So thisis a college that caters to people of all beliefs?
So, I’m guessing you don’t know what you’re talking about?
Seriously? The Court found that her particular position was ministerial. Are you suggesting that everyone who works in any capacity for any business associated with the Catholic Church is subject to the ministerial exception?
On Preview, beaten to punch. But yea, what Diana said, the court found against the school teacher because her position involved religious instruction. If anything, thats a couter-example to your point.
The person in that case was clergy. She’s a minister.
Catholic organizations don’t have to pay for birth control. It is to be provided by the insurance company, who absorb the cost.
So, you’re pretty much completely misinformed about this issue.
According to the website of the Concordia School, enrollment does not require membership in the Lutheran Church. So yeah, sure.
Actually, she’s not. Catholicism is very picky about who gets called clergy, and no one with a vagina need apply. If I remember correctly, “clergy” consists of priests on upward. Nuns and other ministerial positions are laypeople.*
The rest of your post is accurate, of course.
ETA D’oh. Lutheran. Never mind and carry on.
Okay. What about those Catholic organizations that self-insure specifically so that they can ensure that they are not funding contraception or abortion. I mentioned this above and you seemed to ignore it.
More broadly, the Court found that whether or not her position was ministerial was up to the Church. The decision opened the door to the ministerial exception argument, though how many people will try to walk through it is yet to be seen. not all that many, I think, given the narrowness of the doorway (the Court limited its decision purely to discrimination suits). But the precedent has been set that State-recognized churches can essentially decide who is or is not a “minister” for the purposes of hiring and termination.
They can stop offering insurance and pay the fine (as can any organization that doesn’t self-insure). Have you read ANYTHING about this law?
No. But the claim was made above that churches shouldn’t be able to skirt the requirements of insurance since they can’t ignore other laws like wage requirements and the like. It becomes necessary to point out then that significant accommodations have been made to wage laws because of that pesky First Amendment.
Significant accommodations are necessary here too - far more than the administration has proposed, and that the Supreme Court will likely find necessary, IMHO.
My position as well.
Papal infallibility doesn’t enter into this.
Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical,* Humanae Vitae*, affirmed the Church’s traditional teaching that artificial birth control is contrary to God’s intention, and did indeed disregard the report, reaching a different conclusion, of the commission established by John XXIII and continued (and expanded) by Paul VI, but it was not an infallible pronouncement, and I don’t think anyone, not Paul VI himself, nor the CDC, nor anyone, has ever said it was.
I went to a very liberal Catholic all girls high school and we were taught all about birth control. They tried to gently lead us to believe it was moral to choose methods that prevented conception and that methods that caused a fertilized egg to die or be expelled could be thought of as killing a life.
The only Catholic I know who openly opposes the new rule is a gay man.
I agree.
I’m Catholic, and I believe “purely religious” beliefs should not be installed as law. You want to use contraception? Eat meat on Fridays in Lent? Divorce and remarry? Marry someone of the same sex? None of my business.
I also believe that the first amendment ought rightly to respect religious beliefs, whatever my opinion is on them, and that any restriction on them needs to have a compelling and significant public policy argument for it. I don’t see that here. I think churches and, frankly, secular institutions, should have the right to say they don’t want to fund something that conflicts with their religious beliefs, so long as in doing so they don’t create some material public concern. Subsidizing contraception, IMO, does not carry that weight. First amendment rights should trump. I think Scalia and the SC were wrong in the breadth they set with the standard of “general applicability” of a law as a threshold. “Compelling government interest” ought to be in play as well. First amendment rights are not absolute, but neither should they be dismissed so lightly.
I also understand that most people, perhaps most Catholics, don’t bother with such distinctions. The costs don’t concern them either.
I have to say that this one really bugged me. Admittedly, I don’t have a particularly detailed level of knowledge about how things went down at that school, but I’d think that if my employer told me I have to jump through specific hoops to be eligible for a promotion/salary upgrade, I’d hope that they would also tell me in advance that jumping through those hoops makes me a minister in their church.
It may apply to more than clergy, but it would take a whole lot more than the Hosanna-Tabor decision for it to possibly apply to students, especially law students, at colleges like Fordham and Georgetown who are required to carry the school’s insurance if they’re not covered by parents or spouses.
The thread title itself tells us all we need to know.
The controversy has very little to do with contraception and very much to do with swaying voters.
Hope this helps.
Enright3, considering that birth control prevents conception in the first place, how is there any life there to be destroyed? :dubious:
Actually, that’s not how papal infallibility works. As far as I know, there has never been an Ex Cathedra statement about birth control.
Nope, sorry. Like I said before, the schools cannot say whether or not the students can use contraception, but they can certainly decide whether they can pay for contraception directly.
That’s orthogonal to my point. You cannot suggest that law doesn’t apply because of ministerial exemption when many who are affected by it would never ever fall under any definition of ministerial even with the expansion of Hosanna-Tabor. So you now have to find some existing secular argument to justify an exemption in this case. I’ve been waiting for someone to offer one in any of the arguments against this, thus far without satisfaction.