President Obama vs. the Catholic Church
The Obama administration is taking an ax to the trunk of America’s freedom of religion. It has deliberately picked a fight with the Catholic Church in particular, in a move that should alarm Americans of all faiths.
Mandating that employers provide healthcare coverage for all employees, the president is now demanding that this coverage include birth control: free sterilizations and access to all fda-approved contraceptives—even those that induce abortions. Of course, Catholic doctrine forbids all of these practices, and even many non-Catholics likewise oppose the “morning-after pill” on religious grounds.
The government doesn’t care. It doesn’t matter how upset religious leaders get, or whose conscience this violates, or whose beliefs are trampled. The president has settled the issue: Abortion-inducing drugs are every woman’s right—even if God Himself disagrees.
When the Department of Health and Human Services first published this proposal last August, Catholic leaders strenuously objected, calling it “an unprecedented attack on religious freedom.” Try as they might to stop it, though, last month dhh Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced the rule would go into effect this August. She offered one bizarre, meaningless concession: Religiously affiliated organizations like hospitals and universities could have an additional year to “adapt” to the change; they wouldn’t have to betray their convictions until August of 2013.
Predictably, the cry arose that this would force churches to pay for things it morally opposes. The administration knew this would happen, and President Obama “retreated” to what was surely his pre-planned position. Supposedly to appease those with religious objections, last Friday he announced what he called “a solution that works for everyone.” This solution didn’t back off one inch from the demand that all federally mandated health-insurance plans offer free abortifacients, sterilizations and contraceptives. “Under the rule, women will still have access to free preventive care that includes contraceptive services—no matter where they work. So that core principle remains,” he explained. “But if a woman’s employer is a charity or a hospital that has a religious objection to providing contraceptive services as part of their health plan, the insurance company—not the hospital, not the charity—will be required to reach out and offer the woman contraceptive care free of charge, without co-pays and without hassles” (emphasis added).
So the insurance company must still offer the service, but can’t explicitly bill the employer for it. Most likely it will recoup the cost simply by charging the employer higher premiums. At any rate, the employer is still required to provide healthcare that gives employees free access to services it views as sin. The notion that the president tried to “accommodate” religious freedom is proven false by this intolerance of dissent.
What’s more, there are no exceptions for religious insurance companies. Nor for self-insured religious employers. Nor for any non-religious employers—maybe a small business owner with personal convictions—or any for-profit religious employers. Any individuals who simply don’t want their money paying for someone else to get sterilized or to fatally poison a human embryo will face stiff fines for obeying their conscience rather than the law.
It’s another example of the president’s hostility toward the U.S. Constitution (as Stephen Flurry wrote about in his column last week)—in this case, the First Amendment guarantee that no law would prohibit the free exercise of religion.
In the president’s view, a woman’s right to have sex, as well as cost-free access to measures that will prevent the pregnancy that might ensue, trumps Americans’ constitutional right to act in accordance with their religious beliefs.
The president has dismissed such objections to the rule by saying that it’s actually a money saver. Follow this reasoning.
Insurance companies that reduce the number of pregnancies will help their bottom line, the president contends. This new regulation labels birth control—including sterilizations and abortion-causing drugs—as “preventive care.” “That means free check-ups, free mammograms, immunizations and other basic services,” Mr. Obama explained last Friday. “We fought for this because it saves lives and it saves money—for families, for businesses, for government, for everybody. That’s because it’s a lot cheaper to prevent an illness than to treat one.”
There is something chilling about this reasoning when applied to life itself.
Clearly, many people, believing that human life starts at conception, sincerely oppose the use of drugs that induce early-term abortions. This new law doesn’t just make it possible for a woman to take such drugs—it forces a whole swath of citizens, regardless of their personal objections, to guarantee that any woman who wants the drugs receives them at no cost. The government doesn’t even view the objections as worth addressing. The president simply praises the termination of the pregnancy—what could be a fertilized ovum or human embryo—for its cost savings. Like catching a cancer in its early stages.
He’s right: Terminating a pregnancy is certainly cheaper than raising a child.
This president is solidly in favor of abortions (what he calls “reproductive rights”). As an Illinois state senator, he voted against a ban on what is called partial-birth abortion—and then went a step further: He opposed a bill to protect the life of a newborn who managed to survive that grisly procedure. Take a moment, if you can stomach it, to imagine what that would actually mean within the walls of an abortion clinic.
Now this man holds the highest office in the land and is dictating the nation’s healthcare law. His administration is deftly couching this latest mandate in noble language like “women’s health,” “preventive care” and “reproductive services” (like anyone who opposes it is against women’s health). But it is the product of some truly ignoble thinking.
How else can you explain the government so pitilessly steamrolling over deeply held religious objections as though they are utterly baseless, undermining constitutional protections and even alienating voters in the process?
In pushing his radical social agenda, the president is so convinced of his own righteousness, none of that matters. From his perspective, the centuries-old doctrine of a church with a billion believers is a fringe view, and freedom of religion is just a bump in the road.
