I have often written in this space criticizing the American Catholic bishops, but today, after reading their response to the Obama administration’s risibly cosmetic revision to its contraception mandate, I can say with delight that the bishops make me proud to be a Catholic.
The key point is that the bishops have not been fooled by the administration’s absurd canard that, if we merely say that an employer is not required to purchase contraceptive coverage for its employees but then require the insurer to provide the employees with such coverage free of charge anyway, the employer is not purchasing the coverage. As the bishops put it, such “coverage is still provided as a part of the objecting employer’s plan, financed in the same way as the rest of the coverage offered by the objecting employer.” In other words, as I argued yesterday, it’s the same system as before, except that President Obama says that it isn’t, and we’re supposed to be fools enough to believe him.
Moreover, I owe the bishops an apology, for in an earlier post, I had said that the bishops were wrong to frame this issue as one of religious freedom for religious institutions. I argued that if the relevant practices are wrong in the way the Church says they are, then it is wrong for the government to force any employer—not just religious employers—to fund them. I said that the bishops should not limit their objection to the rule’s application to religious employers but should object to it in much broader terms.
In fact, this is exactly what the bishops had been saying all along, as the latest press release makes perfectly clear:
We objected to the rule forcing private health plans … to cover sterilization and contraception, including drugs that may cause abortion…. [W]e explained that the mandate would impose a burden of unprecedented reach and severity on the consciences of those who consider such “services” immoral: insurers forced to write policies including this coverage; employers and schools forced to sponsor and subsidize the coverage; and individual employees and students forced to pay premiums for the coverage. We therefore urged HHS, if it insisted on keeping the mandate, to provide a conscience exemption for all of these stakeholders—not just the extremely small subset of “religious employers” that HHS proposed to exempt initially.
From the very start, the bishops had this right. Shame on me for trusting the accounts in the mainstream media and not reading the bishops’ own statements.
The bishops conclude that “the lack of clear protection for key stakeholders—for self-insured religious employers; for religious and secular for-profit employers; for secular non-profit employers; for religious insurers; and for individuals—is unacceptable and must be corrected.” Hence, “Rescission of [the] mandate [is the] only complete solution.”
So here we have the Catholic bishops preaching the word out of season. It is a good day to be a Catholic in America.
February 11th, 2012 | 5:52 am
I signed a whitehouse.gov petition the other day, demanding that the thing be rescinded. The Whitehouse sent out a response yesterday –presumably to all signatories– stating its re-packaged position, and claiming endorsements for it from such “diverse” groups as Planned Parenthood and something called “Catholics United”. Does this demonstrate that the administration is clueless or just shameless?
February 11th, 2012 | 7:58 am
A good day indeed to be a Catholic here. Let us all pray for the virtue of fortitude, to stay the course for what could be a long battle.
Here in Texas, we say “fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me!” Cardinal-elect Dolan was not to be fooled twice, thank God, by the Son of Lies.
Behind the scenes is a quiet, frumpy-looking and unassuming man who is probably largely responsible for keeping a clear head and making the cogent arguments cited in this post–Richard Doerflinger of the USCCB. Good to have a man like that on the job!
For us Catholics, now is a renewed opportunity to look into our own hearts and make a discovery that many have missed. That the Church’s teaching against contraception is not only to be defended against government coercion because it is OURS as a religious institution, but because it is TRUE. And being true, it is also good and beautiful. Natural sex is the best sex, and the only sex which is morally acceptable.
February 11th, 2012 | 8:17 am
The bishops were loaded for bear on this one.
I can’t recall them ever being so prepared.
February 11th, 2012 | 10:20 am
” Does this demonstrate that the administration is clueless or just shameless?”
Shameless. The petitition page at whitehouse.gov also includes a petition to “Take these petitions seriously.” I don’t think they take any of them seriously. Just as they don’t take anyone else’s point of view seriously
February 11th, 2012 | 10:46 am
How long this good day lasts remains to be seen. These are the same bishops, after all, who could not, or would not, see this coming.
One of them, Archbishop Broglio, negotiated with the Army’s Office of the Chief Chaplain to edit out reference to “unjust law” from the original letter. Our bishops have been quiet on the serious matter of seeking government approval for their own conscientious homiletic wording.
It helps to remember that Lord Acton’s famous remark on the corrupting influence of power was directed at the Church hierarchy of his day. We have yet to see if our bishops acquire the courage to put prophecy ahead of power. There is little risk in letter writing.
February 11th, 2012 | 10:53 am
Thank you, Sydney. Maybe you can help me out with this, too: I am unfamiliar with “Catholics United”. Is that like “Quislings United” or more like “Renfields United”?
February 11th, 2012 | 11:51 am
From the Catholics United website:
James Salt – Executive Director
James has extensive experience working with national progressive Catholic peace and justice organizations as well as political campaigns involving Catholic strategy. He has worked for Pax Christi USA as a leader Pax Christi’s Young Adult Forum, NETWORK, A National Catholic Social Justice Lobby, and was part of the launch team of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good. Most recently, he held an organizing position Maryland Citizens Against State Executions, and oversaw the Kansas Democratic Party’s faith outreach efforts, including messaging work for Governor Sebelius and development of faith-based messaging resources. James lives in Washington, DC.
Sheesh!
February 11th, 2012 | 2:07 pm
“Does this demonstrate that the administration is clueless or just shameless?”
I vote for shameless too. When you claim you changed a regulation and don’t change it at all, you are insulting people’s intelligence.
February 11th, 2012 | 2:46 pm
The headline in our morning newspaper today was that “Obama reverses course on birth control policy.” I hope the bishops make it clear to the faithful that this most certainly wasn’t a reversal, because the news media is spinning it that way, and many people still trust the newspapers.
February 11th, 2012 | 5:36 pm
If you check out “Catholics United” you will find that it is a leftwing organization funded, by among others…George Soros.
The MSM is citing it as an example of how Catholics are coming around to Obama’s position.
The media are not only a disgraceful bunch of liars, they are on the Obama team.
February 11th, 2012 | 6:03 pm
Early on, the President said he wanted to be a “uniter”. Well, Mr. President, you’ve succeeded gloriously! This Protestant is UNITED, 4-square, with you Catholics on this one! I suspect I’m not the only one, either!
He’s not clueless at all … but he thinks we are!
February 12th, 2012 | 3:27 pm
With others, I am delighted that the bishops stood up to the evil, but it seems to me that they made their ultimate opposition less effective when they made that first crack about the “revision” being “a first step in the right direction.” The rule is, don’t respond until you know what you’re talking about. We have to hope that the strength and unanimity of their opposition to the mandate will overcome in the public mind the impression of vacillation.
February 12th, 2012 | 9:34 pm
Mr. Miller, I think your earlier criticisms of the bishops were more valid than you recognize. The emphasis of the bishops in too many of their public statements has been on the impact of the HHS rule on religious employers. For instance, Archbishop Dolan’s widely-cited piece in the Wall Street Journal contains only the lightest implication that the rule violates the rights of non-religious private employers. The interviews given by many other bishops have been similarly deficient. See, for instance, Cardinal Wuerl on Morning Joe. The number of people who read these op-eds and see these interviews is far greater than those who parse through the unnecessarily lengthy and ponderous statements of the USCCB. So, no shame on you at all!
February 13th, 2012 | 7:51 am
@Robert T Miller,
I would like to hear responses from First Things writers to Paul Rahe’s piece over at Ricochet. To get an idea what Rahe has to say, the title of the article is “American Catholicism’s Pact with the Devil.”
February 13th, 2012 | 8:34 am
Mr. Johnson:
Rahe’s piece is a long one, and I’m not entirely sure to which point you want me to reply. If, however, it is the primary point that Rahe seems to be making–that the bishops object to Catholic institutions being required to provide coverage for contraception, but “they raise no objection at all to the fact that Catholic employers and corporations, large and small, owned wholly or partially by Roman Catholics will be required to do the same”–then Rahe’s point is factually mistaken, as I expressly pointed out in this very post. Thus, I quoted from the bishops’ most recent letter, in which they say that the revised mandate would violate the rights of conscience of “employers” generally and in which they expressly say that “the lack of clear protection for … secular for-profit employers …. and for individuals—is unacceptable and must be corrected.”
It is the case of religious employers like Catholic hosptials, schools, and universities that has got all the attention, but in fact the bishops’ objection applies to employers generally, as indeed logically it should.
February 13th, 2012 | 9:02 am
I am not a Catholic (if anything, agnostic), but often line up with Catholics on social issues. I find the Catholic church to be the only major institution standing against the narcissism that dominates our culture.
Yesterday, the Obama administration’s spokesman was asked by Chris Wallace (I think – I’m not a big tv watcher) where the authority to order a private entity to provide free services is located. The answer was that it is located in the Affordable Care Act! This is a major admission, in my view and if this is what the Obama administration believes, what is to prevent them from ordering that abortion services be directly provided after the election is over? Or anything else, for that matter. That this is limited to health related imperatives was not asserted, nor was he asked about it.
A question that Wallace did not ask involves the math. Sibelius has claimed that insurers will save money by providing contraceptive services without cost to the insured party. Yet she also claimed that these services were too expensive ($600 a year was quoted) for individuals to pay for themselves. Someone will be paying for this – probably all of us given the same setup for covering pre-existing conditions. The party suffering from the pre-existing condition cannot be asked to pay extra for coverage, so all of us will pay for it. I’m not suggesting that is a bad thing, but it provides the model.
Finally, the claim that insurers save money by providing contraceptive services only makes sense if the recipient women never get pregnant. If they do, and probably most will, the insurer will pay for coverage for both contraceptives AND one or more pregnancies.
No one has yet called them on this, though it seems obvious to me.
February 13th, 2012 | 10:31 am
@Robert T. Miller
You are certainly correct that Paul Rahe overlooked the points you raised.
But as much as I am encouraged by what I am hearing today from the Bishops (and believe me, I am encouraged), I can’t help but ask why the Bishops were silent last year when it became clear that Obamacare had no conscience protections.
And more to the point, why weren’t the Bishops writing such letters before the 2008 election when Obama was the only Illinois state Senator who voted against providing care to babies born of a botched abortion? He voted to continue the practice that such children should be left uncared for in broom closets, or killed through strangulation or suffocation.
Again, I agree with what you’ve written in your post, and I am thankful for what the Bishops are doing now, but personally I can’t forget their comparative silence (and certainly many spoke out) over Obama’s vote against the Born Alive act–something that might have cost him the election had the Church chosen to put the spotlight on that issue that they are putting on Obamacare today.
And more broadly, turning back to Rahe’s piece, I hope to hear more from Catholic writers at First Things in response to Rahe’s piece, and specifically what Rahe wrote here:
That might seem well beyond the limits of the current debate, but I don’t believe it is. This is the core of Rahe’s piece, I think, which is that social justice became the core mission of so much of the church that they became enablers of the ever-growing power of the state, unrestrained by the church. Obamacare should have come as a surprise to no one in the Catholic Church, along with so many other overreaching government programs that embrace its same assumptions.
February 13th, 2012 | 10:59 am
Mr. Johnson:
Re the President’s positions on children born after botched abortions, I join you in deploring them, but they are not relevant to this discussion.
Re the larger point you quote from Rahe’s article, if you’re a regular reader of FT, you’ll know that this point has been made countless times in the magazine and website by any number of authors going back decades. Wouldn’t it make more sense for you to make this argument on, say, the website of Commonweal?
February 13th, 2012 | 11:15 am
As a Presbyterian pastor who respectfully disagrees with my Roman Catholic brothers and sisters on contraception, I nevertheless stand with you against this outrageous government overreach. And the so-called compromise is nothing but an accounting gimmick. You have my prayers and support.
February 13th, 2012 | 11:16 am
Dear Mr. Miller,
I disagree that Obama’s extreme position on abortion is not relevant to the contraception and abortifacient provisions of his own healthcare law. Personally, I don’t see how anyone can separate the two, but on that point we’ll agree to disagree.
Rahe was making his point as background to help explain why the Catholic Bishops remained silent for so long about Obama and Obamacare. I think its hard to dispute Rahe’s point that there’s a connection between the two, but again, we’ll agree to disagree.
As for Commonweal, I don’t read it. I know nothing about it.
February 13th, 2012 | 11:54 am
The key point is that the bishops have not been fooled by the administration’s absurd canard that, if we merely say that an employer is not required to purchase contraceptive coverage for its employees but then require the insurer to provide the employees with such coverage free of charge anyway, the employer is not purchasing the coverage.
Correct me if I’m wrong but the individual is to be offered the option to have free coverage which they may accept or reject. The employer, whose supposedly is buying this coverage, doesn’t have his rates altered based on how many employees accept or reject the coverage. This leads to a rather absurd view….
Suppose one year every employee rejects the coverage. Employers rate doesn’t go down or up. Suppose next year every employee accepts the coverage, rate doesn’t go up or down. Exactly how is the employer buying anything in year 2? Answer, he isn’t.
Insurance companies are happy to offer contraception free of charge or for marginal co-pays because it reduces overall healthcare costs. Some of this is for obvious reasons; abortion is more expensive than contraception, child birth is more expensive than abortion. Some for less obvious reasons, being on the pill requires at least yearly checkups where other fast, low cost screening for various medical problems can be done, contraceptives can sometimes be used for medical purposes that have nothing to do with preventing pregnancy.
So you already have your religious freedom. If any person feels lower cost health plans violate their conscience because reaping savings provided by contraception is ‘blood money’, then they should be free to pay more. Catholic affiliated institutions (not churches since they are totally exempt to begin with), are perfectly free to commission an estimate of cost savings they reap from contraceptive plans and put that money towards, say, enhanced beneifits for childbirth. Only a min. level of benefits has been defined, there is no prohibition on offering more.
Douglas Johnson
I disagree that Obama’s extreme position on abortion is not relevant to the contraception and abortifacient provisions of his own healthcare law.
YAWN, the health bill included an unprecedented compromise on abortion. For the fist time ever individuals will have to buy abortion coverage in the form of two seperate policies..before nearly everyone who enjoyed employer provided health coverage reaped huge tax benefits for policies that almost always included abortion. Think of it, all during the eras of pro-life heros like Reagan, Bush I and II day in day out gov’t policy subsidized health plans that provided for abortion and contraception coverage with not a peep. Now abortion coverage is singled out for special treatment because so many do feel so strongly on it and to what benefit?
Well none at all. No matter what you try to give the pro-life movement, it will be an ‘extreme pro-abortion position’ unless you give them 100% or unless you’re a Republican. This blog illustrated that not too long ago where a 20% decline in abortions in NYC was respun as an increase through the most tortured abuse of mathematics. For what reason? The most plausible is that no ‘good news’ should be allowed if it came from a polity what was firmly pro-choice politically. At a certain point, the issue the Catholic Bishops and the pro-life community will have to confront is are they really dedicated to their consciences or has group loyality to the GOP subtlely been substituted in its place?
February 13th, 2012 | 12:37 pm
Boonton,
As usual you make numerous claims some more plausible than others. I’ll start with a simple one.
“Insurance companies are happy to offer contraception free of charge or for marginal co-pays because it reduces overall healthcare costs.”
How do you know they are happy to offer contraceptive care “free of charge”? Do you know the reason for co-pay? Allow me to explain a little. Insurers know quite well the microeconomic explanation of the relationship of supply, demand, and price. If contraception was essentially free, there would be no need for a co-pay. So why do they charge it? Habit? So which ones offer it for free?
As to contraceptives resulting in women with health insurance getting checkups whereas they don’t when there are no contraceptives (as implied by the claim). You do know the basic service of health insurance and the service most promoted by the insurers, right? Checkups. With or without contraceptives. I think you may have confused women who can’t afford to go to the doctor at all because they _don’t_ have insurance with those that do have insurance.
As to your extended ad hominems, I agree that there are people who post to this web site that make outrageous claims.
February 13th, 2012 | 1:36 pm
Mike
As usual you make numerous claims some more plausible than others. I’ll start with a simple one.
That’s good to hear. If all my claims were exactly equally plusible then maybe I’d be lucky in being 100% right about everything, but if I was wrong in just one thing then I’d be 100% wrong about everything. A diversity of plausible claims then is welcome news!
How do you know they are happy to offer contraceptive care “free of charge”? Do you know the reason for co-pay? Allow me to explain a little. Insurers know quite well the microeconomic explanation of the relationship of supply, demand, and price. If contraception was essentially free, there would be no need for a co-pay. So why do they charge it? Habit? So which ones offer it for free?
Well let’s limit our discussion to the pill. We have generic pills out there as well as some newer pills that aren’t. All things being equal insurance companies would rather a patient opt for a cheaper generic than a premium non-generic unless there was some reason the older generic would not be good for that particular patient. As for it being ‘free’, the pill itself is not free. Whether it’s generic or not the pharmacy gets paid when the person fills the script. If the insurance company isn’t raising rates for the employer, then the cost of the script is either coming directly from the company’s profits (in which case stockholders are paying for it) or it’s coming from reduced spending on other medical things (in which case the employer may be reaping all or some of the savings rather than paying for the pill, actually figuring out how much savings is going to the employer and how much to the company’s profit line is a rather devilish accounting or microeconomics question).
You do know the basic service of health insurance and the service most promoted by the insurers, right? Checkups. With or without contraceptives. I think you may have confused women who can’t afford to go to the doctor at all because they _don’t_ have insurance with those that do have insurance.
Since you need a script for the pill that has to be renewed on a regular basis, you will have to show up to the doctor on a regular basis for a regular checkup. Believe it or not just as there are some ‘doctor hogs’ who hit their doctor every few months with their insurance, there are also people who only hit their doctor if there’s something really wrong. While hogs do drive up costs a bit, it’s probably the doctor shy people the insurance companies would rather get into the office once or twice a year. In any given year, a person who isn’t having any major problem is probably perfectly fine, but for most people something really bad is probably going to happen sooner or later. Take cancer, diabeties, heart disease/attack, stroke for example. On that unhappy wheel probably 80-90% of us are going to end up drawing at least one sooner or later. The person who never needs a doctor is probably going to drive costs up quite a bit when s(he) doesn’t catch something sooner so yea insurance companies like the fact that you have a regular relationship with your doc.
As to your extended ad hominems, I agree that there are people who post to this web site that make outrageous claims.
Pet peeve here, I made no ad hominem. This is an ad hominem:
“You’re assertion is wrong because you’re stupid.”
You may or may not be stupid but that wouldn’t make your assertion wrong. If its wrong it is wrong because it is false, you being smart or stupid doesn’t make it true or false.
“Your assertion is wrong, so it’s stupid to demand that we take it seriously”
Ahhh this is harsh but not an ad hominem. If it’s wrong then it’s wrong and should be treated as such.
Now I don’t think I made either attack here. Fact is Obama has not gotten any credit for cutting in favor of pro-life demands (i.e. the decision to override the FDA regarding the morning after pill for teens, splitting abortion coverage away from health care reform). If you’re going to be trashed as a radical no matter what you give, then why bother giving at all? Screw those who are demanding compromise, at least until they learn to practice the art themselves. And I think its a perfectly reasonable hypothesis to claim that the reason for this lack of honesty stems from the pro-life movement having embedded itself so firmly as a sub-group of the Republican Party that it has ceased to have any real claim on our attention as anything other than a Republican spin group.
(Speaking of which, why no discussion of the question of whether or not dropping contraception coverage may end up causing abortions? Even if they are paid for by a woman’s own funds rather than insurance, wouldn’t pro-lifers be concerned about a policy that might indirectly increase abortion? It wasn’t even 15 years ago when the Catholic Bishops came out against the Gingrich/Clinton welfare reform bill which capped payments for women who had additional children while on welfare on the grounds that such a policy might make abortion more economically rational for some women.)
February 13th, 2012 | 7:44 pm
“That’s good to hear. If all my claims were exactly equally plusible then maybe I’d be lucky in being 100% right about everything, but if I was wrong in just one thing then I’d be 100% wrong about everything. A diversity of plausible claims then is welcome news!”
If you think there’s that close of a relationship between plausibility and truth, there’s a problem right there.
February 13th, 2012 | 7:46 pm
“Speaking of which, why no discussion of the question of whether or not dropping contraception coverage may end up causing abortions?”
Because “dropping” contraception coverage isn’t at issue here.
February 14th, 2012 | 6:14 am
If you think there’s that close of a relationship between plausibility and truth, there’s a problem right there.
There’s certainly a correlation. I’m willing to grant it’s not 100% if you’re willing to grant it’s not 0% ;)
Because “dropping” contraception coverage isn’t at issue here.
Why would that be relevant? If some population of women, say 10,000 was having 500 abortions per year without coverage but with coverage only has 400 that is a 20% decline. I grant a serious pro-lifer would not be happy with 400 abortions a year but look at the huge efforts some pro-lifers go in order to convince individual women no to have abortions, counting even a single changed mind as a great victory. (This does raise an odd existential question of whether it’s better to exist even for a month inside a womb versus never having life at all but that’s not one I see many pro-lifers or anyone for that matter address much)
February 14th, 2012 | 3:14 pm
It’s relevant whether dropping contraception is at issue, since you raised the issue in terms of dropping contraception.
But nobody’s talking about dropping anything.
February 14th, 2012 | 4:14 pm
I think you’re making a distinction without a difference. In one universe imagine you’re talking about dropping contraceptive coverage and incurring as a cost 100 additional abortions, in another universe you are talking about adding contraceptive coverage which will reduce about 100 abortions. The policy in both universes is functionally the same. Which universe we happen to be in (and reality is a little bit of both) doesn’t alter the morality or wisdom of the proposed policy one bit.
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