A well-known lawyer, Clarence Darrow said, "As long as the world shall last there will be wrongs, and if no man objected and no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever."
The question of wrongs and objection exist today -- now surrounding the U.S. Department of Health and Human Resources' (HHS) Interim final rule, which amends a provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). The rule requires employers to provide health insurance that covers certain preventative services for women, including contraception, sterilization and abortifacients, in accordance with the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) guidelines. It also allows HRSA the discretion to exempt religious organizations from these guidelines.
However, the exemption is moot because the law's definition of "religious" is flawed. It defines a religious employer as having as its purpose to 1) cultivate religious values, 2) primarily employ people who share the organization's religious tenets and 3) primarily serve people who share its religious tenets.
The problem with this is obvious: churches may be exempt from the requirements, but religious universities, hospitals and organizations are not. This poses a serious crisis of conscious for religious employers. If they follow the law and provide "preventative services" for free to their students, employees, or clients, they go against the very beliefs they and their organizations espouse.
If religious employers refuse to provide these services, they will be required to pay a hefty fine to the government, which could ultimately put their organizations out of business, thereby eliminating the services they offer.
Religious employers could invoke the "conscience clause," which permits medical and healthcare providers to not offer certain medical services due to a particular religious belief, and exempt themselves from the rule, but this would require them to turn away patients, students or clients of other faiths, and force them to go against their beliefs in so doing. For Christians, employing their employees, serving their patients or clients, and or offering education to their students is a form of worship and obedience to God.
All three options violate the viability of a religious organization's purpose. There is no way they can follow both the law and their faith, and if they disobey the law they face potentially life-altering consequences for themselves and others.
In response, two schools have sued -- Belmont Abbey College, a Catholic School in North Carolina, and Colorado Christian University -- and the U.S. Conference of Bishops has announced that they will fight the law.
Christians have biblical precedent to non-violently object and rebel against a wrong they perceive goes against what the Bible teaches. For example, in the New Testament, examples exist in which the laws of the day prohibited early Christians from following what their faith commanded them to do. In A.D. 44 the apostles were brought before the Council of the Sanhedrin, an assembly of judges, for performing miracles (Acts 3:1-4:22) and for preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ in Jerusalem, against their orders. The apostle Peter responded to their accusations by saying, "We must obey God rather than men" (Acts 5:29). Instead of killing them, the Sanhedrin beat the apostles and then released them.
Likewise, in the Old Testament, examples exist in which the laws mandated that believers commit an act that went against what their faith commanded them to do. Circa 539 B.C., during the reign of Darius the Mede, that is the reign of Cyrus the Persian, Daniel, a Hebrew exile who had been chosen to serve in the court of the king, found himself in a crisis of conscience. The king whom he served decreed that everyone in the land could not pray to a god other than himself. Daniel could not follow this law because of his belief in God and continued to pray to God. The punishment for breaking the law was death by being thrown into a lion's den. God preserved Daniel's life by closing the mouths of the lions, Daniel was restored to his role with the king, and the king changed the law and acknowledged Daniel's God "as the living God" (Daniel 6).
In more modern times within a democratic context, Christians have looked to the examples of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other religious people who joined him in the fight against segregation.
In all of these examples, those committed to their beliefs were willing to die for them. Their motivation was not to change the law but to follow their conscience and accept the consequences of not following the law, which often led to persecution, jail and, for numerous martyrs, death. Religious organizations, hospitals and universities are justified in not following the new HHS rule as their conscience dictates and their faith demands.
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My privacy, and my choice to take birth control or have an abortion, trumps your conscious because I don’t have to take it under consideration it is your belief and it is not sanction by a secular society. It is the law and a mandate and it protects individual rights and not the theology of the faiths.
Questions about the government requiring or prohibiting something that conflicts with someone’s faith are entirely real, but not new. The courts have confronted such issues and have generally ruled that the government cannot enact laws specifically aimed at a particular religion (which would be regarded a constraint on religious liberty contrary to the First Amendment), but can enact laws generally applicable to everyone or at least broad classes of people (e.g., laws concerning pollution, contracts, fraud, crimes, discrimination, employment, etc.) and can require everyone, including those who may object on religious grounds, to abide by them. Were it otherwise and people could opt out of this or that law with the excuse that their religion requires or allows it, the government and the rule of law could hardly operate.
Break the law if you'd like, but you will be held liable for the consequences, and hey you'll get feel even more martyred when you do. Perhaps that will free up government funds to go back to the community hospital model in which one needs only to provide the best medical care possible without having to kowtow to delusional religious zealots.
Providers who take their religious beliefs into account when they serve patients have no business working in health care. Take away their licenses.
There was a catch though. Even if you were white, you could still go to hell if you were not racist enough (I'm paraphrasing here). SO, if this woman dared to treat non-whites as equals, she would be (in her words) "no better than a n***er" and would be forced to spend eternity in hell with all the other non-white and/or non-racist white people (which I'm sure would be hell for them).
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Since this was a sincerely held belief, and she believed her soul was on the line, would it be acceptable for others of her faith to turn away non-whites or deny them medical care?
After all, she didn't "want" to be racist, she simply had no choice because that's what God demands of all of his followers, as it was explained by (my favorite part) the Totally White Jesus (yes, there was a completely white guy born in the middle east, and "that's how people knew" he was really the son of god).
She says that Martin Luther King was not trying to change any laws.
The rest of the article struck me as equally credible.
I will refuse to fill your prescriptions but I will pray for you.
That's the Catholic bishops idea of freedom of religion.
They are free to do whatever they want to in their churches, but if they want to operate businesses like hospitals or adoption agencies, they have to follow the same laws as everyone else.
Otherwise, they can exercise their 'civil disobedience" by getting out of those businesses,
the way Catholic "Charities" got out of the adoption business.
Or pay taxes on all the real estate they own.
How can the fact that I earn my living in a Catholic Hospital limit my access to insurance benefits?
Where does this stop?
What if an employer hates smokers? Can they deny access to smoking cessation help?
Can they deny diabetes care, because the employees should take care of their health through diet and exercise?
My employer should offer me equitable insurance benefits. If I choose to access certain aspects of the insurance policy, it is a benefit I have earned as an employee.
The employer should not get to rule over my life outside of work.
You can't violate the law just because your religion says you can or should. Besides, if these ARE Christian organizations, remember that Jesus said "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's". And when you are dealing with matters of commerce, you are dealing with matters of Caesar, not matters of GOD.