Liberationist Intolerance

Wisconsin Diocese offers birth control insurance, but warns employees not to use it , declares a local newspaper, reporting on the Catholic diocese of Madison’s bowing to a state regulation requiring health plans to cover contraception.

[E]mployees will be expected to employ their consciences in not using it, King [the diocesan spokesman] said. “If someone were to misuse that freedom in this regard, it could be grounds for termination,” he said.

But then the story adds:

He acknowledged that the diocese has no way to police the issue — an employee would have to offer it up, he said.

Oh, and that’s going to happen. The story ends with a Planned Parenthood spokesman primly tsk-tsking people who are “spend[ing] energy trying to thwart the law,” in the reporter’s summary. She’s “disappointed” (they always are, or claim to be). “I would hope that we don’t have entities — Catholic or otherwise — trying to erect obstacles to health care for their employees,” she says.

We have in this law and in the unctuous and prissy disapproval of Planned Parenthood the public face of the sexual liberationists’ religious intolerance. They won’t say “I oppose Catholicism” or “I don’t want Catholics to be able to live by their principles.” They say, “I would hope that we don’t have organizations trying to erect obstacles to health care for their employees.”

For the sexual liberationists, the “right” to contracept is so fundamental a right that no diversity is to be allowed. It is a matter not of different views of the human good and of human flourishing, but of self-evidently good health care. The Church simply does not want to help its employees stay healthy. The Church wants them to suffer, and the State cannot allow that. It’s not intolerance, you see, it’s the promotion of objective human values this weird and dangerous organization refuses to recognize.

Archbishop Charles Chaput has written several articles for us on this growing ideological intolerance, most recently in Catholics, Health Care, and the Senate’s Bad Bill and The Captivity of “Catholic” Witness , as well as in The Vocation of Christians in American Public Life , his response to JFK’s notorious rejection of Catholicism as a public philosophy in his famous Houston address of 1960. I commend the articles.

Thanks to CatholicCulture.org for the link.