WASHINGTON — Employers do not need to provide insurance coverage for contraception even if their objections are moral rather than religious, a federal judge here ruled on Monday.
.... March for Life sued the Department of Health and Human Services and other agencies, arguing that the government had violated equal protection principles by treating it differently from “similarly situated employers.” The government responded that it had a rational basis for the differing treatment, as the group “is not religious and is not a church.”
Judge Richard J. Leon of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia rejected the government’s position. “This not only oversimplifies the issue — it misses the point entirely,” Judge Leon wrote.
Who is Judge Richard A. Leon?
And, God damn it, opposition to contraception is immoral!
See below:
Judge Richard J. Leon has a BA from:
College of the Holy Cross (where he was a classmate of future Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas) in 1971....
Holy Cross is the oldest Jesuit college in New England and one of the oldest in the United States.
On September 10, 2001, George W. Bush nominated Leon to his seat on the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.
Please note the lineup of Republicans, Bush, Thomas, who are no friends of women and the rights of women to comprehensive health care.
As to the morality of contraception:
The babies came one after the other in my family, six in eight years’ time, then a miscarriage, a seventh, and finally a dire medical warning: An eighth child might leave the rest without the young woman who had brought us into this world. My mother went to her general practitioner first, then the Roman Catholic bishop. The doctor said stop. The cleric said shame if you do.
.... If only Pope Francis had been around then. His words from the papal plane returning from the Philippines earlier this month — that good Catholic parents did not have to “be like rabbits” — would have landed like angel dust on the shoulders of my ever-pregnant mom. Just before his breeding advice, the pope told a story about a mother in remarkably similar circumstances as my own.
“I met a woman some months ago in a parish who was pregnant with her eighth child, who had seven C-sections,” said Francis. “But does she want to leave the seven as orphans? This is to tempt God.”
Christianity, especially Roman Catholicism, has a history of vitriolic hatred directed at contraception, most especially against Margaret Sanger, whose watchwords:
EVERY CHILD A WANTED CHILD.
are regarded as blasphemy by most of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, an exclusively male hierarchy.
Sanger, and Planned Parenthood, has been repeatedly attacked:
Planned Parenthood is often a target for the Right To Life organization this is especially true during elections. African-American Genocide is the newest accusation made against the organization. The Planned Parenthood founder is under attack for genocide.
The Guardian article goes on to say:
The goals Sanger set forth were, first and foremost, that women had the right to limit the number of her pregnancies. Secondly, women could choose when to become pregnant, which would allow a woman to determine the time between pregnancies.
Sanger was one of 11 children and her mother had several miscarriages. She believed the multiple pregnancies and miscarriages shortened her mother’s life.
Women exercising ownership over their own bodies:
Margaret Sanger was the sixth of eleven children born to her devout Catholic mother who got pregnant eighteen times in twenty-two years before she died at only fifty years of age. It may be this graphic reality that inspired Sanger to say over and over later in her life: "No woman can call herself free that does not own and control her own body."
Interestingly, a feminist slogan from the last half of the 20th century:
MY BODY BELONGS TO ME.
has been co-opted in this century to protect children from sexual predation:
Free Spirit Publishing is pleased to announce the publication of My Body Belongs to Me, its much anticipated, critically acclaimed book by New York City child abuse and sex crimes prosecutor Jill Starishevsky.
Using her decade of experience, Ms. Starishevsky has crafted a book that speaks to children - it makes them aware that when it comes to their bodies, there are boundaries. It assures them that it’s OK to tell a parent or teacher if someone touches their “private parts.”
Ironically, these teachings have been made necessary by the sexual predation of the exclusively male hierarchy of the Roman Catholic church:
In 2010, New York Times correspondent Laurie Goodstein wrote a series of articles covering a particularly horrible case of sexual predation in the Roman Catholic Church. She wrote of the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, a Catholic priest who molested up to 200 deaf boys while serving as headmaster of St. John’s School for the Deaf in St. Francis, Wis. from 1950 to 1974.
If one would care to speak of morality . . . .