Even such liberal stalwarts as E.J. Dionne and Michael Sean Winters can be heard to complain about the Obama administration’s HHS mandate that all employers–including all religious institutions but the most narrowly defined ones–include fully paid coverage for contraceptives (including abortifacient drugs) and sterilization in their employee health plans. But let it not be said that President Obama and Secretary Sebelius are entirely without their defenders, even among those who call themselves Catholics.
Here is Joan Vennocchi, for instance, a liberal columnist for the Boston Globe:
The president should be ready for the fight, knowing that on this one he is right.
At Sunday Mass, Catholic parishioners across the country were read letters denouncing the Obama administration’s recent decision to require religiously affiliated hospitals, colleges, and charities to offer health insurance coverage to employees for contraception and the “morning-after pill.’’ On Monday, Rubio, a Republican star who is often mentioned as a VP candidate, introduced a bill that would override the Obama policy by allowing religious institutions that morally oppose contraception to refuse to cover it.
But not all employees of Catholic institutions are Catholics. Why should their employers impose their religious beliefs on them and deny coverage for birth control and other medical care? As long as those Catholic institutions are getting taxpayer money, they should follow secular rules. That’s the Obama administration’s argument, and it makes sense.
Vennocchi has, shall we say, her own way with facts. (Later in the column she claims that “in 2004, many bishops made an issue out of John Kerry’s abortion rights support by threatening to deny communion to the Catholic Democratic presidential nominee.” In truth, there only two or three bishops, out of hundreds in the country, who spoke out in ways that could be so interpreted.) She has her own way with legal reasoning too, not to mention logic. Let it be stipulated that many Catholic institutions “are getting taxpayer money.” But it is a well-established legal principle that the government cannot condition the receipt of federal funds on the surrender of the recipients’ constitutional rights.
As for Catholic institutions “imposing their religious beliefs” on employees who do not share them? Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but in this context, in which the employer is the one who is to pay for the relevant “preventive services” under health insurance, it is precisely the employer’s beliefs that must prevail, or it will be directly complicit in acts it finds a moral abomination according to the tenets of the faith. If an employee who views the matter otherwise wants to buy his or her own coverage for such services, that choice imposes no moral norm on anyone else. But when the government dictates that, for the sake of some (so far hypothetical) employees who “need” such “preventive services,” the employer will be out of pocket for the provision of services it holds to be moral abominations–well, surely even Ms. Vennocchi can see what’s going on. And when the moral judgment is a matter of faith and doctrine, the conclusion that the religious freedom of such an institution is infringed is inescapable.
Similarly obtuse is Katha Pollitt of the Nation, who at least has the excuse of describing herself as “an atheist, a feminist, a progressive” (three strikes and you’re out, Katha). She writes:
Why should the bishops be exempt from the costs of living in a pluralistic society? [USCCB's Sister Mary Ann] Walsh cites the Amish, who are exempt from buying health insurance because they have a conscientious objection to it, but the Amish are a self-isolated band of would-be nineteenth-century farmers; they don’t try to make others read by kerosene lamps or demand the government subsidize their buggies. The Catholic church, by contrast, runs institutions that employ, teach and care for millions of people, for which it gets oceans of public money.
Again the same error. Evidently these ladies of the left believe that if religious institutions “employ, teach and care for millions of people” (which costs them plenty, mind you), the receipt of the merest nickel–the principle is the same, “oceans of public money” or just a small puddle, it makes no difference–is enough to bring the freedom of the church crashing down, subordinated utterly to the will of the government. And if they got no public money at all, these hospitals, charities, and schools? Vennocchi and Pollitt would find some other reason why the authority of government prevails over the consciences of the faithful.
And you thought “liberal” meant “lover of liberty.”
February 6th, 2012 | 4:10 pm
What difference does it make whether or not an organization gets public money? The company I work for gets no public funding but must comply with the regulations. The Catholic Church could go without any public funding for hospitals or other entities and still be subject to the same rules.
February 6th, 2012 | 4:25 pm
I have seen the argument “they are taking government money, so must follow government rules” offered by many people as a reason to support the HHS mandate.
This argument has nothing to do with the HHS mandate. The mandate applies to all employers, whether they receive government funding or not. No matter how many times this is clarified, the argument keeps cropping up, perhaps because it is so foreign to Americans to have government mandates so far removed from a funding stream.
Just to be clear: In order to be free of this mandate, it is not sufficient for a hospital to, say, refuse to offer services to medicare and medicaid patients (which is how such hospitals receive government funding). Instead, a hospital, school or charity would have to be run on an entirely volunteer basis with no employees. In other words, they’d basically have to cease to exist as we now know them.
I’m sure many people would like this outcome. I would love to hear how such people would imagine taking care of all the needs and all of the people who depend on Catholic institutions.
But I fear that the answer is they don’t really care if those people are taken care of or not. Just so long as no one calls into question the sacred sexual liberties protected by free contraception, that’s all that matters.
February 6th, 2012 | 5:44 pm
sally rogers is on the money. This has absolutely nothing to do with accepting public money, though Franck is incidentally correct that that wouldn’t justify it anyway. But it instead just depends on the fact that these institutions are providing goods and services to the public as opposed to their own co-religionists. So to avoid the mandate they’d have to go out of the business of serving all people in need, and become an in-house charitable service for Catholics only.
February 6th, 2012 | 8:56 pm
I really don’t understand why millions of Christians, Muslims, Jews, and even thinking atheists are not already marching down Pennsylvania Avenue with pitch forks and torches. I am appalled by this Statist over-reach. I hope the Catholic Bishops can rally the rest of the faithful, both Catholic and non-Catholic and create a mass movement to stop this shredding of the Constitution.
It’s bad enough that Amercan citizens can now be “detained” and even executed without trial…now this?
Man the pitchforks!!!
February 7th, 2012 | 12:29 am
Nicely said, Matt. One other problem that occurred to me tonight. Take Pollit’s comment: “The Catholic church, by contrast, runs institutions that employ, teach and care for millions of people, for which it gets oceans of public money.”
Could not one turn this around and say this?: But the community receives oceans of Catholic moral theology put into action, and that far exceeds, both quantitatively and qualitatively, anything the state may give to Catholic organizations in the form of liquid assets. In other words, non-Catholic Americans receive far more from Catholic institutions than the non-Catholic Americans can possibly ever give in return. We Catholics don’t mind, of course, for we are put on this Earth to extend the love of Christ to both those inside and outside the Church. But our existence and our mission does not arise from asking permission from the state. Rather, we obey the commands of Christ, and are delighted when the state cooperates with our mission.
February 7th, 2012 | 9:19 am
The Boston Globe is one of the more rabid anti-Catholic rags in the country. Many of their op-ed writers have abandoned the faith, and as with many ex-Catholics, they take a particular delight in attacking the Church. The Globe once covered a visit of Mother Teresa to Harvard and condescendingly noted that the good Mother was apparently unaware of the “sophisticated” nature of her audience when she condemned the practice of abortion.
February 7th, 2012 | 3:50 pm
“Sophisticated” means “adulterated from its natural pure form.”
I’d like to know when pregnancy was redefined as a disease, so that its prevention qualified as “medical services.”
Imagine that a society has decriminalized theft, and now insists that employers furnish burglary tools to any employee who wants them.
February 7th, 2012 | 7:00 pm
So to avoid the mandate they’d have to go out of the business of serving all people in need, and become an in-house charitable service for Catholics only.
Notice how they set it up to reinforce the narrative that doing all this work is somehow a privilege.
Catholics don’t do good works because they’re good works; they are doing this for some sinister reason.
February 7th, 2012 | 7:07 pm
I’d like to know when pregnancy was redefined as a disease, so that its prevention qualified as “medical services.”
This is going to be a BIG deal in the future: once we have redefined medicine away from the motive for doing it (curing disease, maintaining biological integrity, etc.) – and have instead created a new definition that focuses on the training and credentialing of the professional administering the services – we will see a LOT of things classed as “medical services” (to which people have a basic right).
The mention in an earlier thread of domestic violence “screening” (that is, trying to aggressively determine which relationships are substandard, as opposed to intervening only when someone asks for help or someone breaks a law) has a HUGE potential for government control.
And if we are required to pay for contraceptives, it’s a safe bet we’re also going to be expected to pay for other things, too. This is not a slippery slope: changing a definition means redrawing a boundary – in this case, the line around the category “medical services” will be expanded from all the things that fit the old (disease/health centered definition) to encompass all the new things implied by the new definition.
How many things are “medical” in the sense that you need a licensed professional to do them? I can think of a few (abortions, sex change operations, reproductive technologies – including exotic ones, like “making a baby from two fathers” – or why just two? – and other genetic manipulations…..)
February 7th, 2012 | 11:17 pm
“So to avoid the mandate they’d have to go out of the business of serving all people in need, and become an in-house charitable service for Catholics only.”
Catholics would have to discriminate against non-Catholics. No non-Catholics need apply to our schools, seek food at our soup kitchens, find space at our homeless shelters, get treatment at our hospitals. The free exercise of religion—at least in our case—will have been curbed by the government.
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