Of course not. I don’t care if the plumber I hire buys cocaine, but I"m not procuring it for him.
Not to say cocaine=contraception, just that there’s a world of difference between someone buying something with money they’ve earned and expecting me to buy it directly.
You are enabling him to buy cocaine in the same way insurance enables women to get contraception. Insurance is compensation, and employers have no more right to object to benefits required by law than they can object the purchases of employees with their wages.
Now you’re torturing words until they say what you want them to say. Enabling behaviors are generally not understood to be paying a person for an honest day’s work. Even though many people will end up spending that money in immoral ways. You might as well say that if the bakery owner has an alcohol problem, you’re morally culpable if you buy a cookie.
In any case, this part of the discussion has no relevancy. It’s not for me or you to determine what satisfies a Catholic’s religious obligations. Paying someone a wage which they then may or may not use to get contraception is okay. Buying all your employees contraception is not. You might as well ask priests to hand out condoms at services.
I’m on my phone so please excuse any typos.
But here is how I see it, and please bear in mind this was written by someone who does not need birth control for contraceptive purposes, but has been prescribed (in the past) hormonal BC for medical purposes. I am also not religious.
The nuns don’t want to pay for insurance that will pay for birth control. If they self certify that they are opting out due to religious objections, the government will allow interested employees to seek said BC coverage from the insurance companies directly. The nuns don’t want their employees to get that coverage. If they need bc- whether to prevent pregnancy or to treat a medical condition - they should be paying out of pocket. I don’t think that the form is a direction to cover BC for all employees. I could be wrong.- but it sounds like it’s a form that Allows interested employees to seek the mandated coverage. Much like money allows interested employees to seek BC whether it is to prevent pregnancy or to treat a medical condition, though using money means that you are forgoing something else.
I understand that clearly the nuns believe that the form is not very different than providing direct coverage, but to me it does come across as a little spiteful. I may be wrong and bc coverage will automatically be provided to everyone employed by an org that self certifies, but it still seems a bit like “we won’t pay for it, and we don’t want anyone else helping you either!”
And to further clarify- even if the form does act as a directive and all employees will be automatically covered- it still comes across as “I won’t pay and no one else will- except you, you immoral slut!” It smacks of a general lack of interest in helping women who are genuinely suffering. The majority of women are seeking BC for contraceptive purposes, but does it really convey a caring attitude to completely dismiss those who are not?
The following does not reflect my beliefs, but is merely an attempt to clarify the issues the church feels so strongly about.
Here’s the basic philosophical problem. Oral contraceptives allow the sperm and egg to meet and join, but provide a hostile environment by making the uterine lining reject attachment. From the point of view of the church, these are babies who have been ensouled and then aborted with no opportunity for redemption.
So, yes, asking them to pay for goodness only knows how many (could be 12 or more per year!!!) babies to be presumptively murdered is heinous in their eyes. They want no part of it. Not because they think you are a slut, but because they think those babies are precious.
I still disagree; but they deserve more credit than you are giving them.
Thank you, raventhief.
I’m not sure indulging someone’s irrationality is giving them credit, TruCelt. Let them try to put a “by agreeing to work for us, you also agree to forego oral contraception” condition in place and see where that takes them.
It may be a philosophical problem but it’s not really a reality-based problem. Oral contraceptives suppress the ovulation itself so there will be no egg to be fertilized and affect cervical mucous to inhibit the sperm itself. While the endometrium is affected by birth control pills, there isn’t enough evidence to claim that it prevents implantation or not. It’s certainly not the main mechanism by which BC works.
All the administration has to do to resolve the problem is to allow anyone to seek contraceptive coverage on their own. Or not seek it.
But they don’t want there to be a choice. They want everyone to carry it whether they want it or not. So if you don’t get it through your employer, you HAVE to get it through your insurance company, which requires your employer to fill out a form saying they aren’t providing the coverage, so the insurance company has to itself.
Just drop the mandate and no one suffers any injury. This is not a life or death issue and I think it’s going to end in embarrassing fashion. I just don’t understand why the President wants to die on this hill.
Anyway, the early analysis shows not a single justice likely to start out on the side of the administration based on their earlier records on religious freedom issues:
This part is the most startling:
Perhaps he’s concerned of allowing a precedent where an irrational standard (i.e. religion) can be arbitrarily used to evade a legal requirement. Could an employer just make up a religion that makes any kinds of medical insurance taboo, calling it, for example, The Church of the Silver Angel? Are you going to challenge it, saying it’s not a real religion? On what basis?
If that’s your fear, the Democrats should run on repealing the RFRA, because that’s the law that turned the courts much more sympathetic to religious objections. Scalia and Kagan would probably start out on the side of the administration minus RFRA.
I also don’t get your argument. Are you against all religious objections to laws? Or only basically made up ones? Because the catholic opposition to contraception goes back a long way.
Why does the age of a religious tenet (or what is claimed to be a religious tenet) matter?
I’m opposed to unequal application of the law in general. If it’s decided that standard across-board regulations will apply to employee/employer relationships, and a religious organization (or any organization, really) doesn’t want to conform, let them seek out unpaid volunteers instead of employees.
And I cheerfully admit an anti-religion bias, though not an unreasonable one, I think.
Besides, it’s not my “fear”, it’s my speculation on possible presidential motive. Since he’s not my president, my interest is purely academic.
Well, since freedom of religion IS the law, both as a matter of the Constitution and a recent legislative statute, then it has to be applied.
Kagan went even further than I would, she expected RFRA to apply to a landlord who didn’t want unmarried couples as tenants. I don’t think she’ll have much hesitation allowing nuns or even Hobby Lobby to be exempt from the contraception mandate.
You’re wrong. The RFRA gives them a right to object in the first instance, but not the second.
Mennonites are pacifists, they will NOT take up arms and fight in any war. But they do pay full taxes and thus help fund such wars. I’m not sure the exact justification for this, but the Mennonites I know say it’s worth the money to be able to practice their religion in freedom.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I respect the Catholic doctrine forbidding contraception. If they would only hire their fellow Catholics, then it wouldn’t be violating their teachings. They wouldn’t be providing abortions because their workers will not seek them.
Do Catholic nuns have the right to only hire Catholic contractors to fix the plumbing in their covenant? I say yes, they do. Does the Catholic laity have the right to hire only Catholics in their for-profit businesses? I believe no, religious belief* cannot be used for the determination for hiring in the USA.
Hobby Lobby can shut their doors, sell off the business, and thus not be required to pay for contraception services. That’s the price they have to pay if they want to mix their religion with their business.
Disclosure: I’m against the ACA, but for other reasons. However, I do approve of the President’s job performance.
I don’t think you’re quite right on how it works (but I could be wrong). My understanding is that the HHS regulation bascially says that if you provide employer-provided healthcare, it has to cover (free of charge to the employee) a set of contraceptive services. As a sop to the Roman Catholic Church (primarily), the regulation goes on to provide that if the employer has a religious objection, it must so certify and then the insurance company must provide those services free of charge. Employers are perfectly able to seek coverage elsewhere (or purchase these services on their own). The nuns contend that ordering someone else to do something prohibited by their religion is also prohibited. I have trouble seeing that as spiteful.
That being said, although I think the nuns are correct on RFRA grounds, they should probably lose on standing grounds becuase they get their insurance coverage from a “church plan” which is, itself, exempted from the requirement.
That being said, requiring someone to certify their religious beliefs to the government strikes me as kinda creepy.
They are required to certify their beliefs to the insurer, not to the government. Anyway, the insurance carrier is also a party to the suit, so in terms of precedential value it doesn’t really matter if the nuns lose on standing grounds. The certification pretty much does do what raventhief suggests: it tells the insurer that the employee is eligible for exchange-funded contraceptive coverage. That’s a pretty long way from an “order”.
As I already explained, the insurance company doesn’t “pay out of its own pocket”. The substitute contraceptive coverage is funded by exchange user fees.
That memo is now pretty meaningless because the RFRA no longer applies to the states (SCOTUS overturned it to the extent it applied to states in Boerne v. Flores, and it was subsequently amended to limit its reach to federal action anyway.) She also didn’t address any interplay between the RFRA and FHA, so presumably her analysis will be a bit more focused in the present case.