Saturday, February 18, 2012 4:41:13 AM
Before current birth-control fight, Republicans backed mandates
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee addresses the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. In 2005, he signed a state law requiring contraceptive coverage in health plans. It exempted churches but not church-affiliated hospitals and universities.
(Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images / February 10, 2012)
Republicans are fighting a birth-control rule in President Obama's healthcare law, but several states have enacted contraceptive mandates with the support of GOP lawmakers and governors.
By Kim Geiger and Noam N. Levey, Washington Bureau
February 15, 2012, 5:17 p.m.
Reporting from Washington—
Since President Obama moved to require Catholic hospitals and universities to offer their employees contraceptive health benefits, Republicans have rushed to accuse the administration of an unprecedented attack on religious freedoms.
None has been more forceful than former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who accused Obama of "a direct violation of the 1st Amendment." But years before the current partisan firestorm, GOP lawmakers and governors around the country, including Huckabee, backed similar mandates.
Twenty-two states have laws or regulations that resemble, at least in part, the Obama administration's original rule. More than a third had some Republican support, a review of state records shows.
In six states, including Arkansas, those contraceptive mandates were signed by GOP governors.
In Massachusetts in 2006, then-Gov. Mitt Romney signed a healthcare overhaul that kept in place a contraceptive mandate signed by his Republican predecessor. Now the GOP presidential candidate is calling the Obama rule an "assault on religion."
At the federal level, President George W. Bush never challenged a similar federal mandate imposed in 2000.
The state laws were the product of a campaign by women's groups and others that began after insurers started covering Viagra for men.
The cause has always drawn more support from Democrats, who pushed successfully in 2010 to include a provision in the healthcare law designed to expand women's access to preventive services like contraception.
But until recently, many Republicans also supported expanding access to contraceptives, even if it meant angering some religious constituencies.
In 1997, Sen. Olympia J. Snowe of Maine and then-Rep.James C. Greenwood of Pennsylvania cosponsored bills aimed at requiring contraceptive coverage nationally. Seven additional Senate Republicans and 15 other House Republicans signed on to the legislation, though it never became law.
Three years later, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which is responsible for enforcing laws against workplace discrimination, ruled all employers with more than 15 workers must cover contraceptives for women if they offer health plans that cover preventive services and prescription drugs.
When Republicans took control of Washington after Bush won the 2000 presidential election, his administration could have challenged that requirement, as it did other mandates.
But in his 2001 confirmation hearings to be attorney general, John Ashcroft told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he would "defend the rule" promulgated by the EEOC.
The original Obama regulation, released in January, went further than any state by requiring that women receive contraceptive benefits without co-pays or deductibles, as required for all preventive care under the healthcare law. But in exempting only some religious organizations, the administration followed what had become the approach used by many states.
The administration would have exempted an employer that "has the inculcation of religious values as its purpose," primarily employs and serves people of the same religion, and is a nonprofit.
That standard was understood to exempt churches, but not religiously affiliated hospitals and universities.
In the face of fierce blow-back, the administration has since proposed a compromise that makes insurers, rather than employers, responsible for the cost of contraceptive coverage for employees of religiously affiliated institutions.
Congressional Republicans are pushing legislation to exempt all employers from providing contraceptive [and/or any other]
coverage if it goes against their beliefs [or "moral convictions"].
In 2000, when Iowa became one of the first states to enact a contraceptive mandate, the Republican Legislature overwhelmingly backed the bill, which has no exemption for religious employers of any kind.
Even one of the law's few opponents did not move to exempt religious employers at the time, records show. Republican Rep. Steve King, a leading conservative who was then a state senator, instead proposed to exempt employers who did not cover Viagra. "We were not fighting the battle over conscience protection then," King said in an interview this week.
In Arizona, state Rep. Linda Binder, a pro-choice Republican, formed a bipartisan coalition to push her bill, which exempted churches but not other church-affiliated institutions, through the Republican-controlled Legislature. Then-Gov. Jane Hull, a Republican and a Catholic, signed the measure into law.
In New York, a similar law also won GOP support in the Legislature. It was signed in 2001 by Gov. George E. Pataki, another Republican.
Four years later, the Arkansas law easily cleared that state's Legislature, with help from Republican lawmakers, including two GOP cosponsors. Huckabee signed it in April 2005.
He defended the law in a statement. "Religious employers are not required to comply with this policy," he said. "My position is, and always has been, that religious entities shouldn't be forced to pay for contraception."
But like the original federal regulation proposed by Obama, the Arkansas law did not exempt church-affiliated hospitals and universities. It exempts only "religious employers" that are nonprofit organizations whose primary mission is "the inculcation of religious values," and primarily employ people who share the same religion, a standard few Catholic hospitals meet.
kim.geiger@latimes.com
noam.levey@latimes.com
*
Also
Birth-control flap shows the need to abort employer-based healthcare
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-lazarus-20120214,0,1294416.column
Obama's contraception compromise
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinionla/la-ed-contraceptives-20120214,0,6713590.story
Birth control hard to come by at Fordham University
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-fordham-20120211,0,3465426.story
*
Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/health/la-na-gop-contraceptives-20120216,0,3392996.story [with comments]
===
Birth Control, Bishops and Religious Authority
By GARY GUTTING
February 15, 2012, 9:00 pm
The Obama administration’s ruling requiring certain Catholic institutions like hospitals and universities to offer health insurance covering birth control prompted a furious response from the Catholic bishops. The bishops argued that this was a violation of conscience since birth control is contrary to teachings of the Catholic Church, as expressed in Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical “Humanae Vitae.”
What interests me as a philosopher — and a Catholic — is that virtually all parties to this often acrimonious debate have assumed that the bishops are right about this, that birth control is contrary to “the teachings of the Catholic Church.” The only issue is how, if at all, the government should “respect” this teaching.
As critics repeatedly point out, 98 percent of sexually active American Catholic women practice [ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/feb/06/cecilia-munoz/white-house-official-says-98-catholic-women-have-u/ ] birth control, and 78 percent of Catholics [ http://ncronline.org/news/catholics-america/what-core-american-catholics-2011 ] think a “good Catholic” can reject the bishops’ teaching on birth control. The response from the church, however, has been that, regardless of what the majority of Catholics do and think, the church’s teaching is that birth control is morally wrong. The church, in the inevitable phrase, “is not a democracy.” What the church teaches is what the bishops (and, ultimately, the pope, as head of the bishops) say it does.
But is this true? The answer requires some thought about the nature and basis of religious authority. Ultimately the claim is that this authority derives from God. But since we live in a human world in which God does not directly speak to us, we need to ask, Who decides that God has given, say, the Catholic bishops his authority?
It makes no sense to say that the bishops themselves can decide this, that we should accept their religious authority because they say God has given it to them. If this were so, anyone proclaiming himself a religious authority would have to be recognized as one. From where, then, in our democratic, secular society does such recognition properly come? It could, in principle, come from some other authority, like the secular government. But we have long given up the idea (“cujus regio, ejus religio”) that our government can legitimately designate the religious authority in its domain. But if the government cannot determine religious authority, surely no lesser secular power could. Theological experts could tell us what the bishops have taught over the centuries, but this does not tell us whether these teachings have divine authority.
In our democratic society the ultimate arbiter of religious authority is the conscience of the individual believer. It follows that there is no alternative to accepting the members of a religious group as themselves the only legitimate source of the decision to accept their leaders as authorized by God. They may be wrong, but their judgment is answerable to no one but God. In this sense, even the Catholic Church is a democracy.
But, even so, haven’t the members of the Catholic Church recognized their bishops as having full and sole authority to determine the teachings of the Church? By no means. There was, perhaps, a time when the vast majority of Catholics accepted the bishops as having an absolute right to define theological and ethical doctrines. Those days, if they ever existed, are long gone. Most Catholics — meaning, to be more precise, people who were raised Catholic or converted as adults and continue to take church teachings and practices seriously — now reserve the right to reject doctrines insisted on by their bishops and to interpret in their own way the doctrines that they do accept. This is above all true in matters of sexual morality, especially birth control, where the majority of Catholics have concluded that the teachings of the bishops do not apply to them. Such “reservations” are an essential constraint on the authority of the bishops.
The bishops and the minority of Catholics who support their full authority have tried to marginalize Catholics who do not accept the bishops as absolute arbiters of doctrine. They speak of “cafeteria Catholics” or merely “cultural Catholics,” and imply that the only “real Catholics” are those who accept their teachings entirely. But this marginalization begs the question I’m raising about the proper source of the judgment that the bishops have divine authority. Since, as I’ve argued, members of the church are themselves this source, it is not for the bishops but for the faithful to decide the nature and extent of episcopal authority. The bishops truly are, as they so often say, “servants of the servants of the Lord.”
It may be objected that, regardless of what individual Catholics think, the bishops in fact exercise effective control over the church. This is true in many respects, but only to the extent that members of the church accept their authority. Stalin’s alleged query about papal authority (“How many divisions does the Pope have?”) expresses more than just cynical realpolitik. The authority of the Catholic bishops is enforceable morally but not militarily or politically. It resides entirely in the fact that people freely accept it.
The mistake of the Obama administration — and of almost everyone debating its decision — was to accept the bishops’ claim that their position on birth control expresses an authoritative “teaching of the church.” (Of course, the administration may be right in thinking that the bishops need placating because they can cause them considerable political trouble.) The bishops’ claim to authority in this matter has been undermined because Catholics have decisively rejected it. The immorality of birth control is no longer a teaching of the Catholic Church. Pope Paul VI meant his 1968 encyclical, “Humanae Vitae,” to settle the issue in the manner of the famous tag, “Roma locuta est, causa finita est.” In fact the issue has been settled by the voice of the Catholic people.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/15/birth-control-and-the-challenge-to-divine-authority/ [with comments]
===
Bill Moyers Essay: Freedom of and From Religion
February 16, 2012
In this video essay [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbnRjupmH60 ], Bill Moyers addresses the question of how to honor religious liberty without it becoming the liberty to impose on others moral beliefs they don’t share. The recent debate over contraception coverage in Catholic hospitals and other faith-based institutions brought this question to the forefront, but then something surprising happened — a reasonable, practical, and equitable solution from President Obama [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/11/health/policy/obama-to-offer-accommodation-on-birth-control-rule-officials-say.html ] that took the political steam out of what some saw as a holy war.
Special thanks to historian Julie Pycior of Manhattan College for her helpful insights on this issue and this essay.
BILL MOYERS: The president did something agile and wise the other day. And something quite important to the health of our politics. He reached up and snuffed out what some folks wanted to make into a cosmic battle between good and evil. No, said the president, we’re not going to turn the argument over contraception into Armageddon, this is an honest difference between Americans, and I’ll not see it escalated into a holy war. So instead of the government requiring Catholic hospitals and other faith-based institutions to provide employees with health coverage involving contraceptives, the insurance companies will offer that coverage, and offer it free.
The Catholic bishops had cast the president’s intended policy as an infringement on their religious freedom; they hold birth control to be a mortal sin, and were incensed that the government might coerce them to treat it otherwise. The president in effect said: No quarrel there; no one’s going to force you to violate your doctrine. But Catholics are also Americans, and if an individual Catholic worker wants coverage, she should have access to it – just like any other American citizen. Under the new plan, she will. She can go directly to the insurer, and the religious institution is off the hook.
When the president announced his new plan, the bishops were caught flat-footed. It was so…so reasonable. In fact, leaders of several large, Catholic organizations have now said yes to the idea. But the bishops have since regrouped, and are now opposing any mandate to provide contraceptives even if their institutions are not required to pay for them. And for their own reasons, Republican leaders in Congress have weighed in on the bishops’ side. They’re demanding, and will get, a vote in the Senate.
SEN. MITCH MCCONNELL, R-KY The fact that the White House thinks this is about contraception is the whole problem. This is about freedom of religion. It`s right there in the first amendment. You can’t miss it, right there in the very First Amendment to our Constitution. And the government doesn’t get to decide for religious people what their religious beliefs are. They get to decide that.
BILL MOYERS: But here’s what Republicans don’t get, or won’t tell you. And what Obama manifestly does get. First, the war’s already lost: 98% of Catholic women of child-bearing age have used contraceptives. Second, on many major issues, the bishops are on Obama’s side—not least on extending unemployment benefits, which they call “a moral obligation.” Truth to tell, on economic issues, the bishops are often to the left of some leading Democrats, even if both sides are loathe to admit it. Furthermore, and shhh, don’t repeat this, even if the president already has, the Catholic Church funded Obama’s first community organizing, back in Chicago. Ah, politics.
So the battle over contraception no longer seems apocalyptic. No heavenly hosts pitted against the forces of Satan. It’s a political brawl, not a crusade of believers or infidels. The president skillfully negotiated the line between respect for the religious sphere and protection of the spiritual dignity and freedom of individuals. If you had listened carefully to the speech Barack Obama made in 2009 at the University of Notre Dame, you could have seen it coming:
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: The soldier and the lawyer may both love this country with equal passion, and yet reach very different conclusions on the specific steps needed to protect us from harm. The gay activist and the evangelical pastor may both deplore the ravages of HIV/AIDS, but find themselves unable to bridge the cultural divide that might unite their efforts. Those who speak out against stem-cell research may be rooted in an admirable conviction about the sacredness of life, but so are the parents of a child with juvenile diabetes who are convinced that their son’s or daughter’s hardships might be relieved. The question then is, “How do we work through these conflicts?”
BILL MOYERS: We Americans have wrestled with that question from the beginning. Some of our forebearers feared the church would corrupt the state. Others feared the state would corrupt the church. It’s been a real tug-of-war, sometimes quite ugly. Churches and religious zealots did get punitive laws passed against what they said were moral and religious evils: blasphemy, breaking the Sabbath, alcohol, gambling, books, movies, plays…and yes, contraception. But churches also fought to end slavery, help workers organize, and pass progressive laws. Of course, government had its favorites at times, for much of our history, it privileged the Protestant majority. And in my lifetime alone, it’s gone back and forth on how to apply the First Amendment to ever- changing circumstances among people so different from each other. The Supreme Court, for example, first denied, then affirmed, the right of the children of Jehovah’s Witnesses to refuse, on religious grounds, to salute the flag.
So here we are once again, arguing over how to honor religious liberty without it becoming the liberty to impose on others moral beliefs they don’t share. Our practical solution is the one Barack Obama embraced the other day, protect freedom of religion… and protect freedom from religion. Can’t get more American than that. I’m Bill Moyers.
*
© 2012 Public Affairs Television, Inc.
http://billmoyers.com/content/bill-moyers-essay-freedom-of-and-from-religion/ [with comments] [also at e.g. http://www.truth-out.org/bill-moyers-freedom-and-religion/1329422932 (with comments) and http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-moyers/obama-contraception-compromise-freedom-of-and-from-religion_b_1281942.html (with comments)] [video embedded in each and on Vimeo at http://vimeo.com/36901157 ]
===
Christopher Hitchens at Freedom From Religion Foundation FULL
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee addresses the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. In 2005, he signed a state law requiring contraceptive coverage in health plans. It exempted churches but not church-affiliated hospitals and universities.
(Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images / February 10, 2012)
Republicans are fighting a birth-control rule in President Obama's healthcare law, but several states have enacted contraceptive mandates with the support of GOP lawmakers and governors.
By Kim Geiger and Noam N. Levey, Washington Bureau
February 15, 2012, 5:17 p.m.
Reporting from Washington—
Since President Obama moved to require Catholic hospitals and universities to offer their employees contraceptive health benefits, Republicans have rushed to accuse the administration of an unprecedented attack on religious freedoms.
None has been more forceful than former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who accused Obama of "a direct violation of the 1st Amendment." But years before the current partisan firestorm, GOP lawmakers and governors around the country, including Huckabee, backed similar mandates.
Twenty-two states have laws or regulations that resemble, at least in part, the Obama administration's original rule. More than a third had some Republican support, a review of state records shows.
In six states, including Arkansas, those contraceptive mandates were signed by GOP governors.
In Massachusetts in 2006, then-Gov. Mitt Romney signed a healthcare overhaul that kept in place a contraceptive mandate signed by his Republican predecessor. Now the GOP presidential candidate is calling the Obama rule an "assault on religion."
At the federal level, President George W. Bush never challenged a similar federal mandate imposed in 2000.
The state laws were the product of a campaign by women's groups and others that began after insurers started covering Viagra for men.
The cause has always drawn more support from Democrats, who pushed successfully in 2010 to include a provision in the healthcare law designed to expand women's access to preventive services like contraception.
But until recently, many Republicans also supported expanding access to contraceptives, even if it meant angering some religious constituencies.
In 1997, Sen. Olympia J. Snowe of Maine and then-Rep.James C. Greenwood of Pennsylvania cosponsored bills aimed at requiring contraceptive coverage nationally. Seven additional Senate Republicans and 15 other House Republicans signed on to the legislation, though it never became law.
Three years later, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which is responsible for enforcing laws against workplace discrimination, ruled all employers with more than 15 workers must cover contraceptives for women if they offer health plans that cover preventive services and prescription drugs.
When Republicans took control of Washington after Bush won the 2000 presidential election, his administration could have challenged that requirement, as it did other mandates.
But in his 2001 confirmation hearings to be attorney general, John Ashcroft told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he would "defend the rule" promulgated by the EEOC.
The original Obama regulation, released in January, went further than any state by requiring that women receive contraceptive benefits without co-pays or deductibles, as required for all preventive care under the healthcare law. But in exempting only some religious organizations, the administration followed what had become the approach used by many states.
The administration would have exempted an employer that "has the inculcation of religious values as its purpose," primarily employs and serves people of the same religion, and is a nonprofit.
That standard was understood to exempt churches, but not religiously affiliated hospitals and universities.
In the face of fierce blow-back, the administration has since proposed a compromise that makes insurers, rather than employers, responsible for the cost of contraceptive coverage for employees of religiously affiliated institutions.
Congressional Republicans are pushing legislation to exempt all employers from providing contraceptive [and/or any other]
coverage if it goes against their beliefs [or "moral convictions"].
In 2000, when Iowa became one of the first states to enact a contraceptive mandate, the Republican Legislature overwhelmingly backed the bill, which has no exemption for religious employers of any kind.
Even one of the law's few opponents did not move to exempt religious employers at the time, records show. Republican Rep. Steve King, a leading conservative who was then a state senator, instead proposed to exempt employers who did not cover Viagra. "We were not fighting the battle over conscience protection then," King said in an interview this week.
In Arizona, state Rep. Linda Binder, a pro-choice Republican, formed a bipartisan coalition to push her bill, which exempted churches but not other church-affiliated institutions, through the Republican-controlled Legislature. Then-Gov. Jane Hull, a Republican and a Catholic, signed the measure into law.
In New York, a similar law also won GOP support in the Legislature. It was signed in 2001 by Gov. George E. Pataki, another Republican.
Four years later, the Arkansas law easily cleared that state's Legislature, with help from Republican lawmakers, including two GOP cosponsors. Huckabee signed it in April 2005.
He defended the law in a statement. "Religious employers are not required to comply with this policy," he said. "My position is, and always has been, that religious entities shouldn't be forced to pay for contraception."
But like the original federal regulation proposed by Obama, the Arkansas law did not exempt church-affiliated hospitals and universities. It exempts only "religious employers" that are nonprofit organizations whose primary mission is "the inculcation of religious values," and primarily employ people who share the same religion, a standard few Catholic hospitals meet.
kim.geiger@latimes.com
noam.levey@latimes.com
*
Also
Birth-control flap shows the need to abort employer-based healthcare
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-lazarus-20120214,0,1294416.column
Obama's contraception compromise
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinionla/la-ed-contraceptives-20120214,0,6713590.story
Birth control hard to come by at Fordham University
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-fordham-20120211,0,3465426.story
*
Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/health/la-na-gop-contraceptives-20120216,0,3392996.story [with comments]
===
Birth Control, Bishops and Religious Authority
By GARY GUTTING
February 15, 2012, 9:00 pm
The Obama administration’s ruling requiring certain Catholic institutions like hospitals and universities to offer health insurance covering birth control prompted a furious response from the Catholic bishops. The bishops argued that this was a violation of conscience since birth control is contrary to teachings of the Catholic Church, as expressed in Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical “Humanae Vitae.”
What interests me as a philosopher — and a Catholic — is that virtually all parties to this often acrimonious debate have assumed that the bishops are right about this, that birth control is contrary to “the teachings of the Catholic Church.” The only issue is how, if at all, the government should “respect” this teaching.
As critics repeatedly point out, 98 percent of sexually active American Catholic women practice [ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/feb/06/cecilia-munoz/white-house-official-says-98-catholic-women-have-u/ ] birth control, and 78 percent of Catholics [ http://ncronline.org/news/catholics-america/what-core-american-catholics-2011 ] think a “good Catholic” can reject the bishops’ teaching on birth control. The response from the church, however, has been that, regardless of what the majority of Catholics do and think, the church’s teaching is that birth control is morally wrong. The church, in the inevitable phrase, “is not a democracy.” What the church teaches is what the bishops (and, ultimately, the pope, as head of the bishops) say it does.
But is this true? The answer requires some thought about the nature and basis of religious authority. Ultimately the claim is that this authority derives from God. But since we live in a human world in which God does not directly speak to us, we need to ask, Who decides that God has given, say, the Catholic bishops his authority?
It makes no sense to say that the bishops themselves can decide this, that we should accept their religious authority because they say God has given it to them. If this were so, anyone proclaiming himself a religious authority would have to be recognized as one. From where, then, in our democratic, secular society does such recognition properly come? It could, in principle, come from some other authority, like the secular government. But we have long given up the idea (“cujus regio, ejus religio”) that our government can legitimately designate the religious authority in its domain. But if the government cannot determine religious authority, surely no lesser secular power could. Theological experts could tell us what the bishops have taught over the centuries, but this does not tell us whether these teachings have divine authority.
In our democratic society the ultimate arbiter of religious authority is the conscience of the individual believer. It follows that there is no alternative to accepting the members of a religious group as themselves the only legitimate source of the decision to accept their leaders as authorized by God. They may be wrong, but their judgment is answerable to no one but God. In this sense, even the Catholic Church is a democracy.
But, even so, haven’t the members of the Catholic Church recognized their bishops as having full and sole authority to determine the teachings of the Church? By no means. There was, perhaps, a time when the vast majority of Catholics accepted the bishops as having an absolute right to define theological and ethical doctrines. Those days, if they ever existed, are long gone. Most Catholics — meaning, to be more precise, people who were raised Catholic or converted as adults and continue to take church teachings and practices seriously — now reserve the right to reject doctrines insisted on by their bishops and to interpret in their own way the doctrines that they do accept. This is above all true in matters of sexual morality, especially birth control, where the majority of Catholics have concluded that the teachings of the bishops do not apply to them. Such “reservations” are an essential constraint on the authority of the bishops.
The bishops and the minority of Catholics who support their full authority have tried to marginalize Catholics who do not accept the bishops as absolute arbiters of doctrine. They speak of “cafeteria Catholics” or merely “cultural Catholics,” and imply that the only “real Catholics” are those who accept their teachings entirely. But this marginalization begs the question I’m raising about the proper source of the judgment that the bishops have divine authority. Since, as I’ve argued, members of the church are themselves this source, it is not for the bishops but for the faithful to decide the nature and extent of episcopal authority. The bishops truly are, as they so often say, “servants of the servants of the Lord.”
It may be objected that, regardless of what individual Catholics think, the bishops in fact exercise effective control over the church. This is true in many respects, but only to the extent that members of the church accept their authority. Stalin’s alleged query about papal authority (“How many divisions does the Pope have?”) expresses more than just cynical realpolitik. The authority of the Catholic bishops is enforceable morally but not militarily or politically. It resides entirely in the fact that people freely accept it.
The mistake of the Obama administration — and of almost everyone debating its decision — was to accept the bishops’ claim that their position on birth control expresses an authoritative “teaching of the church.” (Of course, the administration may be right in thinking that the bishops need placating because they can cause them considerable political trouble.) The bishops’ claim to authority in this matter has been undermined because Catholics have decisively rejected it. The immorality of birth control is no longer a teaching of the Catholic Church. Pope Paul VI meant his 1968 encyclical, “Humanae Vitae,” to settle the issue in the manner of the famous tag, “Roma locuta est, causa finita est.” In fact the issue has been settled by the voice of the Catholic people.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/15/birth-control-and-the-challenge-to-divine-authority/ [with comments]
===
Bill Moyers Essay: Freedom of and From Religion
February 16, 2012
In this video essay [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbnRjupmH60 ], Bill Moyers addresses the question of how to honor religious liberty without it becoming the liberty to impose on others moral beliefs they don’t share. The recent debate over contraception coverage in Catholic hospitals and other faith-based institutions brought this question to the forefront, but then something surprising happened — a reasonable, practical, and equitable solution from President Obama [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/11/health/policy/obama-to-offer-accommodation-on-birth-control-rule-officials-say.html ] that took the political steam out of what some saw as a holy war.
Special thanks to historian Julie Pycior of Manhattan College for her helpful insights on this issue and this essay.
Full Transcript
BILL MOYERS: The president did something agile and wise the other day. And something quite important to the health of our politics. He reached up and snuffed out what some folks wanted to make into a cosmic battle between good and evil. No, said the president, we’re not going to turn the argument over contraception into Armageddon, this is an honest difference between Americans, and I’ll not see it escalated into a holy war. So instead of the government requiring Catholic hospitals and other faith-based institutions to provide employees with health coverage involving contraceptives, the insurance companies will offer that coverage, and offer it free.
The Catholic bishops had cast the president’s intended policy as an infringement on their religious freedom; they hold birth control to be a mortal sin, and were incensed that the government might coerce them to treat it otherwise. The president in effect said: No quarrel there; no one’s going to force you to violate your doctrine. But Catholics are also Americans, and if an individual Catholic worker wants coverage, she should have access to it – just like any other American citizen. Under the new plan, she will. She can go directly to the insurer, and the religious institution is off the hook.
When the president announced his new plan, the bishops were caught flat-footed. It was so…so reasonable. In fact, leaders of several large, Catholic organizations have now said yes to the idea. But the bishops have since regrouped, and are now opposing any mandate to provide contraceptives even if their institutions are not required to pay for them. And for their own reasons, Republican leaders in Congress have weighed in on the bishops’ side. They’re demanding, and will get, a vote in the Senate.
SEN. MITCH MCCONNELL, R-KY The fact that the White House thinks this is about contraception is the whole problem. This is about freedom of religion. It`s right there in the first amendment. You can’t miss it, right there in the very First Amendment to our Constitution. And the government doesn’t get to decide for religious people what their religious beliefs are. They get to decide that.
BILL MOYERS: But here’s what Republicans don’t get, or won’t tell you. And what Obama manifestly does get. First, the war’s already lost: 98% of Catholic women of child-bearing age have used contraceptives. Second, on many major issues, the bishops are on Obama’s side—not least on extending unemployment benefits, which they call “a moral obligation.” Truth to tell, on economic issues, the bishops are often to the left of some leading Democrats, even if both sides are loathe to admit it. Furthermore, and shhh, don’t repeat this, even if the president already has, the Catholic Church funded Obama’s first community organizing, back in Chicago. Ah, politics.
So the battle over contraception no longer seems apocalyptic. No heavenly hosts pitted against the forces of Satan. It’s a political brawl, not a crusade of believers or infidels. The president skillfully negotiated the line between respect for the religious sphere and protection of the spiritual dignity and freedom of individuals. If you had listened carefully to the speech Barack Obama made in 2009 at the University of Notre Dame, you could have seen it coming:
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: The soldier and the lawyer may both love this country with equal passion, and yet reach very different conclusions on the specific steps needed to protect us from harm. The gay activist and the evangelical pastor may both deplore the ravages of HIV/AIDS, but find themselves unable to bridge the cultural divide that might unite their efforts. Those who speak out against stem-cell research may be rooted in an admirable conviction about the sacredness of life, but so are the parents of a child with juvenile diabetes who are convinced that their son’s or daughter’s hardships might be relieved. The question then is, “How do we work through these conflicts?”
BILL MOYERS: We Americans have wrestled with that question from the beginning. Some of our forebearers feared the church would corrupt the state. Others feared the state would corrupt the church. It’s been a real tug-of-war, sometimes quite ugly. Churches and religious zealots did get punitive laws passed against what they said were moral and religious evils: blasphemy, breaking the Sabbath, alcohol, gambling, books, movies, plays…and yes, contraception. But churches also fought to end slavery, help workers organize, and pass progressive laws. Of course, government had its favorites at times, for much of our history, it privileged the Protestant majority. And in my lifetime alone, it’s gone back and forth on how to apply the First Amendment to ever- changing circumstances among people so different from each other. The Supreme Court, for example, first denied, then affirmed, the right of the children of Jehovah’s Witnesses to refuse, on religious grounds, to salute the flag.
So here we are once again, arguing over how to honor religious liberty without it becoming the liberty to impose on others moral beliefs they don’t share. Our practical solution is the one Barack Obama embraced the other day, protect freedom of religion… and protect freedom from religion. Can’t get more American than that. I’m Bill Moyers.
*
© 2012 Public Affairs Television, Inc.
http://billmoyers.com/content/bill-moyers-essay-freedom-of-and-from-religion/ [with comments] [also at e.g. http://www.truth-out.org/bill-moyers-freedom-and-religion/1329422932 (with comments) and http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-moyers/obama-contraception-compromise-freedom-of-and-from-religion_b_1281942.html (with comments)] [video embedded in each and on Vimeo at http://vimeo.com/36901157 ]
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Christopher Hitchens at Freedom From Religion Foundation FULL
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tE8GY5FUVWQ
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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