I never write diaries. I'm too busy doing front line work in reproductive health care. I hope you give this diary a read because I haven't seen alot written about this in the progressive blogosphere. We all know that we must seriously push back on the latest maneuver in the War on Women. The maneuver goes like this: constitutionally protected religious liberty is under attack by Health and Human Services (HHS) regulations that do not exempt certain religiously affliated employers from providing birth control coverage in their health insurance plans for their employees.
The fact that 98% of Catholic women have used birth control, in my view, is not an effective push back on the Catholic bishops religious liberty argument. If constitutionally protected religious liberty were really at stake the “everybody’s doing it” argument doesn’t hold water. I think court rulings on this subject are important to incorporate into pushback on the birth control controversy this week.
Legal precedents in the courts have ruled that certain religiously affiliated institutions can NOT opt out of contraception coverage in their health insurance plans. But you wouldn't know it based on commentary within the mainstream media in the past week responding to the Catholic bishops. The bishops are lobbying hard that Obama has “overreached” by assaulting religious liberty in that religious employers will be forced to violate their consciences by paying for birth control in their insurance plans. And they are having an impact in the media. EJ Dionne, Chris Matthews, Melinda Henneberger,, Mark Shields, David Brooksand USA Today, among others, have all parroted the Bishops’ seemingly convincing meme. And, the Obama Administration is not helping with its lackluster messaging on the topic.
But there are other liberties at stake here besides religious liberty, namely, that is, the rights of employees to be free from discrimination (shocking, I know). We are not hearing much about this. Not surprisingly since the MSM no longer does real journalism and therefore hasn't bothered to research the background. But legal case history shows that courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court , have previously ruled in favor of nondiscrimination against employees against the "religious liberties" arguments of certain religious employers on the issue of contraception.
Read More
