7/14/00 9:45 a.m.
D.C. Tries to Sack Little Rome
But Congress may not let them.

By Kathryn Jean Lopez, NR associate editor------------lopezk@ix.netcom.com

re we going to say we are going to defer to Rome, in terms of our views?"

That, from District of Columbia city-council member Jim Graham, and that, in a nutshell, the reason for a bill passed by the D.C. city council on Tuesday, that, if signed by mayor Anthony Williams, would require all D.C. employers to provide full "prescription-drug" coverage to their employees, including contraceptives and abortion pills.

In particular, the legislation is aimed at some very specific D.C. employers, who include the Catholic University of America (which one of my fellow alumni jokingly refers to as "Little Rome"), the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Providence Hospital, Georgetown University, Georgetown University Hospital, the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., and Catholic Charities — the largest private service provider to the city's poor — among others.

Wrong on so many levels — one might wonder what the D.C. city council is doing mandating what services private institutions provide their employees anyway — a bad act was compounded by what, if directed toward another group, might be denounced as a hate crime. The D.C. city council, displaying some of the worst nativist tendencies of olden days — fearing the religious imperialism of a foreign power (in a private organization?) — resorted to blatant bigotry in debating prescription drugs.

Although nine of thirteen states with similar mandates on private health insurance include conscience clauses in their laws, debate on the D.C. bill earlier this week included one council member referring to any employer who did not provide contraceptive coverage as guilty of "employee discrimination." Another council member warned of the "slippery slope" the prospect of a conscience clause might create — if churches are allowed to bow out, citing moral objections to contraception and abortion, who's to say they don't try to opt out of mandatory benefits for domestic partners down the road. (A promise of more to come from the D.C. city council?) According to observers, Democratic councilman Jim Graham glared at Catholic D.C. Auxilary Bishop William Lori, who was sitting in the audience, while he warned against a particular "homophobic church" that will now "determine people's medical care, if Catholic institutions are allowed a conscience exemption." If the council were to accept any such exemption, he said, "we are permitting religious principles to dictate public-health policy."

Harsh words for the D.C. city council came from House Republicans Ernest Istook, a Mormon, and Tom Davis, a Christian Scientist, on Wednesday. On Thursday, while marking up the D.C. appropriations bill, Istook introduced an amendment to it that would effectively kill the D.C. bill, if signed by Williams. Davis or Virginia Democrat Jim Moran, a Catholic, will likely introduce another, less fatal, version of the amendment, adding a religious exemption, rather than mooting the entire D.C. law. On Thursday afternoon, through a spokesman, Davis said he was holding out hope for a D.C.-centered resolution, with Mayor Anthony Williams, a Catholic, rejecting the bill or sending it back to the city council, demanding a conscence clause.

Neither Williams nor D.C. delegate to congress Eleanor Holmes Norton have come out on the fate of the legislation or on inclusion of a conscience clause.

With videos floating around D.C. of the Tuesday night city-council meeting, and so many prominent religious institutions in New York, one might expect a civil-liberties group like the American Civil Liberties Union to come to the defense of the religious groups and their affiliates opposed to this legislation on moral grounds. No such luck. According to Caitlin Borgmann of the ACLU's Reproductive Freedom Project, this kind of "contraceptive equity legislation" is only fair, especially at institutions like Georgetown, where most of the people on campus don't agree with the Catholic Church on these reproductive matters anyway. Nice judgment call for a city government to be making.

An abortion debate is the last thing Congress wants in trying to get through the D.C. appropriations bill. But regardless of the timing, congressmen should be outraged by the anti-religious vitriol that this issue has incited and, rather than join the crowd, led in this instance by the D.C. city council and an assorted coalition of pro-abortion advocacy groups (including NARAL and the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice), it ought to stop them in their tracks. The nation's eyes will be on Congress and the D.C.-appropriations bill. As more and more states — and Congress — consider similar legislation, policymakers must decide what means more, First Amendment rights to freely practice religion and not be encroached upon by the heavy hand of government, or Supreme Court-imagined emanations from penumbras in the Bill of Rights that trump all else.