-religious person as religion plays in the life of a believer. An exemption from the healthcare law based on the doctrines of a church might thereby be extended, based on that precedent, not just to other employers, but to other employers who did not even claim church membership or a faith commitment.
As the First Amendment has been introduced into this debate over economic regulation, I will address that: First, I don’t believe the authors of that amendment intended to protect churches. The laws they outlawed were of two types: 1) taxing people to support the Anglican Church and 2) penalizing people (e.g., in re: office holding) for not being Christians or Protestant Christians. The great majority of Americans who then attended religious services (probably a minority of the whole) attended churches which were controlled by their lay members, not a clerical heirarchy. The distinction between the religious freedom of the members and the organizational autonomy of the church was not one that often required attention, but it is clearly the former that the First Amendment was written to protect.
Whatever constitutional rights are allowed to churches, they must be confined to their explicitly religious activities, not to their activity in the secular realm of commerce, employment, etc. In this case, granting churches exemptions from law attacks the equality of persons in the marketplace, which is as much essential to economic freedom as the First Amendment is to religious freedom.
BTW, what if a church objects to infant male circumcision on religious grounds? Does it have to buy health insurance for its employees that pays for that?
There are a number of ideas in that which could be the basis for much discussion and may relate well to GOP threats to legislate Catholic religion back into health care.
*** Stay tuned...for bad health news..Pretty Kitty, Pretty Poison --- Doug Wiken
That is an outstanding comment. Thanks.
Isn't it ironic that the only RCCs with their undies really in a bundle over this are the "celibate" ones? A huge majority of the the laity support the birth control part.Many, many of the leadership in the local churches and RCC businesses support it. But those boys in the Vatican and their puppets, the bishops, are in an uproar!!
Yeah, there are a few RCC lay people joining in, but very few. Less than 10%.
There is one absolute, incontrovertible, apparently untouchable dictatorship that has survived about 1500 years - the RCC. Not good. Not good at all.
Posted by: D.E. Bishop | Feb 13, 2012 at 04:00 PM