Waaaaaaaaaaah!
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) have issued the following statement:
The Catholic bishops have long supported access to life-affirming healthcare for all, and the conscience rights of everyone involved in the complex process of providing that healthcare. That is why we raised two serious objections to the "preventive services" regulation issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in August 2011. [...]
Second, we explained that the mandate would impose a burden of unprecedented reach and severity on the consciences of those who consider such "services" immoral: insurers forced to write policies including this coverage; employers and schools forced to sponsor and subsidize the coverage; and individual employees and students forced to pay premiums for the coverage. We therefore urged HHS, if it insisted on keeping the mandate, to provide a conscience exemption for all of these stakeholders—not just the extremely small subset of "religious employers" that HHS proposed to exempt initially. [...]
[W]e note at the outset that the lack of clear protection for key stakeholders—for self-insured religious employers; for religious and secular for-profit employers; for secular non-profit employers; for religious insurers; and for individuals—is unacceptable and must be corrected. And in the case where the employee and insurer agree to add the objectionable coverage, that coverage is still provided as a part of the objecting employer's plan, financed in the same way as the rest of the coverage offered by the objecting employer. This, too, raises serious moral concerns. [..]
We will therefore continue—with no less vigor, no less sense of urgency—our efforts to correct this problem through the other two branches of government. For example, we renew our call on Congress to pass, and the Administration to sign, the Respect for Rights of Conscience Act. And we renew our call to the Catholic faithful, and to all our fellow Americans, to join together in this effort to protect religious liberty and freedom of conscience for all. [Emphasis supplied.]
I hope this surprises no one. Indeed, the problem with accepting "legitimate religious liberty concerns" as trumping sound public policy is precisely the problem of getting into the business of deciding what is a "legitimate religious liberty concern."
Continue reading below the fold.
The Respect for Rights of Conscience Act that the bishops are supporting:
Amends the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) to permit a health plan to decline coverage of specific items and services that are contrary to the religious beliefs of the sponsor, issuer, or other entity offering the plan or the purchaser or beneficiary (in the case of individual coverage) without penalty. Declares that such plans are still considered to: (1) be providing the essential health benefits package or preventive health services, (2) be a qualified health plan, and (3) have fulfilled other requirements under PPACA.
In the wake of the Obama "accommodation,"
E.J. Dionne wrote:
President Obama did today what he should have done at the very beginning: He honored the fact that religious groups, including the Catholic Church, had legitimate religious liberty claims in the battle over a contraception mandate under the new health care law. And he did so while still holding to his commitment to expanding contraception coverage as broadly as possible.
The problem with Dionne's unprogressive formulation is simply this—who gets to decide when a "religious liberty claim" is legitimate? The very exercise of determining "legitimacy" of a "religious liberty claim" is oxymoronic. On the philosphical point (as opposed to the political point),
Charles Pierce has the much better (and progressive) argument:
The Church has claimed — and the president has tacitly accepted — the right to deny even its employees of other faiths the health-care services of which it doesn't approve on strictly doctrinal grounds. That is not an issue of "religious liberty." That's the enshrinement of religious thuggery in the secular law. By accepting that frame, the president has left himself dependent on the avaricious to bail him out against the arrogant. This is not a comfortable place to be.
Now that the Catholic bishops say that their employment of persons is the means by which persons are eligible for birth control under the Obama accommodation, and that this is a violation of their religious liberty, how can Dionne (or President Obama for that matter) distinguish this "religious liberty" claim from the one the president accommodated on Friday? There is no logical difference in the positions.
The risk of giving in to unprogressive principles is deciding where you can stop.
