All health insurance plans in America must now provide contraception to women with no copay. For free. The article at the link below discusses political efforts the Roman Catholic Bishops are making to exempt Catholic institutions from this provision of the health care law. The article below is where you go to get facts. All the rest below the orange IUD is lapsed resentful recovering Catholic ranting and some thoughts about nonviolent civil/religious disobedience. So if you hate that, leave now.
http://www.sacbee.com/...
The RCC's argument is so often the same, whatever the issue. Whenever the RCC hierarchy collectively stamps slippered feet and argues for their own viewpoint, the argument they present us is invariably their own moral exceptionalism.
The Roman Catholic Argument:
The RCC must and should ignore criminal law, aid and abet child molesters, ignore or attempt to remake civil law, and ignore the civil rights of its employees as it sees fit because the RCC is more moral than your Average Bear. The RCC hierarchy are practicing nonviolent civil/religious disobedience by hiding child rape and depriving secretaries (Catholic or otherwise) of condoms. They are foaming away and playing politics in the service of religious freedom of conscience and of "life."
This argument begs the question: Whose life and whose conscience?: the Bishop or the Secretary, Nurse, Teacher, Janitor, etc.? Who gets to decide the moral questions in one's life? I am not willing to give over that responsibility to others.
What is nonviolent civil/religious disobedience? Gandhi's definition is the clearest in my opinion:
I have also called it love-force or soul-force. . . . I discovered in the earliest stages that pursuit of truth did not admit of violence being inflicted on one’s opponent but that he must be weaned from error by patience and compassion. For what appears to be truth to the one may appear to be error to the other. And patience means self-suffering. So the doctrine came to mean vindication of truth, not by infliction of suffering on the opponent, but on oneself.
Let us examine the definition of violence:
Violence is defined by the World Health Organization as the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation. This definition associates intentionality with the committing of the act itself, irrespective of the outcome it produces.
A conscientious objector takes on the burden of the objection. That is the nature of nonviolent conscientious objection, religious or otherwise. Transferring the burden of one's own conscientious objection onto the Other is not conscientious objection. It is assault. The Roman Catholic Church is engaging in the War on Women. This is not new. And it is getting very old. I am distressed that the RCC now has a sophisticated media representative and is making video commercials about the hellfire that awaits you if you do not vote according to Catholic doctrine.
Each woman will decide for herself how to handle her private sexual/reproductive life. That is liberty. The Roman Catholic Church will obey civil law now, please. It is the Rule of Law that provides the order within which each citizen exercises liberty and free choice, religious or otherwise.
Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's. - Jesus of Nazareth