South Bend, Ind. — Yesterday I linked to a letter organized by Carter Snead, law professor at the University of Notre Dame. It now has about 90 signatures on it, including 13 college and university presidents, Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. The updated letter can be read here.
UPDATE: As of early Sunday, Donald Landry, Samuel Bard Professor of Medicine & Chair, Department of Medicine & Physician-in-Chief, Columbia University has been added, as well (updated letter). And growing ….
link doesn't seem to work. but I get the idea
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe link is dead
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abusethe links does not work or the letter has disappeared - please fix
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe link to the updated letter doesn't work.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseOh wow. A whole 90 signatures.
I am sure that the Republic will be shaken to its knees by a whole 90 signatures.
I am sorry, but the days of fighting against contraceptives are over. That battle has been lost long ago.
No one cares.
I have seen that the Corner has been spammed with posts on this issue lately. Yawn.
What part of religiously-affiliated groups do not have to be excepted from generally applicable laws do conservatives not understand????
Maybe start by reading Justice Scalia's opinion in Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith as a good starting point.
External Link
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThis is not a compromise. It was never meant to be a compromise. It was meant to be a headliner going into the weekend that *suggested* the administration had offered to compromise, in order to win the news cycle. What it demonstrates to anyone paying attention, though, is that this administration either has no understanding of ecomonics or has no respect for those who disagree with it.
For those who favor religious freedom it was simply the middle finger.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWell, if we are going to talk about economics, then we know that employers aren't really paying for their employees health coverage anyway. Their employees earned it. The people who REALLY pay for health benefits is the employee, not the employer. Health insurance is just another form of compensation that happens to have tax advantages over cash compensation.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseGiven that, the real objection is not who bears the economic burden of the contraceptive coverage (that is the employee, in all cases) but that nominally, it is the religiously affiliated organizations who have to pay for it. The compromise devised by the White House changes this, so now religiously affiliated organizations neither have an obligation to pay for contraceptive coverage nor face the economic burden of that coverage.
“My initial reaction is: How dumb does he think we are?” “Does he think when he puts lip stick on a pig, that we don’t understand that it is still a pig?”
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse90 signatures...that's about 3x the average Occupy Wall Street protest, and all of these people appear to have jobs.
You got your butt handed to you during OWS, which has collapsed under the weight of your idiocy. You're just continuing the trend here with some fairly ignorant, Marxist, assessments of what constitutes wages and employment...and the First Amendment. You'd be howling like a stuck pig if the Federal Government required you to hang a poster in your mom's basement stating that you will register for selective service and fining your mom for failure to drive you to the registration.
Especially since women aren't eligible for the draft.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseCAPTCHA - exceedingly well read - and that does not apply to Mr. Welker's piece.
No one is fighting over contraception. It is out there, use it but you pay for it. It doesn't need to be free because it is available even to the poorest of the poor. If you want the morning after pill, feel free to use it but pay for it. If you want to be sterilized, feel free to get the snip snip. Oh wait, you still have to pay for you to be cut but any of your women can be sterilized on someone else's dime.
This is about the Federal government overstepping its power and forcing religious organizations to go against their beliefs. People talk about Conservatives wanting to be in your bedroom but now Big Brother will be in bed with you.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWell, David, the fact is that religious-affiliated groups in the past have been excepted from generally applicable laws in the past.
Back when the government didn't display the same contempt for religion that your post apparently displays.
Like Obama, you seem to interpret "do not have to be excepted" to "must be subject to." But then the idea we should be more like the PRC as expressed by Thomas Friedman is commonly held by liberals. The idea of a state controlled church is therefore much in vogue, as we see by the liberal reaction to the Catholic Church's "unacceptable" objections. So your position that religious organizations might be permitted to exist so long as they don't expect to hold principles inconsistent with government policies, and that there is nothing in our Constitution that might require the government to view the Church as an organization with any sort of independence that must be respected, isn't surprising.
But I didn't come here to discuss the war on religion that, predictably, liberals will come here to continue. Rather the the content of Katherine Jean Lopez's post.
I find it somewhat amusing in a gallows humor sort of way that a University of Notre Dame law professor is characterizing Obama's mandate as "unacceptable." It seems to me that the Catholic Church has long given Obama reason to believe that his views are quite acceptable to them. Father Pfleger is still Pastor of St. Sabina Parish. And he's long endorsed the views of his own Rev. Wright and gave his stamp of approval to the views of pro-abortion Al Sharpton and black-nationalist Louis Farrakhan by inviting them to speak at St. Sabina. One might say that he's merely allowing his parishioners to hear different points of view. Yet, he's never told his parishioners that he differs in any way with these hatemongers, which would lead his parishioners (as well as now-President Obama) to understandably believe Pfleger agrees with them.
And since the Archbishop of Chicago can't bring himself to permanently remove this priest from his position, understandably this would lead an observer to believe the larger Catholic Church doesn't find Pfleger's views far from the mainstream if at all. Then Notre Dame not only invited Obama to give a commencement address but awarded him an honorary degree as a doctor of laws. The Catholic Church has never taken any action against ostensibly "Catholic" lawmakers like Nancy Pelosi despite the fact that their actions to promote abortion constitutes not only a grave sin but scandal. Actually, Not only have they taken no action against such lawmakers but I recall a letter (I don't recall if it was only from a single Bishop or if it represented the official position of the USCCB) that it was perfectly acceptable for Catholics to vote for pro-abortion candidates if they disagreed with other US polices like the Iraq war.
Obama's views on not only contraception but abortion and what Andy McCarthy has accurately described as infanticide had long been well known before Notre Dame decided to honor him. This certainly would have reinforced the notion that the Catholic Church has no serious disagreements with Obama's views. Has the Catholic Church ever done anything to lead Obama to believe that, despite the milquetoast lip service, as an organization they have any strong objections to his policy positions?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI don't know if my earlier post will ever appear, but one thing I didn't address while observing your obvious hostility toward religion, David, is why your referral to Justice Scalia's opinion in Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith is not a good starting point but woefully off point.
No one gets an exempt from controlled substance laws. Religious institutions however are exempt from the contraception mandate. What the Obama administration has done, though is define the exemption so narrowly that only houses of worship qualify. In other words the Obama administration has decided it can now redefine religious activities that have been recognized for centuries as such into primarily non-religious activities and thus subject to his mandate.
There are whole religious orders in the Catholic Church that exist solely to minister by running hospitals or schools. That is the ministry they are called to. They are called religious sisters, for instance, to distinguish them from nuns who live a cloistered life in an Abbey. Yet Obama refuses to recognize them as ministries.
The religious order that Mother Teresa founded, the Missionaries of Mercy, works entirely in the slums of places like India and Africa. That is the vow they've taken, to serve the poor, in primarily non-Christian countries by feeding them, running hospitals and hospices to care for them, and basically providing what they needed.
Obama has tyrannically determined that these are no longer religious activities because the narrow exemption is only for religious institutions that exist for the inculcation of faith among those predominantly with those of the same faith. Completely ignoring the fact that it's a historical fact that for centuries it has been a religious duty to go among those not of the same faith and by example inculcate the faith among those not of the same faith. You may not be aware of it, but that's the legend behind St. Patrick's conversion of Ireland to Catholicism.
Congrats, David. Obama has done something no one ever dreamed of doing before. Refused to recognize the religious mission of orders that have come to this country to minister to those of all faiths. He has restricted the definition of a religious institution so narrowly that India has a broader definition of religious freedom than the US under Obama (which represents a huge change for the US). And you cheer. If Mother Teresa were to open a hospice here for the poor who are not of the Catholic faith, she'd have to violate her conscience by purchasing contraception and abortifacients for any lay workers she might have to hire. Something she or her order would never be forced to do in the parts of the world where they minister to the poor.
But while Justice Scalia's opinion has nothing at all to do with the situation under discussion, Chief Justice Robert's opinion (writing for a unanimous court) in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Et Al probably will. I don't expect your animus toward religion will permit you to see that.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWell, if we are going to talk about economics, then we know that employers aren't really paying for their employees health coverage anyway. Their employees earned it. The people who REALLY pay for health benefits is the employee, not the employer. Health insurance is just another form of compensation that happens to have tax advantages over cash compensation.
Given that, the real objection is not who bears the economic burden of the contraceptive coverage (that is the employee, in all cases) but that nominally, it is the religiously affiliated organizations who have to pay for it. The compromise devised by the White House changes this, so now religiously affiliated organizations neither have an obligation to pay for contraceptive coverage nor face the economic burden of that coverage.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYour parents called. They said it's time to stop living in the basement, and that your Sociology professor is never going to pop the question, so move on.
Those of us who own businesses and have employees are laughing at your ignorance.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI think you're onto something: let's make it so people have to pay directly for the medical services they consume. That will reintroduce the market forces that are sorely absent from the health care industry but would actually do something to "bend the cost curve down." If people want to insure against catastrophic expense they can buy insurance policies. They would use their own after-tax funds. And their own consciences.
Problem solved!
Of course, that's not what you meant. Like Obama, you meant to run a three card monte table but none of us is playing along.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWe're really going to draw our line in the sand on birth control? Really? The longer this primary goes, the worse we look for the general election...
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse