It is inevitable that people in your family will end up talking about the court case filed by various Catholic institutions and universities against the Obama administration's birth control requirement. It will be easy for family members to claim (as the Right has done) that this is an issue of 'freedom of religion' and that Obama is waging a war on religion.
When this happens, it is extremely important that you game out the situation and help them see the problem with their claims. This gaming out was used with flourish by opponents of the Obamacare mandate ("Then, what stops the government from mandating that you buy broccoli?") and will play a huge role in bringing people around to our side of the argument.
First, this issue is not about freedom of religion; it is about what requirements we as a society will have for employers.
If it is true that a tenet of a religion should become the basis for which an employer does not have to follow federal employment law, then what would we do if someone reads the following to you?
"If your brother, a Hebrew man or a Hebrew woman, is sold to you, he shall serve you six years, and in the seventh year you shall let him go free from you." (Deuteronomy 15: 12)
As you can see, the Bible justifies the ownership of slaves, so clearly minimum wage laws should not be enforceable and people should instead work as slaves, right? Remember: Historically, the Bible was
used to justify slavery in the South before the Civil War.
What if someone else read the following scripture to you?
"Those who were less valiant in pre-existence and who thereby had certain spiritual restrictions imposed upon them during mortality are known to us as the negroes. Such spirits are sent to earth through the lineage of Cain, the mark put upon him for his rebellion against God and his murder of Abel being a black skin...The present status of the negro rests purely and simply on the foundation of pre-existence." (Mormon Doctrine, p.527, 1966 ed.)
Again, this tenet of a religion was used to
justify exclusion of blacks from the priesthood in the Mormon Church. In a speech entitled, Race Problems as they Affect the Church, Mormon Apostle Mark E. Petersen
said the following:
“If I were to marry a Negro woman and have children by her, my children would all be cursed as to the priesthood. Do I want my children cursed as to the priesthood? If there is one drop of Negro blood in my children, as I read to you, they receive the curse."
A religion is given terrific leeway in the goings-on of its activities. The Mormon Church was allowed to exclude blacks just as the Catholic Church is allowed to exclude women from the clergy. That is freedom of religion. But the Catholic Church is not allowed to stone people to death; that is where civil protections come in. There is a point where even religions cannot go, despite any 'freedom of religion' our Constitution protects. This is because there are other rights in the Constitution that are also protected, and may "trump" freedom of religion. That is why stoning is not allowed....
But we are not even talking about the activity of the church itself. There already exist provisions in the law that exclude churches from the mandate. We are talking about the activity of employers who are connected to the church, such as hospitals and schools.
So if there is a religion that believes that blacks are cursed, is it their right to openly discriminate against non-whites in their workplace? Or are we as a society going to say, "There is a minimum level of behavior that we will accept if you want to be an employer in this country"?
In the end, we as a society say that there are minimum requirements for employers. This includes mandatory break time, safe and sanitary working conditions, sprinkler systems and functional fire alarms, and a minimum wage.
If we allow "religious teachings" to be the basis for whether civil laws will apply to employers, then NO LAWS would be enforceable. All one would need to do is point to a religious teaching written down somewhere to get around any law. That is not the type of society that we have built, and that is not the type of society that you want to live in.
This lawsuit is not about freedom of religion; it is about the minimum requirements that every employer must meet to be involved with transactions in the market for human capital. We as a society have a minimum standard and we should not allow any one organization to determine whether it meets those standards or not.