This is no compromise at all. The only difference is that the insurance company, instead of the university (or hospital or other religious institution), will inform the employee of the availability of the “services” that are contrary to our consciences. This is a cheap verbal trick. It will remain the case that Catholic hospitals and universities will be compelled (if they follow the mandate) to provide insurance that covers services that they hold are gravely morally wrong. It will still be the case that Catholic hospitals and universities are coerced to treat as the same procedures they believe are entirely different (genuine health services on the one hand, and abortifacients, sterilization, and contraceptives, on the other hand). It will still be the case that the government is seriously infringing on the exercise of religious freedom.
Some might argue that these proposals do not require us to cooperate formally with evil-doing (formal cooperation being that which involves intending that the evil be done, material cooperation being that which involves doing something that facilitates someone’s wrong-doing as a side effect). But the objection to the mandate (in either form — they are scarcely even cosmetically different) is that it compromises our teaching mission. First, it compels Catholic institutions to contribute in a fairly immediate way to evil-doing (by providing insurance that covers these services). Second, it prevents Catholic institutions from acting as Catholic institutions. It prevents them from teaching by their deeds, and so it infringes on their free exercise of religion. It forces them (if they bow to it) to compromise their witness to the Gospel. If the formal-cooperation objection were right, that would also mean Catholic universities could rightly comply if the government commanded them to remove crucifixes from their classrooms, or require each Catholic hospital to set aside a room where government paid abortionists would come to provide their grisly “services.” Such compliance would not be formal cooperation, but it would surely betray the mission of those institutions.
Bottom line: Catholic institutions will be forced to pay for insurance that provides coverage for procedures that violate their consciences. The “new” mandate is like forcing a Catholic university to provide its students with cable TV that includes pornographic channels; the students will have to pay for watching every channel except the pornographic channels — only, the university will not provide the list of channels, that will be provided (by mandate) by the cable TV company. Clearheaded Catholics would not comply with such a mandate — nor will they with this one.
— Patrick Lee is the John N. and Jamie D. McAleer Professor of Bioethics and Director of the Institute of Bioethics at the Franciscan University of Steubenville.
"Clearheaded Catholics Will Not Comply"
They already do:
"Although Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan of New York has been leading the national fight against requiring Roman Catholic hospitals, universities and charities to cover birth control in their health insurance plans for employees and students, some Catholic institutions in his own diocese and others throughout New York State have for 10 years been complying with state law mandating precisely that coverage.
The state began requiring contraception coverage in 2002, and Catholic institutions, after losing a court battle over the issue, have followed the law. Historically Catholic institutions like Fordham University, which is run by a lay board of trustees in the tradition of the Jesuit religious order, provide contraception coverage for employees and students.
Fordham, which has 15,000 undergraduate and graduate students, seeks to comply with Catholic teaching by prohibiting its student health center from prescribing or dispensing birth control pills unless they are used for conditions like severe acne or endometriosis, according to Bob Howe, Fordham’s director of communications. Students who seek birth control pills to prevent pregnancies must obtain prescriptions from a private doctor or a service like Planned Parenthood, and the college’s insurance carrier will then cover the pills under its standard reimbursement schedule.
“We currently follow New York State law,” Mr. Howe said. “For employees and students, we provide insurance coverage that includes contraception. That’s the law.”
New York is one of the 28 states that require insurance companies to cover contraception. According to the White House, Colorado, Georgia and Wisconsin have no exemptions from that requirement, while California, New York and North Carolina have limited religious exemptions, identical to the limited exemptions the Obama administration proposed to put in place nationally.
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so they have been doing this all along... fancy that?
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"It will remain the case that Catholic hospitals and universities will be compelled (if they follow the mandate) to provide insurance that covers services that they hold are gravely morally wrong."
"gravely morally wrong" and used by 98% of their own members. Methinks they have a bigger problem than the mandate if their own members disregard the old men living in Palaces in Rome to such a degree.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYour reply is a non sequitur. 100% of people have lied in their lifetime, yet I hope you don't tell your kids that lying is OK because everyone does it. 100% of people are selfish, yet I hope you don't approve of that either. There are sound reasons for questioning the validity of research showing that 98% of Catholic women use contraception. For the sake of argument, however, even if the statistic is valid, that still is not a legitimate reason for accepting the mandate. Again, we do not condone wrongdoing because everybody has done wrong at one point or another. We call that "argument ad populum"--and, yes, it is a fallacy of reasoning.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMAKE THEM MAKE YOU
The Obama administration -- or any successor in interest -- CANNOT enforce this.
They will either have to sic the IRS goon squads onto Catholic and other religious organizations, or put them all in jail.
No admin. can survive that purely rotten theater.
You contact NRO, and you get madisonian's e-mail address, if you know of anyone in jail. If I cannot help directly, I'll find counsel in the area who can, and I'll get busy seeking reciprocity into as many jurisdictions as possible.
If you so desire, and you SHOULD, there is NO WAY IN HELL anyone should follow this mandate. Force the executive branch to enforce it.
Over my dead, Jewish body the Ayatollahs find so unclean will American citizens have their freedom of conscience robbed from them!
To me, any Jew who condones this mandate should hop into the nearest cattle truck.
This one has not yet forgotten.
And if the pagan leftists are coming now for the Christians first, this Jew's gonna shout out loud about it!
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseSilly little wingnuts.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWhat if a church provided a health plan that did not cover doctor or hospital visits or any type of medication based upon its doctrine of reliance solely on faith healing? Would that be acceptable? We have laws that require employers of a certain size to provide health coverage to its employees -- doesn't the government have a role in ensuring that the coverage provided pursuant to those laws is not illusory?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseA flawed analogy that has been refuted many times. First, the government *can* intervene in a way that might violate a person's conscience but *only* if it has a *compelling interest* to do so. For example, the government has on several occasions stepped in to make sure the children of Jehovah's Witnesses received a blood transfusion because the children were gravely ill and the government had a compelling interest to save their lives. Now, only with extreme sophistry can one argue that the government has a compelling interest to provide free birth control. There are no universities that I know of that would object to health insurance because they believe only in faith healing. Even if there were a few, however, the government would not have a compelling reason to override their religious freedom *if* some other reasonable way were available (e.g., an insurance co-op or an ad hoc discount) to help those people obtain necessary health care. Now, the government might have a compelling interest if half the universities in the nation objected to providing any insurance on religious grounds, but if that were the case, I very much doubt our current leader would have even made it into office.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI would amend the analogy of a university providing cable TV coverage as follows: the university pays for the entire cable coverage including the objectionable channels but to activate those channels, the student must inform the cable company first. This "accommodation" is an accounting trick only and is so blatantly so that it is an insult to the public the administration is trying to fool. .
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe other point of this which, I think has been largely forgotten, is that this in no way frees individual Catholics (or others) from being able to actually do the same as "religious" institutions. As someone who has to get insurance, or has to provide insurance for others, there is no option of having anything but the mandate, regardless whether one is personally opposed. If the Catholic bishops call this an acceptable "compromise", not only does the Roman Catholic Church stand for nothing, but they've just abandoned their individual faithful as well.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"will inform the employee of the availability of the “services” that are contrary to our consciences. "
lol, given than almost 100% of Catholic women between 18-45 use contraceptives whose consciences exactly are you talking about ?
"cooperate formally with evil-doing "
Ah, so now all these Catholic women are evil too! Dear oh dear, ill have to let my cousins , who are catholic, know about this, im sure they werent aware !
The serious point is that in the mean time, with anti-abortion groups/people crowding out all other conservative voices right now, independent voters see a global economic crisis , looming war in Iran and a republican party marching off in the opposite direction talking about abortions/culture wars. Democrats can barely contain there glee.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAh, yes. The statistics game.
It doesn't matter if every single Catholic supported the use of contraceptives, the Church teaches what she teaches. The people who practice artificial birth control, are, in the eyes of the Church (who claims to speak for Christ himself), participating an intrinsically evil act. That doesn't mean that person IS evil, but they are doing something that is. This is not that difficult to understand.
Furthermore, the issue is not about birth control as much as it is about violating conscience. How many times have I heard "conscience" invoked by those on the left (e.g Nancy Pelosi)? Only here, that "conscience thing" is something to be overridden and silenced.
If a line is not drawn with this issue, then when? Is there any act by the government, ExPat, that would cause you to say "Enough!"? Well, this is the issue for Catholics. And about time too!
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe 98% statistic is wrong, pure and simple. The survey was not only limited to women between 15-44 but also excluded any women who were a) not sexually active, where that is defined as having had sexual intercourse in the past three months b) postpartum, c) pregnant, or d) trying to get pregnant! In other words, the study was specifically designed to include only women for whom a pregnancy would be unintended and who are "at risk" of becoming pregnant. It negates all the "Faithful" Catholic women in that age range who do follow the churches teaching on sex and contraception.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseGood luck with organizing Roman Catholic civil disobedience against access to birth control.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"independent voters see a global economic crisis"
Gosh, expatasia, you're saying that independent voters haven't spotted the connection between the culture war and the global economic crisis?
Here's a hint: Japan was the first to legalize the murder of the unborn, in 1947. Guess what the average age is in Japan now. Do you seriously suppose Japan will ever be a significant economic power again?
"cooperate formally with evil-doing"...yes, the murder of unborn children and children forcibly being expelled as they are dismembered is---I'm sorry, was there some dispute about what to call this?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseA few comments are mentioning that 98% of Catholic Women use Birth Control. This statistic has been proven FALSE. w w w . whatswrongwiththeworld .net/2012/02/how_to_lie_with_statistics_exa_1 .html
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