Gotta question for ya. How is not providing birth control, which is against their religious beliefs, forcing someone to ‘act the way they want them to.’?
I happen to disagree with the Catholic Church on just about everything. However, there is a huge difference between an entity, such as the church, saying “Want to work for us? Ok, however we won’t pay for your birth control.'” and “Want to work for us? Ok, you cannot ever use birth control.”
The church, in this instance, is doing the first and I see nothing at all wrong with that. There is no forcing going on.
Slee*
*Atheist. Or agnostic. Depends on which day you catch me.
Against my better judgement, I’m going to regret this but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. You believe what you wrote. Alright, I can accept that. My information comes fromthis Slate.com story. It is very clear when they say that:
2 links are in the article and it mentions the same thing. From the first link (which talks about Sotomayor’s grant of the injunction):
And from the 2nd link:
And finally, from a different source, an LA Times article the next day, saying the same thing:
You linked to a 37 page PDF of legalese that most people are not going to read and I’m not going to read. Please excuse me if I don’t want to spend 30 minutes on the finer points of semantic legal reasoning but from the outside sources which have explained the issue, the nuns are doing exactly what I’m saying they are doing:
They don’t have to provide contraception.
The government accommodated their religious beliefs and crafted an exemption for them
To get the exemption, they must sign a form stating they are exempt
Then an outside insurance company would be able to provide contraception to those employees of the nuns
Because of #4, the nun do not want to sign the exemption stating they are exempt, thus leaving their employees in limbo so they cannot get contraception
The nuns are assholes and trying to push their fundamentalist beliefs on their employees
Please don’t make me regret trusting you to respond sincerely.
You’re phrasing it as a negative, as in “how can they be forcing people to do something when they are simply refusing to do anything?”. The correct way to look at it is through the employer provided insurance lens. The nuns provide insurance. They are trying to not provide insurance in this case, forcing their employees to forgo standard employer provided insurance. That is forcing their employees to act the way they want them to
In this case, the Obama administration has crafted an exemption for them. The nuns will not be paying for the birth control, period. Full stop. The end.
However, in order to certify that exemption, they have to sign a piece of paper saying they are exempt and that paper allows someone else to step in and provide birth control. That’s what they are against and that’s why its so silly. The nuns simply need to acknowledge that just by existing as an employer, they affect the world in ways that may not always be congruent to their beliefs. They need to accept that then, and sign the paper, absolving themselves of the responsibility of birth control but knowing that while their move frees up others to do so, it is still not them providing it themselves so its ok to sign it.
Ricksummon, the Catholic Church holds that artificial contraception (or more specifically, artificially contracepted sex acts) are intrinsically immoral. so, ‘malum in se.’
I missed this earlier, but it begs the question … why does their first amendment right to be fruitcakes override my first amendment right to call them fruitcakes?
I’m an atheist - one of the most looked-down upon groups on the planet. Where’s my special protection?
Er… The quote you included didn’t quite say that. It looks like you may have dropped a couple of words out of what is, admittedly, a complex sentence.
They didn’t say you had no right to call them fruitcakes. They just don’t think they should have their religious rights violated.
The real trouble here is the obvious: that special pleading simply cannot be extended to everyone. The “Kali Worshiper” example may be absurd, but it is true that religious pacifists have to pay the taxes that build nuclear weapons. They don’t get a religious exemption.
And the real problem with this is that the nuns are trying to get in between the employee/patient and his insurance company. “As long as you work for me, your insurance company is bound by my rules, and not by any mutual agreement between you two.” That goes far beyond individual conscience: that’s intrusion into someone else’s private business.
And how, precisely, is calling them “fruitcakes” violating their religious rights? And, to that end, why shouldn’t I be complaining to high-heaven (no pun intended) about my religious rights being violated every time I use a quarter. Need I remind you: I do not put my trust in God.
Blue’s point seems to be because religious people are occasionally criticized and made fun of, they deserve special protection. I disagree.
The point isn’t that you “call them fruitcakes.” Go ahead and do that all you want. The point is that you think they are fruitcakes and want to make a jurisprudential judgment based on this a priori opinion, rather than taking their argument on its own merits. My broader point is that in a pluralistic society, fair and objective judgments are hard to come by, and even harder to come by in the environment of acrid ridicule that comments like yours create.
There are other people on this board who disagree with the nuns’ stance on contraception but who are weighing their argument on its own merits. I don’t see you doing that, perhaps because you have already decided that it has no merits. If that’s the case, then you’re time is better spent demonstrating that then whining about special treatment.
Untrue. First of all, there is no problem with my *thinking *that they are fruitcakes; otherwise, why would I say it out loud. Secondly, it is they who seem to want to play under special rules. I’m not advocating for any laws to be changed, or for any special persecution be levied up on them … they are the ones saying they deserve special rules – ones that come awfully close to laws respecting and establishment of religion.
In other words – they are the ones unwilling to play ball.
As Trinopus pointed out, you’re not really grasping what I’m saying before you respond. You took the first clause of a compound sentence and based your reply on that. The problem isn’t thinking or saying in and of itself, but applying your less-than-objective viewpoint to judrisprudence, which should be as objective as possible. Imagine a supreme court justice writing an opinion on a gun control case beginning with, “These crazy gun nuts…,” or beginning an abortion case opinion with, “These rampant feminazis…” No matter how sound and logical their following comments might be, they would be criticized for a lack of objectivity.
So please, go ahead and show your cards before you enter into the debate. Just know that the conclusion you’re going to reach won’t be taken as seriously.
As for the nuns, they weren’t advocating for any laws to be changed either. They were doing just fine. Bricker’s statements that this issue isn’t a First Amendment issue notwithstanding, you’re making an argument solely based on the establishment clause. Whereas those who want to continue doing what they were doing before the ACA was passed are making their arguments based on the free exercise clause. So if the Supreme Court does rule using the First Amendment, then they will decide how to apply each clause in this case. Either way, the burden of proof is on the administration to show how it does not and cannot ever violate the free exercise of religion that was taking place before the law was established.
I’ve got sour news for both you and me: I’m not a supreme court justice. I’ll couch my opinions however I like, thank you very much. And regardless of what I think about religion, the fact remains that the Sister don’t want to obey the same rules as every other company that provides health insurance to their employees, to the point that they won’t even sign on to a perfectly reasonable compromise that didn’t have to be extended to them in the first place.
Who do you trust more, Slate.com or the Obama Administration itself?
The “37 page PDF if legalese” that I linked to was the brief that Obama’s Solicitor General filed, with the Supreme Court, a few days ago. I’m not surprised that you don’t want to read it; most defenders of President Obama probably feel that they’ll be better off if they don’t actually know what his administration is saying and doing. But for the purposes of this thread, there’s no need for you to read the entire thing. I’ve already quoted the relevant portion in the very first post in this thread. The Obama Administration says that even if the Little Sisters of the Poor sign the paper, the third party administrator can and will ignore what the paper says and not provide contraception coverage. To save you the trouble of going to the first post again, here’s the quote:
[The Little Sisters of the Poor] need only self-certify that they are non-profit organizations that hold themselves out as religious and have religious objections to providing coverage for contraceptive services, and then provide a copy of their self-certification to the third-party administrator of their self-insured group health plan. See id. at 39,874-39,886; see also 29 C.F.R. 2590.715- 2713A(b). At that point, the employer-applicants will have satisfied all their obligations under the contraceptive coverage provision.
…
this case involves a church plan that is exempt from regulation under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA), 29 U.S.C. 1003(b)(2). Employer-applicants’ third-party administrator therefore will be under no legal obligation to provide the coverage after applicants certify that they object to providing it.
[Emphasis mine]
So if you believe that, once the Little Sisters sign the paper, the third party administrator must provide contraception coverage, then you apparently also believe that the Obama Administration is blatantly lying. To a court. To the Supreme Court, in fact.
So let me ask you a very simple question: do you think that the Obama Administration is lying to the Supreme Court?
As has been pointed out to you many times by many people, any person can buy contraception at any drugstore, or get it free from countless sources. Your statement that the employees of the Little Sisters of the Poor “cannot get contraception” is therefore false.
Like none at all perhaps? This here is the problem. When you say stuff like this, it’s pretty obvious you would defend almost any objection to Obamacare.