Never mind the red herring in this defense of the contraceptive mandate (which applies whether or not you take federal money), the argument itself is quite breathtaking. The argument goes something like this: when you take money from the federal government, you sell your soul to the [fill in the blank]. Recipients of federal funding can be forced to behave in all sorts of ways that violate their consciences.
The only way to avoid this is to opt out of government money, not really practical (let alone desirable) for hospitals, universities, or social service agencies. (Yes, I’ve heard of Hillsdale and Grove City, which may have come close to cornering the fund-raising market for not being beholden to Mammon.) If government were to be pared back to a pre-New Deal size, institutions that weren’t recipients of public funding wouldn’t be at a competitive disadvantage. But for the foreseeable future, the only effect of opting out would be that non-governmental purveyors of health, educational, and social services would be crowded out of the market. Doubtless some people would like to see this happen, but I’m not one of them.
This brings me back to the principle articluated by Prof. Fendrich. Let’s apply it to higher education. She is doubtless employed by an institution that receives federal funds. By her lights, that means that the federal government can dictate curriculum and the contents of courses, regardless of some quaint concern with academic freedom. She’d probably be O.K. with Professor Obama’s gentle hand at the helm, but Rick Santorum’s old friend Bill Bennett?
It seems to me that there are two alternatives to this highly undesirable (albeit not altogether implausible–consider the ways in which states regulate elementary and secondary curricula) situation. One is to insist that government expenditures have to respect First Amendment (freedom of speech and of religion) strictures. The other is to argue that, regardless of the precise applicability of the First Amendment, government ought to leave as much autonomy as possible to the institutions it helps finance. In practice, the former argument leaves our conscientious freedom to the vagaries of the composition of the Supreme Court, while the latter leaves them to the composition and far-sightedness of legislative majorities. At the moment, I’m actually somewhat more inclined to rely on those majorities, given what I’ve seen from all too many judges.
February 9th, 2012 | 3:34 pm
The impractical is all we have left.
I find this debate rather saddening, largely because the compromises that have been made make it very easy for us to lose it. One should have no expectation that voting, campaigning, petitioning, etc… will have any effect. The people who would actually take the hit if they pulled away from the government are too invested in the status quo, and the government knows it.
February 9th, 2012 | 7:08 pm
Amen! No one would accept similar restrictions on secular beliefs protected by the First Amendment – say a requirement that biology courses include creationism or a prohibition on expressing certain anti- government ideas (like opposition to the draft) in a history class. Somehow, religious liberty is different (even though it’s protected in the same First Amendment). This is all about stamping out “pernicious” opposition to abortion, just as the Fugitive Slave Act was meant to stamp out abolitionism. If there’s any good in all of this, it’s that Justice Kennedy will be hard-pressed to uphold Obamacare now that it’s obvious that liberals will use Obamacare to render the Constitution a meaningless nullity.
February 9th, 2012 | 8:27 pm
As Megan McArdle observed, it’s as if there were scads of people striving to care for the poor, and the Catholics ought to be grateful they were chosen.
February 9th, 2012 | 11:27 pm
Let’s get real here; what’s going on here isn’t anything new. There’s no requirement in the mandate that Catholic institutions change their doctrinal “curriculum”, so the curricular analogy is a bad one. Rather, the effect of the mandate basically mirrors what the Solomon Amendment did when Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was in place. Institutions of higher education receiving funding from the federal government were required to allow the military to recruit on campus, regardless whether they had in place non-discrimination policies covering sexual orientation.
February 9th, 2012 | 11:46 pm
“, institutions that weren’t recipients of public funding wouldn’t be at a competitive disadvantage”
What is that supposed to mean?. That they won’t get top-ranking professors or doctors?. Why is that more important that maintaining institution’s integrity as a Catholic institution?
February 10th, 2012 | 7:58 am
The problem with analogies that attempt to provoke empathy is that they are not equivalent in scale. The Church believes that abortifacients kill people. The HHS mandate forces us to participate in and pay for murder. That is worse than being subjected to ideologically objectionable curricula. It is also worse than the other examples I have seen—Jews and Moslems having to pay for pork products, etc.
I don’t know what most leftists consider a comparable sacred cow. What is their line in the sand? I thought the First Amendment was a candidate, but I was wrong.
February 10th, 2012 | 9:30 am
“I don’t know what most leftists consider a comparable sacred cow. What is their line in the sand? I thought the First Amendment was a candidate, but I was wrong.”
Peg, I think we ARE seeing it here and with the Komen case. The sacred cow is “access to” abortion and contraception (as they define access, meaning “compelling other people to pay for it so as to allow it to create no inconvenience to anyone.”) That’s why this one is playing out like this — that’s why the administration can’t just say, “You know what? I think the Catholics are wrong here but it’s not worth the fight” and why Komen had to back down. Because not-providing-funding for abortion and contraception-related matters is like killing babies to them.
February 10th, 2012 | 9:31 am
“Them” meaning the leftists that are pushing that side of the debate, not necessarily the administration or Komen itself.
February 11th, 2012 | 12:08 am
It occurs to me that many would object if the government forced them to buy guns as some kind of second amendment requirement.
February 12th, 2012 | 5:40 am
Back in the days when the government relied on citizen militias it could and did require men to buy guns in connection with their service in the militia. Lawyers defending Obamacare in the Supreme Court rely heavily on that precedent in support of the constitutionality of the individual mandate.
February 13th, 2012 | 11:30 am
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