The Sunday morning talk shows were a cacophony of apoplectic right wingers like George Will and Matthew Dowd on This Week and David Brooks and GOP Strategist Alex Castellanos on Meet the Press attacking President Barack Obama for finally standing up to Catholic big business.
Obama did this by insisting that if a religious institution serves the general public, employs the general public, has a secular purpose, and takes public money, it must abide by the law: in this case, the Affordable Care Act, which requires employers to provide women with insurance coverage for all forms of birth control, without a deductible or co-pay. Excluded from this responsibility are directly religious entities, like churches.
These hysterical conservative voices are doing no more than echoing the latest spin brought to us by the Church's master spinmeisters: the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The bishops have been shouting from the rooftops that by this action, the administration is trampling "religious liberty."
The question is: Whose religious liberty?
Catholic women who choose to use birth control (more than 90% of American Catholic women) are making that decision based on one of the most cherished beliefs in the Catholic faith: the primacy of conscience.
Following one's conscience is not only the right of a Catholic, but the duty. Conscience is described eloquently (with a gender tweak) in the Vatican II document, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. It says:
"For woman has in her heart a law written by God: to obey it is the very dignity of woman: according to it she will be judged."
So thank you President Obama. You protected the religious liberty of the hundreds of thousands of Catholic women -- and non-Catholic women -- who work for these important institutions. You saw to it that these women have this crucial element of primary care, which, by helping them to space births, will go a long way towards protecting their health as mothers and the health of their infants.
Actually, it was a very pro-life move.
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This President correctly respected Religious institutions ans churches that primarily teach Religion and gave them all an exemption to this rule.
Hospitals' primary business is healthcare. Universities primary business is education. There are all kinds of employees hired and they deserve preventive care.
Fact Over 90 percent of Catholic women use or have used contraception
Fact 28 states already mandate that insurance conpanies provide contraception
Fact Birth control pills are used for several medical reasons and not just preventing unintended pregnancies
Fact This law does not force ANYONE to use contraception.
The rightwing nuts have it all wrong. It is not a war against Religion. It is a religious war against women. Are they afraid to let women control their own lives?
Such great words!
No one whose conscience dictates they not access birth control has to use birth control.
Those who wish to access birth control may, without consulting their bosses or employer/churches.
My employer has no say in what I do outside of the work hours for which I am paid.
Beautifully said.
(Disclosure: I personally know the author.)
All throughout church history, we see again and again events in which the church hierarchy simply got it wrong. They went for the politically and economically expedient and forgot that what makes a church spiritual is the unrelenting resilience of the human spirit that can sometimes only be expressed through the primacy of conscience. That the hierarchy refuses to follow this human principle often leads to its own foolish stands on morality and law. Such is the case with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
It is obvious to me that Obama has declared war on regious beliefs, and is trampling on the Constituttion!
Read past your bias and stop playing the victim.
If so, there's a whole lot of people who will quit going to Catholic hospitals because they would never contribute to the Catholic CHURCH.
Or is this too complicated for you to understand?