Religious Freedom and Contraception (among other things)

The reason that employers have to provide it is because there is not a government run health care alternative. This continues to be fallout of our ridiculous, hodgepodge medical system and the horrific lack of a public option (Medicare for All) in the latest-greatest Liberal Legislation of The Century, the ACA.

Sebastian, stopping a sin tax of an extra $650+ bucks a year to be a regular adult is not soooo ridiculous. On top of that, many women take the Pill for reasons besides non-pregnancy (such as less debilitating, less painful periods). The government (rightly!) sets standard levels of medical care and coverage, and (a small part of) the Catholic Church wants to stomp their feet and deny their employees that coverage because bitches, legs closed. See, now, if there were a public option, then religious employers could whine and moan, and the govt. could say, that’s cool, your health care is insufficient, please pay this penalty and all your employees get Medicare at no extra cost. Huzzah, protect the worker! But no, as it is, there is no other way for their employees to get the necessary preventative health care they need, so.

Well hey, if we’re going to impute what is next, how about taking away the license of a doctor who doesn’t want to perform elective abortions?

Look, if instead of doing things properly, you cram things down through employers, you get problems like this. But it doesn’t do any good to pretend that it isn’t a problem just because politically you don’t want to do the actual right thing.

If you believe that the actual right thing is to make sure that everyone has access to contraception (and for the record I certainly believe that), you need to freaking provide it. Or at least provide a backstop if it isn’t provided elsewhere. And then if enough people disagree with you about that, it works through the political system and you either do or do not provide it.

But that is really quite different from forcing people to provide it directly themselves. You’ve gone from balancing people’s collective participation in things they do or do not like (mitigated through the political system) to directly forcing them to participate in an unmitigated way.

Now sometimes you have to do that. You can’t have safety regulations for food in restaurants without enforcing food safety regulations. You can’t allow conscientious objectors to that because it undermines the whole point of a safety regulation.

I get that.

You can’t have wage and hour laws without involving an employer because well, they hire for the hours and pay the wages.

I get that.

But forcing Catholic Charities to provide contraception coverage isn’t like that. The nexus between contraception and employing people *is not tight*. In fact it shouldn’t be tight, we don’t really want employers involved in that.

The moral force to the “we can’t make exceptions” argument comes when the law and the person asking for the exception are intimately entwined. A chef can’t ask for exceptions to the “wash your hands” regulations because he is preparing the food that we want not to have e coli.

The moral force of “we can’t make religious exceptions to neutral laws” comes from the idea that the neutral laws are regulating the religious person in an unavoidable way. But if there is no reason whatsoever to regulate the religious person in that way, it loses almost all of its force. If you believe that we need to be sure that people can get contraception, there is no reason to force people who believe contraception is immoral to provide it. And even if you stupidly decide that an employer mandate is the best way to go, there is no reason whatsoever not to allow opt-out *because the object of the law is the person who is seeking contraception*. It isn’t an ’employee’ in their status as an employee.

When you force religious objectors to participate in circumstances where they are not a necessary party *except by the fact of your law forcing them to be such a party* it looks a lot like petty bigotry.

Employers are not a necessary party to birth control access.

Through the political process, in the US, we allow the death penalty.

But we don’t force random people who object to the death penalty to actually strap the person down for the needle. And even if you chose to be a prison guard we don’t force you to strap the person down for the needle if you agree with the concept of incarceration but disagree with the death penalty. Conscientious objectors are allowable unless the are strictly necessary. Even in times of war we didn’t make the Quakers shoot at people.

We do however force chefs to a minimum level of cleanliness. Why? Because food handling laws can not be divorced from the position of being a chef.

Contraception providing can easily be divorced from employment providing. There is literally no reason whatsoever that they can’t be separated. In fact it would be a positive good if they were separated.

Therefore, there is no principled reason to not allow conscientious objection. Note I’m not saying that the principle of conscientious objection ALWAYS wins. I’m saying that in cases where the conscientious objector isn’t a necessary participant we shouldn’t force them to participate just because “we make the rules”.

Curiosity: would it be acceptable to allow employers to not pay coverage for contraception (or for whatever procedure they find objectionable), as long as they are willing to pay their employers the difference in the cost of health insurance in cash?

Contraception providing can easily be divorced from employment providing. There is literally no reason whatsoever that they can’t be separated.

Sure there is. The mandates on employers were found by the legislatures which passed the ACA to be the best way of providing access to insurance, and so “divorcing” them would be a loss in terms of public money or public health. The fact that you and I (or the Bishops) think the legislatures were badly mistaken in reaching this conclusion does not create a right of conscientious objection which would not obtain otherwise (i.e., if they legislatures were actually right in thinking the mandates were the best ways of protecting health at the least cost).

By the way, we seem to be debating the regulation as it existed before Obama offered his revision; it certainly should be acknowledged that Catholic hospitals, etc., are not even being required to buy the employees the objectionable policies.

Well, Sebastion and others have been mostly civil, so I will try to be as well. I was raised in the Mennonite Church (general conference, for those in the know), so as a young man I was an absolute pacifist. At the end of the 1970s, the US re-instituted registration for the military draft, a policy which continues to this day. I ignored the law until I recieved a letter telling me I would receive no student aid unless I agreed to participate. I wrote all over the margines of the registration form about being a conscientious objector, although there was no acknowledgement of that designation in the official format. I cried when I mailed in the letter, knowing that I cared more for a college education than I cared about God, or other human beings, or my own integrity. The state, in all its power, conquered my soul (although no conservative today, nor any Christian I am aware of, would care at all about my desire not to kill Others).

Sebastian, you are wrong in your analogy about the death penalty and contraception. No regulation is making a priest hand out condoms; the first draft of the rules merely require businesses and organizations to provide insurance that meets minimum standards of modern health. The current draft simply states that insurers must meet minimum standards of modern health, even if the businesses are too stupid, superstitious, or evil to accept those standards or pay for them. These are far less oppressive of someone’s conscience than registration for military service.

Also, although I’m getting increasingly less civil, I want to register how morally bankrupt it is to equate giving someone the opportunity to direct her own life, reproductive choices and pleasure with strapping a man to a table and killing him, or dropping bombs on a house. I don’t know how to comprehend the mind of someone who thinks both actions–preventing one’s own pregnancy and taking someone else’s life–are similarly evil. It’s like staring into the eyes of a sociopath; realizing that people with such inhuman beliefs are trying to acquire more power and influence in America makes me glad I’m no longer a pacifist.

Sebastian, should institutions associated with Jehovah’s Witnesses be allowed to offer insurance which only provides care which doesn’t involve ‘whole blood’ blood transfusions, or even no blood transfusions at all?

Playing devil’s advocate here: would a boycott scenario be an acceptable analogy here?

Suppose you’re a pacifist. Yes, you pay taxes and they pay for the military. Yes, you have to put up with that: render unto Caesar, etc.

But you are still free to boycott any private entity that supports the military, that benefits from wars, etc. Right? You could boycott GE, for example.

And now the Caesar tells you (whatever the rationale) to buy stuff from GE. Dontcha think this takes the tension to a whole different level?

Yes, employees can go out and buy the stuff even if it isn’t covered by employers. But, since it would be free otherwise, by law, the church groups are, in effect, imposing a ‘sin’ tax, to express religious disapproval of what these individual are up to. Surely that’s a violation of religious liberty: to wit, the right not to regard being on the pill as sinful.

I don’t think I understand this part of the argument, in particular the steps I’ve filled in with “??” below:

1. Suppose there is a law L that requires all employers except church-run organizations to provide insurance coverage for contraception;
2. Employees of such organizations must now pay for this coverage, or the services that would be covered by it, themselves;
3. ??
4. Church-run organizations are imposing this cost on their employees;
5. ??
6. Church-run organizations are imposing a “sin-tax” on their employees.

JHA @20: In the case of the contraception mandate, however, it is difficult to show that the policy satisfies RFRA’s requirement of strict scrutiny, for the reasons Sebastian notes, among others.

Sure, once you can show that the policy is in fact substantially burdening the free exercise of religion. Is the running of a hospital the “free exercise” of the Catholic religion? Not clear to me that it is.

On a practical matter, health insurance for women who don’t want to get pregnant is cheaper than for those who do. On a practical level, employers should definitely leap to give their employees support for contraception. Why not just 2 plans? With contraception support + the cash difference between what that costs and what it costs for insurance with maternity support.

the entirely correct line that religious liberty is an individual right.

I think this is where the analysis errs. For a good thorough treatment, I can’t recommend Stephen Carter’s (Yale Law) The Culture of Disbelief too highly.

To summarize the argument, though–religious belief is, for almost all religions, a matter of group practice; thus, you can’t protect individual rights to participate without protecting group rights to function as religious groups.

This is a case where the details matter; that’s why I like what Obama did in his second take. He distinguished between what an insurance company has to do and what an employer has to do. It may seem meaningless to some, but a lot of liberal Catholics really were uncomfortable with one position (the church has to provide contraception directly) and not another (the church contracts with insurance companies, who in turn are obligated to provide services to their customers.) It ends up in the same place, but it removes the church from the direct discussion.

Having said that, the religious exemption has gotten far, far out of control in the US in other contexts. If you’re providing public services you abide by public rules. A pharmacist doesn’t get to choose which prescriptions they like and which they don’t; you don’t get to void discrimination laws for agencies providing public services; and so on. (To translate: Yes, you can require that priests be Catholics. No, you can’t refuse to hire gay people if you’re running the county adoption agency.)

The impairment on free exercise—that is, the burden on religious practice—comes from requiring an individual to do something her religion proscribes (in this case, facilitating or paying for the commission of a mortal sin). This easily qualifies as a substantial burden under the relevant caselaw.

If doing anything which makes it more likely that another individual will do something which one regards as sinful constitutes “facilitation of sin,” and if compelling such facilitation is ipso facto a “substantial impairment of free exercise,” then there are virtually unlimited opportunities for future lawsuits. And no matter how many mattresses the government tries to pile up to ease the moral discomfort of the religious, the most exquisitely sensitive will always cry that the pea beneath is causing them agonies in their conscience.

(By the way, is it legally relevant if the claimant here has been sleeping on that lumpy mattress for a decade or so in 28 states without feeling the need to cry out for relief?)

John,

Is there no possibility of meaningful religious group practice unless, in effect, some people are deprived of their individual religious rights?

I think this is manifestly the case in many strongly communitarian/exclusivist/authoritarian religious groups, like Hutterite or (some kinds of) Amish or Hasidic religious groups. In those cases, what you see are faith-driven collective acts of self-provision and maintenance, theologically grounded in a notion of community or covenant, and defending the right of individual members to pursue acts contrary to the collective puts into question the faith motivation of the whole (meaning not just the faith of all other individual members, but also of the collective body itself).

Obviously these are extreme cases, deserving of some finely detailed theoretical responses (hence, the long debate over rights of exit, and internal vs. external restrictions, Kymlicka, Taylor, Okin, etc.); the situation at hand isn’t nearly so extreme, and I tend to think that the Obama administration’s revised position–I like your description of it in terms of prophylactics–fairly effectively satisfies most of the fears about interference with religious bodies acting holistically in the performance of the work they feel called to do. I mean, it’s an awkward reach-around (one that single-payer would fix, by the way!), but it does seem to work. I want to see more legal parsing and discussion of the revision, though, because while the whole argument is surely nonsensical within a framework which associates religious freedom solely with the individuals who choose to affirm or reject the instructions of their religious faith, for those who accept that religious groups themselves, as groups, also may be understood as possessing rights, then any kind of government mandates, even indirect ones, deserve scrutiny.

In fairness, the bishops would fiercely oppose universal government provision of contraception.

As would Mitch McConnell.

The notion that government-provided universal access to contraception would somehow “resolve” this issue is, in the current US political context, nothing short of hilarious. “The government now wants to FORCE Catholics to pay for OTHER PEOPLE’s BIRTH CONTROL out of THEIR OWN POCKETS.” Yeah, that’ll fly.

What will McConnell have to say about the Muslim employer who – speaking purely hypothetically! – wants to impose de facto sharia law on Muslim and non-Muslim employees alike

He’ll say that’s different, because shut up. And you know this as well as I do.

Why do you insist on attributing good faith and intellectual integrity where none is warranted? They don’t call them culture wars for nothing.

The solution was for liberals to do the hard work and create a healthcare plan that was not tax deductible, so employers get out of the game AND still give up on the Single payer model.

Push all individuals to buy insurance personally, and choose “does or does not” cover abortion etc. covage and then give subsidies to the poor.

t would have been harder, and since they didn’t do the hard work, employees of Catholic hospitals are screwed.

Next time do the hard work.

The notion of “free choice by another moral agent” is where criticism of the Obama compromise should collapse, as a matter of logic and, especially, public policy. The current version of the freedom of conscience claim must go something like this: in order for my conscience to be “free” on contraception, the following must all be true:

1. I can’t use contraception;
2. I can’t provide contraception to anyone else;
3. I can’t be forced to follow a generally applicable law that requires the insurance plan I’m making available to my employees to cover contraception; AND
4. The secular insurance company that I’m using to provide health insurance to my employees can’t be forced, by generally applicable law, to offer side deals to my employees through which contraception is made available free of charge.

I think step 3 goes too far, but step 4 is simply ludicrous. The insurance company is the “moral agent” in step 4, not the Catholic Church (presumably, Catholics who feel very strongly about contraception choose not to work for insurance companies that provide contraception coverage). Once you get to step 4, Catholics are no longer simply preserving their ability to avoid “facilitating” the use of contraception; they are insisting on the right to prevent people with whom they do business — the insurance companies — from facilitating the use of contraception. So now it’s not just the churches that get religious exemptions from generally applicable laws, but also the secular companies that do business with the churches? Because money! It’s fungible! Ridiculous.

It’s also morally and logically indistinguishable from Catholics insisting that “freedom of conscience” gives them an affirmative right to burden the ability of their employees to use contraception. The “conscience” objection to the Obama compromise isn’t “I’m being forced to violate my conscience by providing contraception to my employees;” instead, it’s “I’m being denied my right to burnish my conscience by making my secular employees pay for contraception out of their own pockets.” Since all manner of common and fun activities are also considered “mortal sins,” by one religion or another, think of all the fun places this notion could take us. No coverage of prenatal care for unmarried mothers, since it would clearly amount to “facilitation” of fornication. No coverage of STDs for any unmarried people, for the same reasons. No coverage of treatment of AIDs (or, heck, maybe any disease) for gays, since homosexuality is a sin.

I don’t think I’ll ever cease to be amazed at the ACA’s ability to drive people stark, raving stupid.

the choice to spend wages on contraception (or anything else) is the result of a free choice made by another moral agent. This is also why there’s not a problem with tax dollars—and might not be a problem were employers to provide some sort of “voucher” that employees use to purchase the health care plan of their choice—but there is a problem with the religious entity having to pay for the coverage when it purchases insurance.

On the main point, John H. is of course completely right (and the trolls are of course trolling; but the usual arguments against mud-wrestling a pig don’t apply here since John seems to enjoy it as much as they do) but I do have to say, I find Jonathan Adler’s argument above absolutely fascinating.

So, evidently a dollar paid in a market (or, interestingly, as taxes) carries zero moral responsibility, but if something other than pure purchasing power is exchanged, it carries a moral residue along with it. So if the employer provides a dollar to the employee, and the employee then uses that dollar to make a payment to a pharmacist for contraceptives, all the agency rests with the employee; but if the employer provides a dollar’s worth of insurance to the employee, and the employee uses the insurance to pay the pharmacists, some of the agency still rests with the employer. Evidently a cash payment severs the chain of moral custody, but a payment in kind does not. (Presumably in a barter economy we would all be fully accountable for each others’ actions.) There’s some kind of profound & important confusion of free markets and free will going on here, I think, but it would take a David Graeber to do it justice.

“What will McConnell have to say about the Muslim employer who – speaking purely hypothetically! – wants to impose de facto sharia law on Muslim and non-Muslim employees alike

He’ll say that’s different, because shut up. And you know this as well as I do.”

Exactly! As far as they are concerned those other religions aren’t real anyway.

“Sebastian, should institutions associated with Jehovah’s Witnesses be allowed to offer insurance which only provides care which doesn’t involve ‘whole blood’ blood transfusions, or even no blood transfusions at all?”

As far as I can tell no one has responded to this point to my satisfaction. We have had a process to decided what requirements an acceptable insurance plan must meet. If we allow one group to get a religious exemption from having to supply these basic requirements why not allow others? What makes Catholics so special? Birth control is a basic part of health care for millions of women. You don’t want to provide it fine, don’t take the government subsidy.

The one case where I can see Vlad’s step-sequence compress down is where Catholic institutions self-insure. Apparently some of them do (and a recent New York Times story notes some cases where they specifically do so to avoid state mandates on contraceptive coverage.)

This, IMO, would be more problematic for Catholic institutions than cases where they’re simply paying an outside insurance company, since if I understand the accommodation announced on Friday, the insurers — in this case, the institutions themselves — would have to provide the coverage they object to.

On the other hand, unlike healthcare and education, it doesn’t appear to me to be part of the practice of Catholic faith to be in the insurance business.

I am a little confused by the employment arguments being debated here. I don’t know how far this logic would go. For instance, is it legal for a company to refuse to employ women based on their religious beliefs? Or, if they are forced to employ women, can they define their job categories to limit their pay and authority? Can they define a dress code? How far does the religious exemption extend?

As a further example: in Germany, the law requires every employer to contribute to the employee’s health insurance (fifty-fifty). The law further specifies the minimum standards for what health insurance has to cover. These standards include contraception coverage for women up to the age of 20. Questions to the moral theologians:
1) Is that fundamentally different (aside from the age cutoff) from what US law now requires?
2) If yes, how is it different?
3) If no, why hasn’t the German Catholic church ever demanded an exemption from the insurance mandate?

Btw, in case that matters, German Health insurance is not government-run. It is run by several independent entities roughly comparable to US health insurance providers.

I clearly said something that tripped the filter. Short version–the 28 state talking point is false, the Catholic church has not been forced to provide contraception before. Hopefully the extended version comes out of moderation soon.

@54, according to wikipedia:

There are two separate types of health insurance: public health insurance (Gesetzliche Krankenversicherung) and private insurance (Private Krankenversicherung). … About 87.5% of the persons with health insurance are members of the public system, while 12.5% are covered by private insurance (as of 2006).

So, it is mostly government-run.

Why don’t you guys just accept that the ACA is a fuck up of colossal proportions, and be done with it? Why would anyone want to defend this crap.

I would love to see the folks saying “I don’t want to pay for that as an employer” back anything like Medicare for all. But it’s just so clear that what they’re shooting for is the ability to say “I don’t want you to have that, and as your employer I can keep you from having it”. They want the employer to be crucial in employees’ lives…when they approve of the employer.

piglet 02.13.12 at 5:07 pm

” For the record, I am forced by the laws of the land to pay, with my tax dollars, for wars, death penalty and other things that I find utterly unconscionable. ”

Or, in short, by the laws of the land liberals and other non-rightwingers are forced to pay for *everything that the right uses the government to pay for*, with few to no exemptions. And back in the day, I saw no right-wingers disturbing themselves about it. And h*ll will freeze over before those same bishops will refuse communion to a right-winger for using tax dollars and the compulsion of law to do things against the ‘seamless garment of life’.

For instance, is it legal for a company to refuse to employ women based on their religious beliefs? Or, if they are forced to employ women, can they define their job categories to limit their pay and authority? Can they define a dress code? How far does the religious exemption extend?

More good questions that we won’t see any answers to in this thread.

But we would probably do well to drop all this talk about “religion,” as it’s obviously a distraction at this point. McConnell gives away the game when he criticizes Obama for “decid[ing] what somebody else’s religion is,” because a person’s religion is clearly whatever that person says it is. Thus does an invocation of “religious beliefs” become an all-purpose get-out-of-jail-free card.

But it’s just so clear that what they’re shooting for is the ability to say “I don’t want you to have that, and as your employer I can keep you from having it”. They want the employer to be crucial in employees’ lives…when they approve of the employer.

Thank you for cutting through the BS, Bruce.

Somewhat more detailed version of the “28-state” talking point:

28 states require insurers which cover prescription drugs to provide full coverage of FDA-approved contraceptive drugs and devices.

* 8 states do not have religious exemptions (Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Montana, New Hampshire, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin).

* 4 states exempt churches and church associations, but not hospitals or other institutions (Arizona, California, New York, Oregon).

* 7 states exempt churches, church associations, church-affiliated primary and secondary schools, and (arguably) charities and universities, but not hospitals (Arkansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Rhode Island).

* 8 states have much broader exemptions which can apply to hospitals (Connecticut, Delaware, Hawai’i, Illinois, Maryland, Missouri, New Mexico, West Virginia), and 2 of those states also allow secular organizations and religious insurers to claim exemptions on moral or religious grounds (Illinois and Missouri). Out of those eight, Connecticut requires the objecting employer to subcontract out provision of contraception coverage, and Hawai’i and Missouri offer individual access to contraception coverage at the group rate.

* One state only exempts insurers (Nevada).

[Source: The Guttmacher Institute]

So, by the numbers, that’s eight states that exempt no-one, twenty states in total that don’t exempt hospitals, and of the remaining eight which do potentially exempt hospitals, three offer alternative methods of providing the coverage to employees.

(Now, it’s possible that this is nevertheless all an evil plot to institute a slippery slope to impose elitist New Hampshire and Georgia values on the God-fearing folk of Connecticut and Illinois, by using a supposed compromise modeled on left-wing Missouri law. However, given the miserable track record with the truth of those usual suspects making the biggest fuss in Congress, the press, and the comment section of this blog, I’m still inclined to side with Justice Scalia’s opinion in Employment Division v. Smith.)

JHA:

It’s different because the choice to spend wages on contraception (or anything else) is the result of a free choice made by another moral agent. This is also why there’s not a problem with tax dollars—and might not be a problem were employers to provide some sort of “voucher” that employees use to purchase the health care plan of their choice—but there is a problem with the religious entity having to pay for the coverage when it purchases insurance.

How is insurance different than a voucher or a tax in this analysis? Not all employees will use the insurance to procure birth control. Presumably, if they are obedient Catholics, only very few of the employees will use it for this purpose. Therefore, in your analysis, there is “a free choice made by another moral agent” before any contraception is procured (and another, separate free choice before it is used). So if the test is whether there is a free choice by another moral agent, that test is satisfied.

Insurance is also like a voucher in that you can use it or not use it for a variety of different services, and different people will use it for different things. I’d like to hear you explain again, without using this “free moral agent” argument, why this is different than forcing employers to purchase a voucher or to pay into an HSA.

The fact that employees are not required to use insurance to buy contraception brings up another point. If religious organizations want to influence their employees’ behavior, why shouldn’t they do it the traditional way: by convincing them that it is morally or spiritually right to act in a certain way? The Bishops seem to think that they can use the ACA as a government-mandated shortcut to compel religious action from their employees without going through the hard work of spiritual/religious leadership. Why should our laws be used to help the Church force its employees to follow religious precepts when the Church has failed to convince the employees to be observant on their own?

HV 58 (about German health insurance):

“So, it is mostly government-run. Why don’t you guys just accept that the ACA is a fuck up of colossal proportions, and be done with it? Why would anyone want to defend this crap.”

My comment isn’t concerned with defending ACA. This is only respondsing to the religious liberty argument. For precision’s sake, no, the German “gesetzliche Krankenkasse” is not government-run. It is run by non-governmental entities. Their operation is regulated by law to be sure but so is the operation of US health insurance providers. If you are interested in the fine points, Krankenkassen are “Körperschaften des öffentlichen Rechts”, similar to public TV and radio broadcasters (e. g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARD_%28broadcaster%29). Believe it or not but these public broadcasters are not “government-run” (this would be unconstitutional), although they are funded by a user fee collected by the government. (Btw this would be another case in need of a religious exemption).

The only reason to mention this was that if the church needs a religious insurance exemption in the US, the same case could be made in Germany. But it isn’t being made. Why?

Mds, all 28 states allow exemptions if you self insure the drug benefit–which many hospitals (Catholic and otherwise) already did for the obvious non-contraception-related reasons [i.e. when you run a pharmacy you can often get better drug benefits than by going outside].

Re 71, of course I loathe Santorum too, but I don’t understand why this is good writing?

“It must be made with our politics that” is just throat-clearing; it could be cut without losing anything. “Affront to the rule of law” is cliche. “Doddering nonsense” doesn’t read well to me, and you enshrine something *in* something else, not *into* it. The referent of “it” in “espouse it” is unclear — it seems like it should be the subject of the clause, which is “affair,” but an affair is not something one can espouse. “Simply,” again, is just space filler. “Disagree” needs a “with…” or “about…” following it. And “in our lives” is extra verbiage (where else would they have power?) that ends the sentence on a weak note, and also ruins the parallel construction of “health of..” and “power of…”.

Just saying.

The point is that when insurance coverage is contracted for, some things are covered and others not. The mandate requires that contraception be part of the contract, so it is part of what the employer is required to pay for. Under current doctrine, we treat tax dollars differently because we all pay taxes into the common fisc, and then those tax dollars are spent on those things that the government decides to spend them on. There’s no free exercise problem here, even though many of us object to many things the government spends the money on, because we’re not required to pay for those things directly. This distinction is found throughout First Amendment jurisprudence, including in the speech context (e.g. government can’t force you to pay for objectionable speech, but it can use your tax dollars to pay for objectionable speech).

JHA

JHA -so a Catholic-affiliated hospital, as an example, can’t force me to pay the invoice they send to cover the medical care I received after being transported there unconscious if I consider Church beliefs objectionable? The hospital is, after all, “buying” employee insurance coverage with dollars it gets in payment for services rendered to the population at large – it’s not giving medical care or education away nor is it relying on Church donations willingly made as a parish does. If Congress wants to expand the religious exemption, it needs to rethink who’s actually paying and it isn’t the Church. If they want to debate religious freedom, they need to consider the implications of pretending patients or students with Constitutional rights aren’t the ones primarily funding some Church businesses. That’s most problematic for hospitals because the Church operates a great many and might well have the only facility in the vicinity. Perhaps, in exchange for this expanded exemption, the Church ought to run its businesses off donations willingly given by those who share its beliefs rather than expect those who don’t share them to contribute financially. The Church is then free to exercise religion without intruding on the free exercise of those who wouldn’t willingly contribute one cent to the Church.
Won’t happen of course because some politicians would need to apply the same logic to this as they do to taxes: businesses don’t pay taxes, their customers do. Government has no money, it spends taxpayer dollars. Well…the Church doesn’t have any money either to operate universities or hospitals, it spends what it gets from charging the public for services.

“ERRATA: Re “Should Christian Scientists allowed to provide insurance that covers no medical care? “: Nick Kristof offered that example and blew it. Per their website, Christian Scientists consider a decision to seek conventional medical care a matter of individual conscience. That said, plenty of employers do not offer medical care coverage, their possible Christian Scientificity notwithstanding.”

Way to miss the point Tom. It is not whether they ARE doing these things but whether they should be PERMITTED to do them.

@ Jonathan H. Adler:

The impairment on free exercise—that is, the burden on religious practice—comes from requiring an individual to do something her religion proscribes (in this case, facilitating or paying for the commission of a mortal sin).

Question: Say a non-Catholic employee of a Catholic hospital, as he is about to pick up his check at the end of the week, proclaims that he can’t wait to use that money to go get some condoms, pick up a random woman at a bar, and get laid. Then the next day, he’s going to use more of the money to participate in a pro-choice rally and make a generous donation. Would it be within the employer’s rights to then deny the employee his pay, or at least some amount of it? Or to withhold it until he promises not to use it for those purposes?

Once it is known how the money will be spent, can an employer then act in some way? Or must the employer be forced to fund activity that it finds objectionable or morally wrong?

JW Mason —

The difference is choice. In your hypo, B does not get to choose whether or not to pay C to provide the contraception, as it is already contracted for. Also, for those institutions that self-insure, A and B are one and the same.

Dan Robinson —

Religious employers are not claiming the right to influence the behavior of their employees. They are claiming the right to be employers without giving up their rights of conscience.

As for the employment discrimination examples above, under current First Amendment doctrine, religious institutions are exempt from employment discrimination (and retaliation) rules when it comes to clergy and others who perform similar functions. The Supreme Court so held just this year, 9-0.

Back to the contraception mandate, the First Amendment does not preclude the imposition of such a mandate on religious institutions generally. The federal government, however, is bound by RFRA, and this law imposes a more stringent standard on policies that burden the free exercise of religion. So just because states can impose contraception mandates — and they can under current law — does not mean the federal government can follow suit.

JHA

JHA

Do you think Obama is overplaying his desire to appease the middle class at the expense of alientating the church?

Should these women be denied access to medically needed drugs because it offends the sensibilities of some pompous blow hard?

I think we’ve already established that the rights of pompous reactionary theocratic misogynist blowhards always trumps the provision of health care to women, due to horseshit origami “rights of conscience.”

” MPA Victoria—
Insofar as some of those treatments are potentially life-saving, there would be a stronger claim that they could pass muster under RFRA, but the principles are the same. Requiring such employers to provide such coverage would burden their religious exercise, so the question is whether the state can proffer a sufficiently compelling justification for imposing that burden. And, as with contraception, the easy way around this problem is for the government to provide or subsidize the treatment in question, or to stop privileging employer-provided insurance so that individuals are better able to obtain insurance in line with their own moral and religious preferences. At issue is not “access” to contraception (or anything else) but who pays for it.

JHA”

Well at least you are consistent. Though I would argue that for the people objecting to this the issue is indeed that dirty, slutty women want access to contraception and they don’t want them to have it. Does the new policy, where the insurance company and not the organization in question handles the distribution of contraceptives, ease your concerns?

Also lets just say I started a new religion with a tenet against putting safety guards on saws. In fact for this religion the use of any type of device intended to prevent injury is a mortal sin as it shows a distrust of GOD. Does the government have the right to force me to violate my DEEPLY held religious beliefs and obey safety regulations?

/Curious to see exactly how crazy you are willing to go.

LightsOut asked:

Would it be within the employer’s rights to then deny the employee his pay, or at least some amount of it? Or to withhold it until he promises not to use it for those purposes?

Once it is known how the money will be spent, can an employer then act in some way?

Most of employees, most of us, are work under conditions of at will employment. So is largely free to fire the employee for any reason at all: I am not a lawyer (IANOL?), but I think the exceptions are pretty much limited to firing related to race, gender, age and disability, things that are explicitly regulated by law. So the answer to your questions, I think, is that the employer cannot withhold pay already earned, but is free to fire the employee.

I recall an episode from I think the 2004 election, but maybe the 2008, in which a woman parked her car in an employee parking lot and had (IIRC) a KERRY FOR PRESIDENT bumpersticker on the car, and she quickly lost her job. This was in Alabama (again, IIRC), the story went national almost immediately, with the employer making the point that he didn’t want someone with her views on his payroll. I’m pretty sure she was quickly hired by the Kerry campaign.

Mr. Vieuxtemps asks
“Why don’t you guys just accept that the ACA is a fuck up of colossal proportions, and be done with it? Why would anyone want to defend this crap.’

I don’t know if you’ve ever taught middle school students, but I have. There were always a significant number of sullen, slow students in the class, and since you’re no longer allowed to beat them, you must occasionally engage in inane, convoluted arguments to get them to do what they are supposed to be doing.

This is why ACA, and not a single payer system, made it through Congress.

Intellectually, it’s a pile. But it does get more people covered.

Also for all those arguing that catholic affiliated businesses should get this special treatment:

Should a business affiliated with the Southern Hypothetical Baptist Church of White Supremacy be entitled to refuse to employ or serve people of colour due to their religious beliefs? Obviously doing so would be illegal. Yet we would tolerate this infringement of personal belief quite happily (unless you’re Ron Paul).

And this is a far more direct infringement because the business is being forced to hire and serve people against its religious conscience while here Catholic affiliated businesses are only being required to provide health coverage without contraception through an insurer who will separately offer free contraception to employees.

“other than obvious corruption of the political system”
And there is your answer Henri.

“And there is no good reason to defend crappy ACA; whatever troubles it faces, it deserves them. Let it die.”

As a Canadian who is reasonably happy with our system part of me agrees with this. The other, more sensible, part thinks that the ACA is an improvement on the status quo and may even be a step towards a system of universal care. Some actual human beings will be able to get medical treatment that they otherwise would not have gotten thanks to the ACA. This is a non-trivial improvement. In fact for the individuals helped it is literally a life saving improvement.

The Catholic Church does not recognize those not married within the Church. Can they now refuse to cover who you describe as your spouse, since they do not recognize your lay marriage? How about those children you have, in their view, out of wedlock? Let us give them their religious liberty and allow them not to offer health insurance for those bastard children. I mean, to do otherwise would be against “religious liberty.”

I think it has to be pointed out that the Jehovah’s Witness example really stretches a long way beyond the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Insurance companies pay for a number of things forbidden by some religions: stays in hospitals which serve food forbidden by some religions, treatment by medical professionals wearing uniforms considered impermissibly immodest by some religions, etc. As far as I know, there’s no movement among, e.g., Orthodox Jewish organizations to protest the injustice whereby they are forced to pay for their secular employees to eat cheeseburgers; would such a movement be less defensible than the current Catholic one?

whatever troubles it faces, it deserves them. Let it die.

And then what? Let the perfect be the enemy of the not very good and get the utterly rubbish instead? Clinton tried to introduce universal healthcare and faced heavy opposition from the usual suspects. It has taken more than a decade to reappear on the US agenda in even the current format.

“So presumably you’d allow businesses affiliated with Jehovah’s Witnesses an exemption from providing health insurance that covered whole blood transfusions? Or any religious affiliated organisation any kind of exemption up to and including refusing coverage for women at all if there is a chance they’ll be treated by a man.”

You seem to be making up religious objections that don’t actually exist. I think that in general forcing people to violate their religious observations is the sign of a bigot if reasonable accommodations are available. I don’t think we should make Jehovah’s Witnesses provide for blood transfusions just because they happen to be employers. That doesn’t mean that their employees should be unable to get blood transfusions, I think for example that anyone who doesn’t get coverage through their employer or somewhere else should be able to get Medicare for whatever the fair premium is. And especially when there are things like Medicare already available (and spending enough money per capita to pay for universal health care in Canada) there is no reason to fail to allow true religious accommodations.

Further you’re taking the hypothetical much further than even the Catholic church does. They aren’t asking the government to let them bar their workers from using contraception. They are asking that the government let the church not pay for it.

BTW, there aren’t many businesses ‘affiliated’ with Jehovah’s Witnesses for reasons which should be obvious to anyone who knows something about their faith more than that they don’t to transfusions.

” I think that in general forcing people to violate their religious observations is the sign of a bigot if reasonable accommodations are available. ”

Should we really be calling people bigots here Sebastian?

This “debate,” viewed from the outside, is so ludicrous as to be cringeworthy.

What’s really sad about this is not the pathetic logical twister games required to make this current controversy possible, but the fact that “debate” in the USA has failed to get past this primary school-level conception of “freedom.”

If this is what you guys have to work with, I really do pity you.

“You seem to be making up religious objections that don’t actually exist.”

You are arguing for a general principle are you not? We are probing that general principle by examining where it would lead us if rigorously applied to other cases that could realistically come up. That those cases are hypothetical doesn’t invalidate the argument. Frankly, only a few weeks ago, I would have thought the case under debate as unlikely and far-fetched. The catholic church starting a fight over health insurance coverage for contraception seemed to me no more plausible than Jehovah’s witnesses starting a fight over blood transfusion. That reality is crazier than reasonable people would think is one of the take-home messages here.

And with that, I’m out of here. Good night.

D’oh@$%!

Where I ,wrote, “doesn’t require anything of employees”,

I meant, “doesn’t require anything of employers”

That typo comes close to eviscerating my meaning.

Putting in a point about the real world again: to draw out the conscientious-objector comparison, US employers are, in fact, required to make accomodations for employees who serve in the military (http://www.dol.gov/compliance/guide/userra.htm). I don’t know if any Quakers or other pacifists have ever tried to claim a religious exemption to this sort of thing, though I doubt it.
The comparison isn’t totally exact: employers aren’t directly paying money for military service. But they are required to bear the cost of their employees’ absence.

@chris
George Orwell already dealt with that in 1984–if the government claims everyone follows the established religion, where are you going to get the Enemies from who people need to blame everything on?

It’s occurred to me that there’s a familiar non-religious principle at work here. This is all about what employees of religiously-affiliated institutions are doing with the portion of their compensation that comes in health care coverage. The employees are presumed to be accepting smaller upfront wages in exchange for other benefits. Yet somehow, it morally remains the employer’s money because they’re the ones transferring it directly to the insurance company on the employees’ behalf. Similarly, those “gold-plated” benefits that, say, public schoolteachers get are a generous unearned gift from taxpayers, not a portion of the worker’s previously-agreed compensation, so of course employers can play takesies-backsies with such funds. There’s a common thread about the illegitimacy of ordinary workers’ pay here that the default reactionary misogyny blinded me to at first. Obviously, if employers still paid their employees in company scrip, they could exercise much more control over what rightfully remains the employers’ money. Ah, for those lost heady days of liberty.

Henri’s GE example is nonsense and that is why it has been rightly ignored so far. There is absolutely no analogy to the situation of being forced to buy from a certain company. This is a minimum standards regulation: group health insurance has to meet certain minimum standards. It has to cover blood transfusions, contraception, and viagra, in addition to all the rest. The correct analogy is still my seat-belt example: the law mandates that cars must have seat-belts. It doesn’t prescribe a particular manufacturer. Furthermore, the seat-belt example is actually stronger in terms of how it interferes with personal freedom because you are actually required to wear them while nobody is required to use contraception.

(I see – this didn’t go through moderation)

Henri’s GE example is nonsense and that is why it has been rightly ignored so far. There is absolutely no analogy to the situation of being forced to buy from a certain company. This is a minimum standards regulation: group health insurance has to meet certain minimum standards. It has to cover blood transfusions, contraception, and viaxra, in addition to all the rest. The correct analogy is still my seat-belt example: the law mandates that cars must have seat-belts. It doesn’t prescribe a particular manufacturer. Furthermore, the seat-belt example is actually stronger in terms of how it interferes with personal freedom because you are actually required to wear them while nobody is required to use contraception.

(If two consenting adults want to submit to binding arbitration by an expert in sharia law, or something like that, that’s generally ok. Stuff like that. Group rights grow out of individual rights in this way, without fundamentally abrogating them.)

Does this mean to say that there’s a difference between “I will only marry you if you sign this contract obligating you to follow sharia law” and “I will only employ you if you sign this contract obligating you to follow sharia law”?

Also, re: the ACA, while liberals might prefer if the government simply provided all care, that doesn’t mean that having private actors provide it was a “second-best” outcome. Some people believe that private insurers will be more efficient than government bureaucrats. They also believe health care should be available to all, so they’ve required guaranteed issue and community rating. But in order to prevent a race to the bottom, the government must then specify what procedures all health plans must cover–otherwise the sickest people will gravitate to the plans that cover the most. For liberals, like myself, the ACA represents a second-best outcome politically. For someone like Joe Lieberman, there was no political compromise at all–this bill represents the best policy, a balance between the efficiency of the market and the protections of government. So Sebastian’s argument fails–from their perspective, Senate moderates got pretty much their first-best choice of policy. The adverse selection problems that would be caused by insurers choosing not to provide government mandated service are equivalent to the diseases that would be spread by chefs not washing their hands.

Yes, if you object to seat belts, you’re screwed. Unless you manage buy a pre seat belts model, or something. Very few people do object, though, if any. So, what’s the point?

“I get the impression that indeed the employer intends to boycott insurance companies that provide certain benefits.”

Factually wrong. Are you Catholic employers wouldn’t boycott the insurance company, they’d negotiate a contract with it that excludes certain benefits. Also, the logic of the boycott argument would require them to boycott the drug manufacturer, not the insurance company. Now the assumption (as has been stated in this thread) is that the employee who isn’t covered would still get contraception, only they’d pay for it out of pocket. In that scenario, the drug company wouldn’t lose anything (and neither the insurance company) – the only loser would be the individual. If that is a boycott, then Santorum is Gandhi, McConnell is MLK, and Pope Ratzinger is – Giordano Bruno, perhaps?

“Very few people do object [to seat-belts], though, if any.” And that claim is based on what scientific survey? You either have no clue (there are in fact plenty of people who are upset about sea-belt laws, helmet laws etc.) or you deliberately throw around BS. I don’t mind playing devil’s advocate, but the assumption is that the devil is actually a clever guy.

“But then the government passes the law (The Glorious Safe Driving Act) that now requires all the insurance companies to give away a free handgun with every policy.”

More BS but ok. I won’t leave you with the impression that you ave scored a point. This law would be a stupid one but that alone doesn’t make it unconstitutional. It may be unconstitutional for other reasons (because the burden it places on the insurance isn’t really justifiable) but I don’t see how it raises any religious freedom issues.

Here’s a more realistic analogy. A government mandate may require certain employers to pay for employees’ self-defense training. Now the employer may be a pacifist and object to that training. Would they get a religious exemption? Of course not.

Okay, so we seem wedded to this conscientious objection principle. I still think it morally repugnant that I must discuss with a straight face someone’s conscientious objection to providing health care that has demonstrably improved the health and living standards of people around the world. Still, here goes:

When the U.S. had a military draft, one could apply for CO status. To do that, the man would need to go before a local tribunal to demonstrate his consistent, religiously grounded beliefs. Usually, a deferment lead to an alternative service–for example, my father, rather than blowing things up in Asia, built things in West Africa.

So, we should have local tribunals of citizens to test each organization’s dedication to its principles. The organizations should demonstrate A) that they are consistently opposed to doing business with companies that provide birth control. If they won’t buy a product that is evil, they shouldn’t make money by holding its stock in their investment portfolios; and B) that the organization’s heirarchy follow the parent religion’s strictures–if Notre Dame is Cathlolic, for example, then clearly it wouldn’t allow its leadership to act outside of Catholic laws. Ideally, all of the faculty would be celibate, but what can you do.

Also, once the organization received its CO status, it would have to provide an aternative benefit. In this case, I suggest that it give every employee a cash bonus every year worth more than the highest probable cost of the benefits it is refusting to provide its employees because its conscience is so important to it.

Low BS-tolerance.

Correct Consumatopia – my understanding is that if you have at least 50 workers you either provide health insurance of a certain standard or your workers are offered subsidised insurance through an exchange. The company is then taxed $2,000 dollars for each worker that is getting insurance through an exchange. Details may be wrong but that’s the gist I think.

Hence my comment upthread around the General Electric analogy:

“You aren’t being forced to buy from GE, your employee isn’t forced to buy from GE and if you don’t want to even allow your employees the option to buy from GE then you can pay the extra tax.”

But then the government passes the law (The Glorious Safe Driving Act) that now requires all the insurance companies to give away a free handgun with every policy.

OK, so what? I’d disagree with that law, I’d oppose it politically, but if I lost the political fight I wouldn’t claim that was some kind of violation of fundamental rights; it’s just a dumb law with little or no relation to its intended purpose.

Clearly, demanding that I pull the trigger is way over the line, but the current law isn’t even the equivalent of making me carry the gun in the car, let alone making me load it.

P.S. As you sort of hint at but don’t make explicit, the government does actually require insurance, bought from a private company, that passes certain government-determined standards, for driving — it’s not just a matter of tax breaks, it’s actually against the law to drive without it. But that’s different, because shut up, that’s why.

Isn’t there an argument that we’re at the bottom of a slippery slope rather than at the top of one. That is isn’t the catholic church just playing on the feeling of some portion of the electorate that by a perfectly rational process we have come to the point where providing birth control pills with no copay is either provided by an employer or else the employer is subject to a tax penalty is just somehow, someway going to far.

Kind of like the same way that you realize when you kill the last wolf or polar bear or rhino that you’ve somehow gone too far.

Even if you see moral progress in all this expansion of rights and government and equality and federal uniformity, doesn’t it give you any sense of moral vertigo how much things have changed over time?

How can you study conservatism without any feeling of what it means to some people to have a sense of authority or decorum or values change?

Its like trying to study the left without any feeling of what humiliation is. Doesn’t it just sound odd when right wing authors write about the left and you can tell they just just don’t get it at all?

This is why the right can manipulate voters. They get that we’re all culturally endangered. We’re already there. There is no moral voice that has supermajority consent in the world and it creates significant and exploitable anxiety. For the left, this is the realization that on issues like war, torture, labor law, environmental protection, voting, progressive taxation, battles that we’re presumed won have been reopened.

Some left-leaning writers see this and interpret it as fanaticism or irrationality or the death moans of a dying culture. Maybe, they are right. But they are not dead yet. And no one really knows what is like for authority to die in a culture like ours.

“A government mandate may require certain employers to pay for employees’ self-defense training. Now the employer may be a pacifist and object to that training. Would they get a religious exemption? Of course not.”

Why in the world not?

This side note into ‘authority’ is a little weird considering how the Obama administration precipitated this episode by summarily announcing that all employers without religious exception would be required to have contraception coverage.

Henri @ 132:

Your new analogy doesn’t encompass what’s really objectionable here, so let’s fix that:

The Glorious Safe Driving Act is passed. Citizen A objects to the act based on his avowedly secular belief that handguns are dangerous and the law is stupid. He refuses to buy the insurance, and goes to jail, pays the fine, whatever the punishment is.

Citizen B objects to the act because it offends his Christian faith. According to you and Sebastian, he can’t go to jail. He gets to ignore the law. Religious freedom!

Except what have we said to Citizen A? Your objection to the law doesn’t count as much as Citizen B’s, because unlike Citizen B’s objection, you don’t claim that your objection is compelled by your belief in a deity. Sorry, kid, but some people’s “conscience” counts more than others.

I don’t know about you, but this seems like a singularly odd, and corrosive, way of thinking things should work in a pluralistic democracy (especially when you realize that as a practical matter, only the dominant religion is going to be able to wrangle these sorts of exemptions for itself). And it seems positively perverse to try to justify it with a lot of moralizing about avoiding “bigotry” and preserving “freedom of consicence,” or by reference to the First Amendment’s prohibition on establishment of religion.

You have managed to miss the point completely in both 151 and 152, Vlad.

151: my analogy had nothing whatsoever to do with any religions or deities.

152: the government is NOT providing anybody with easy access to contraceptives. If it was, there would’ve been nothing to talk about. Instead, it forces you to buy something (that may not like) from a private for-profit company. That’s the issue.

Wow this is a long thread.

Do you think there is still no problem here?

I don’t. You aren’t being required to use the gun, just buy one. If your moral convictions are so strong that you can’t bring yourself to funnel money to arms manufacturers, then no driving for you in the dystopian Glorious Safe Driving Act world. Probably for the best since it’s a pretty sick and twisted world that would legally require one to be armed.

Let me expand your analogy. In crazy car-gun world it turns out that having guns in the car actually provides some sort of benefit such as (for some unknown reason) reliably preventing unwanted pregnancies. An exemption is written into the Glorious Safe Driving Act allowing moral objection exemption provided they: a) demonstrate some sort of religious basis for the objection and b) vow never to let anyone other than a member of their religious faith drive their car.

The Cult of All Arms Manufacturers Are The Spawn of Satan objects to the Act because they operate a very large taxi service that employs a lot of non-Cult members as drivers and their taxi service is very lucrative, (for some unknown reason) prestigious and providing public transportation is nominally in line with the tenets of their faith.

This is a closer analogy. Closer still is if it were The Cult of All Arms Manufacturers That Have Four Words or More in Their Legal Names Are The Spawn of Satan and the law further stipulated that the choice of car-gun manufacturer for each vehicle was determined by lottery. – but I’m getting pretty ar into the woods now.

Speaking of seat belts, a less silly analogy would be if a car maker were given a pass on being forced to include seat belts in a specific model of car because it has other safety measures which are shown to be as effective as seat belts. And then that car maker using that exemption to argue that their other cars without the magic safety devices should also be exempt. And then claiming that their being denied this unsupported expansion to their already privileged treatment is part of an intentional and concerted effort by the hedonistic and perverted seat belt lobby to destroy their company.

Finally, to address the idea of being forced to buy something – it’s insurance.

Insurance, like telephones, is a network good. As more participants enter into it, risk can be spread over a larger group providing increased benefits to all participants (in an idealized world – I concede that in the actual world, a lot of the benefits accrue to executives and whatnot). This provides a legitimate basis for the government to require you to purchase it.

Specifically with regards to individual items covered – i.e. the pill, I fail to see how the final paragraph in the original posting doesn’t address the issue.

Churches are being required to pay for health insurance for their employees, something for which there is a legitimate reason for the government to mandate and in general terms is not objectionable to any parties. What they are objecting to is specific items which they may not like are being included in the mandatory insurance packages. They are not objecting to being forced to pay for insurance – they are only objecting to being forced to pay for insurance for the specific items. Thus it is the specific items that are at issue. Which is a debate that they have lost even with their own congregants, so wev.

“Insurance, like telephones, is a network good.”

Insurance is not a good or a network. Neither are telephones. 0-3.

So, now you have the situation where animal rights proponents face the choice of supporting cow slaughtering or not driving at all. That’s a close analogy, I believe.

I’m not letting go of the fact that the Churches themselves get an exemption, just none of their ancilliary operations which are non-faith only.

So, in a world where only leather seat belts are effective, but are also very effective, then the analogy is that vegetarians are being given an exemption to having to purchase seat belted cars provided they never take passengers. And then saying that their being denied their Gaia-given right to chauffeur others is primarily an attack on their diet choice.

Insurance is not a good or a network

Please pardon my misuse of technical terms that have agreed-upon meanings which I only have a vague understanding of. I’m no economist, heck I don’t even have an mba. The point was that the benefit to participants increases as the number of participants does.

@bjk – 156

Doctors are now ministers?

“That case also makes clear the danger of carve-outs for religious entities, it appears that she was fired after she became sick rather than for any religious reasons.”

She was fired for suing her employer.

@ bjk

1. The article I linked to says she sued after being fired. She claims it was because she was ill. Do you have some evidence that she sued before being fired?

2. 6 of 9 Supremes didn’t concur with Thomas. The fact that Thomas thinks that isn’t relevant at the moment as he isn’t in the majority.

From my earlier link:
Chief Justice Roberts concluded that Perich indeed functioned as a minister in her role at Hosanna-Tabor, in part because Hosanna-Tabor held her out as a minister with a role distinct from that of its lay teachers. He also noted that Perich held herself to be a minister by accepting the formal call to religious service required for her position.

None of that would apply to a doctor unless also the doctor is leading prayers etc. However if it makes you feel better the hypothetical doctor can be a Hindu (ie the hospital knew s/he wasn’t Catholic or didn’t ask when they hired him/her). Still think a ministerial exemption would/should allow the hospital to control how s/he spends his/her money and spare time?

Nobody said that anyone is forced to buy contraceptives. You’re forced (be being penalized for not doing it) to associate with and to financially support companies that give away contraceptives for free. Which is something you disapprove of, that you consider immoral.

No you could just not insure your employees. You’d then pay a tax of $2k/employee which would probably be less than the cost of insuring them anyway (I’m in the UK so this is just a guess). That’s not a penalty because you aren’t worse off! You wouldn’ t be paying anything to those immoral companies you hate so much. Or at least no more than you do anyway when your taxes go to all kinds of things you dislike.

You are never forced to buy bombs from GE, but you don’t want to buy even a refrigerator from GE, because they also produce bombs. See?

Nope. This analogy still doesn’t work. Bombs = insurance plan with contraception included. Refrigerator = insurance plan without contraception included. I think the RCC is saying that its affiliated organisations shouldn’t have to buy bombs but they aren’t against buying refrigerators from GE (ie they still will buy insurance from companies that have seperate policy plans that cover contraception).

@ bjk

1. Still waiting for a source for your claim that she was fired for suing rather than suing for being fired.

2.

No, the ministerial exemption allows the hospital to hire and fire according to their conscience. As is their prerogative.

You need to do more than just assert that. Like I said, 6 of 9 supremes signed onto the opinion that said Perich was a minister because she was a commissioned minister and regularly lead students in prayer.

Which of those would apply to a non-Catholic ob/gyn at a Catholic hospital? Answer: none. Even the current supremes would probably struggle to take seriously a claim that such a doctor functioned as a minister.

Insurance, like telephones, is a network good. As more participants enter into it, risk can be spread over a larger group providing increased benefits to all participants (in an idealized world – I concede that in the actual world, a lot of the benefits accrue to executives and whatnot). This provides a legitimate basis for the government to require you to purchase it.

I’m not sure there’s any definition of “network good”, but you’re correct that both insurance and telephones have network effects. I mean, look how many pictures of telephones you see here: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

But in the case of insurance, the bigger issue is adverse selection. We’re talking about either employer-supplied insurance, or individually-purchased insurance on the ACA exchange. Neither of those are permitted to discriminate against individuals with pre-existing conditions. If the government wants that kind of insurance to continue existing, it needs to mandate that everyone pay into it and that what every insurance company must, at a minimum, provide.

However, no one is actually required to purchase either individual or company insurance. If you choose to do either, you’re required to pay the government instead. However, (correct if I’m wrong) I believe in both cases that penalty is, on average, cheaper than what individuals and companies would typically pay for compliant insurance policies.

Under the logic of the bishops, this represents less freedom than if we charged the mandate penalty to everyone and simply provided single-payer health care. So giving people more options–a way to avoid a tax by going out and purchasing what the tax would have provided on your own–means less freedom.

Except conservatives aren’t, yet, applying that logic consistently. Because it would also apply to Paul Ryan’s Medicare reforms. I mean, what happens when the bishops start objecting to certain kinds of end-of-life care? There’s no employer-purchased Medicare, but individuals demanding exemptions is enough to cause adverse selection. Hey, we just ended Medicare as we know it.

If there is no “conscientious objection” to taxation, but there is one to mandated purchases (even when those mandates are only enforced by taxes fairly close to the cost of purchase), then this pushes those of us who support social and personal freedom towards higher taxation and larger bureaucracy. The moral dilemma that these faith organizations have isn’t that I’ve forced them to pay for something, it’s that I haven’t forced them hard enough that their consciences are clear in complying with it. If I simply ordered them to hand over the money, they would cheerfully render unto Caesar (and perhaps vote against me at the next election). But if I say “either hand me over the money, or go out and do this on your own”, then their religious liberty is supposedly endangered.

“No you could just not insure your employees. You’d then pay a tax of $2k/employee which would probably be less than the cost of insuring them anyway (I’m in the UK so this is just a guess). That’s not a penalty because you aren’t worse off! You wouldn’ t be paying anything to those immoral companies you hate so much. Or at least no more than you do anyway when your taxes go to all kinds of things you dislike.”

Would one of you people please respond to this!

Sebastian, Henri and bjk you need to read this:

“had a pelvic scan and they found a huge cyst in my uterus. “The size of a grapefruit” the doctor told me, as if it were a thing to behold. They removed the cyst, and prescribed birth control pills to help keep a new cyst from forming. There’s where the trouble started.

I went to the local Walgreens to fill the prescription. I was on my parent’s insurance, and didn’t know the ins and outs of what was and wasn’t covered. When I went to pick up the prescription, it rang up at $80. For a one month supply. “What about insurance?” I asked. The heinous woman behind the counter said, as loudly and as self-righteously has she could, “insurance doesn’t cover BIRTH CONTROL! ! ! !” She didn’t say “you SLUT” but I know that she was thinking it.

There was no way I could afford to spend over $800 a year on this prescription. I was horrified by the way the woman spoke to me. I was going to just have to take my chances that the cysts didn’t return. Thankfully, someone, I don’t know who, told me that there was a Planned Parenthood on campus.

I went there, and the people were so kind that I cried with relief. The pills to help keep me from getting cysts— which also happen to keep me from getting pregnant if I were sexually active— were free.

I will never forget that experience. It taught me a lot about the importance of having access to women’s health care, for my whole body. It taught me first hand about the stupidity of self-righteousness.”

Access to contraception is access to healthcare. Full stop.

Instead, it forces you to buy something (that may not like) from a private for-profit company. That’s the issue.

Requiring insurance agencies to provide low-cost contraception coverage if requested by an insured person, and to notify all insured persons that this option exists, is not forcing anyone to buy anything.

It’s true that this policy, like most regulatory policies, raises the cost of doing business for insurance agencies. That would also be true if we, say, fined insurance companies whenever they took longer than 24 hours to process a claim. I guess technically you could get away with calling anything that costs the insurance company money “forcing them to buy” something, as, like, a definition of the phrase “forcing to buy.” But then, with that definition, every regulation we affix to the insurance company we’re forcing insurance companies to buy things, in which case the situation actually boils down to “insurance should not be regulated.”

bjk 169 is a gem. If bjk had his way, any catholic-run business could get exempted pretty much from any regulation that it objects to merely by stating that its employees were fulfilling religious duties, its business activity was religiously inspired, and it had religious objections to the regulation in question. Moreover, any business could start calling itself a church and claiming the same exemptions. What this tells is that there has to be a test based on something more than “bishop X said so”.

This is not a far-fetched scenario at all. At stake in the court decision cited above are employment laws. Churches have been granted very limited exemptions to some anti-discrimination laws based on the rationale that the church can’t be forced to hire a lesbian atheist as Pope just because she happens to be the most qualified candidate. If you start expanding that exemption to non-religious employees, like doctors, employment laws will soon become optional (as bjk 177 openly admits). bjk 147 is also on record saying that yes, an employer should have the right to decide pretty much every detail of the health care available, or not available, to anybody who happens to be employed by him. bjk should be taken seriously. This is what this is really about.

And HV 163, this BS was already refuted in 136. Your way of “argument” I am sorry to say is very similar to what we are used to from the right-wing machine – make up some nonsense claim and when it has been refuted by the opponent, just restate the very same nonsense claim. Stick with your talking points. This is an effective means of propaganda in the right-wing echo chamber, but why do you think you can pull this on CT?

I’m still waiting for Henri or Sebastian to answer my question about moral exemptions provided to liberals by right-wingers (note – exempting us from things which the right doesn’t want to exempt us from).

I don’t ubderstand why liberals defend the insurance for conttraception, while republicans oppose it.
As it is without Obamacare, if you need contraception, you go to the pharmacist, spend, say, 1 $, and buy it. With Obamacare, your employer buys insurance, pays it, and the insurance pays the pharmacist. However, the ultimate payer for the insurance is you (since you will get a lower salary): thus, you pay both the contraception, and the overhead for the insurance company (say, 1 cent): the end result, is that you have a tax (1%) on contraception, which should make democrats unhappy and (some) republicans happy.

Since, however, people have the opposite take on the subject than me, I ask: where do you not agree with the above analysis?

My comment above was to HV at 185.

“Indeed, it’s almost as if “government” was defined as “what tells you that you don’t have to do what authority expects you to do.” ”

First, it used to be liberals who understood that the Bill of Rights limited that, and even in countries that didn’t have a Bill of Rights that the moral force of your comment was sharply limited. It is ‘authoritarians’ who believe otherwise.

Second, adherence to the regular political processes is a big part of what gives government that ‘authority’ regarding what it expects you to do. But a recurring theme in this thread has been the complaint that of course you can’t push through what you want in the regular political process because Republicans are so evil. (Setting aside the fact that Catholics aren’t particularly Republican, and that the actual Republican Evangelical basis isn’t anti-contraception–a fact which probably should not be set aside.)

Third, as a function of the second point, you end up opening up a whole can of worms that doesn’t exist if you go through the regular poltical process and actually tax and spend instead of mandating.

Fourth, I’m pretty sure that you don’t even really believe in the legitimacy of major legal changes by administrative fiat unless done by administrations that you like–reinforcing the second point about end-runs around the political process. If this was the Bush administration ordering counseling about an unborn child’s right to life before a late term abortion could be performed or any other major administrative ‘clarification’ touching on abortion, I strongly suspect you wouldn’t be so breezy about letting the regular political process be circumvented.

So the problem is that methods matter. Some methods lend government legitimacy even to those who lost in the poltical process. Others don’t. This administrative method doesn’t lend itself to the moral force of “governments get to tell you what to do so go stuff yourself” nearly as well as going through the necessary work of taxing something and having the government actually provide it.

Since, however, people have the opposite take on the subject than me, I ask: where do you not agree with the above analysis?

Cost sharing. It’s the whole point of insurance.

Contraception costs a lot more than $1, but under an insurance system, the cost is shared by all similarly situated employees, whether they personally need contraception or not (some are men, some are past menopause, some don’t want contraception because they’re trying to get pregnant, etc.) rather than falling entirely on the person who needs it. Since almost everyone accepts that this is a better solution for most other forms of health care (everyone’s premiums pay for chemo, not just the cancer patient, etc.), the only reason to *not* extend the principle to contraception is if you think it’s somehow different from other forms of health care and not deserving of being covered under the same principles.

I have a feeling that if some people on this thread worked in my office, they would be actively resenting the fact that their premiums paid for one coworker’s heart attack treatment and another’s chemo and they’re making slightly less money as a result. I don’t resent that fact, and not just because I like those particular coworkers.

Barry, I’m not sure what you’re saying. I tend to think that we should allow true moral objections to be accommodated whenever possible whether or not they are ‘religiously’ based. I suspect the main reasons we hang onto the religious part of the concept is because it makes it harder for people to just claim moral exemptions for anything that they happen to vaguely dislike. But that is a practical problem, not a general principles problem.

If a Muslim woman comes from a faith where she believes it immoral to be unveiled in front of non-women, we should probably accommodate her by only making her unveil in front of women whenever possible–which should be fairly possible in most situations.

If someone believes it is evil to work on Saturdays, we shouldn’t assign them community service punishment on Saturdays but we won’t let them out of it entirely just because they think that work should never be a punishment. A pluralistic society should be willing to make reasonable accomodations.

The position of many of the people here on this board appears to be “we sort of passed a kind of law so eat it”.

Now one of the things we don’t do, is let people opt out of taxes or ‘write off’ of taxes for things that the government does that they don’t like. Maybe you don’t buy the moral difference of “render unto Caeser”, but it is a distinction of incredibly long standing (more than 2000 years). If you want to mount a full fledged assault on it–arguing that it is impossible to make the distinction of paying taxes to the government and supporting everything it does, feel free. I don’t feel interested in bothering to defend the (obvious to me) moral concept until I’ve seen a darn good attack on it first.

But the more limited case regarding that concept is that taxing and spending is one thing with one understanding about moral agency between tax payors who disagree with policies and the government, while forcing people to do something or pay directly for something that they disagree with is another.

That looks like a pretty darn good distinction to me.

Fine. But perhaps not providing health insurance to their employees is also an ethical problem for them. In which case they’re still facing a no-win dilemma.

Hard cheese old boy. If they think insurance provision is also important then they can provide insurance but without contraception coverage and live without the tax breaks. Someone can believe that people of colour are inferior but that doesn’t mean we should let them refuse to serve them at the lunch counter no matter how much it violates their conscience.

I’m willing to make reasonable accomodations ( the RCC should be perfectly free to provide health insurance without coverage for the Pill for its bishops!) but we can’t have the religious ignore any and all laws simply by saying they morally object to it. Otherwise we end up with laws that only apply to atheists and agnostics.

Anyway back to an earlier question HV. If a Catholic Hospital finds out that one of its ob/gyns is using his spare time to carry out abortions at a PP clinic and donating money to the PP clinic to keep it open should they be able to order him to stop donating time and money? How much control over employees should an employer have?

Again, wouldn’t you all agree that a public insurance financed by taxes would resolve all these dilemmas and concerns, made exceptions unnecessary?

Yeah it would. But so what? That isn’t going to happen because the same people who are jumping up and down in Congress about this contraception issue will also block any attempt to provide public insurance. You can wish for public insurance (and a pony too) but that doesn’t mean you’ll get what you want.

Sebastian,

Okay, but a point that has gone missing here is that it appears the Bishops are asking for a complete excuse, rather than an accomodation. They want to not participate in a plan that provides contraceptive services while performing no alternative action. When an American concientious objector (durring the period between WW1 and Viet Nam) was allowed to avoid military service, he was given an “alternative service,” ranging from being in a non-combatant role in WW1 to serving in mental hospitals or participating in a peace corps-like organization in the 1960s.

In your examples, a woman would have to expose her face when public safety indicated that she should, and a person serving a sentence would have to serve it, perhaps on a Friday, as you stated yourself.

Would your objections be eased if the state required the church organization to give every employee an annual stipend, equivalent to the cost of annual birth control, in lieu of providing an insurance plan that covered birth control? Do you think the church-related organizations’ objections would be eased?

Henri,

I don’t find it credible that you believe that employees who clean the floors at a retail store such as Walmart (who are without employer provided health insurance) earn $7,000 a year more than employees who clean the floors in a hospital.

Now one of the things we don’t do, is let people opt out of taxes or ‘write off’ of taxes for things that the government does that they don’t like. Maybe you don’t buy the moral difference of “render unto Caeser”, but it is a distinction of incredibly long standing (more than 2000 years).

No, we buy this distinction. You are trying to overturn it. You just don’t have the honesty to admit it.

The government lets you avoid a tax if you’re willing to perform the action the tax would have paid for. If you don’t want to perform that action, that’s okay–just pay render onto Caesar and we’ll do it for you.

Or to put what I said another way, the tax policy scheduled to go into effect later is exactly the kind of accomodation that ben in el cajon@204 is talking about.

That’s not true either, incidentally. They are perfectly entitled to refuse to serve any group, unless they are open to the general public.

@HV
Yes thats my point – if you run a business then expect to comply with laws and regs that apply to businesses. Run a hospital (open to the public) then expect to comply with laws that apply to hospitals if you want your tax breaks.

And your answer on the ob/gyn question?

@ Sebastian

If someone believes it is evil to work on Saturdays, we shouldn’t assign them community service punishment on Saturdays but we won’t let them out of it entirely just because they think that work should never be a punishment. A pluralistic society should be willing to make reasonable accomodations.

Yeah and if you think its evil to provide insurance with contraception coverage then you don’t have to. For ministers you still get your tax breaks so long as you provide insurance. For affiliated organisations you can provide insurance without contraception coverage or not provide insurance at all and pay some more taxes. You don’t have to provide contraception coverage to your employees.

This is a far greater accommodation than is made for a racist who doesn’t want to serve people of colour at his business.

HV and SebH, you are boring in your repetitiveness. Can’t you try making this thread a little bit interesting?

How about inverting the example: Suppose Republicans pass a law that prohibits group insurance from covering contraception. Now I may be an employer who believes that contraception coverage is not just the right thing to do, it is actually a moral imperative. What now? Do HV, Sebastian H agree that I should get an exemption from the law?

I anticipate your response that if I believe in contraception coverage, I as employer can just provide that coverage myself without going through the insurance. But I also believe in privacy. I think it would be wrong for me to ask employees for their contraception receipts so that I can reimburse them. That is a real dilemma. What do you guys suggest?

Note that the law in question doesn’t prohibit contraception – that would be unconstitutional although Santorum (and I suspect the bishops) disagrees. It only prohibits group insurance from covering contraception. Note also that the example is realistic: “9 states prohibit abortion coverage in the entire private insurance market” (http://www.prochoiceamerica.org/what-is-choice/fast-facts/issues-insurance-prohibition.html).

Consumatopia, so essentially you are saying that dems (or, should I say, you?) prefer that people would pay more money in aggregate for the same service, as long as they are forced to share the cost?

But if the US government forces them all to cooperate with Burma’s junta, then you’ve lost this choice. Maybe it doesn’t mean much to you, but then maybe it does to other people.

Yes and as has been repeatedly pointed out:

1. You don’t have to buy the insurance – you can pay the taxes.

2. Just claiming you have a moral opposition to a law has never been a blanket opt out of complying. eg the racist restaurant owner who really really doesn’t believe he should have to serve non-whites at his restaurant.

I can believe that its morally wrong to give money to charity but that doesn’t mean the Govt is going to give me the same tax breaks as someone who does give to charity.

Barry, I’m not sure what you’re saying. I tend to think that we should allow true moral objections to be accommodated whenever possible whether or not they are ‘religiously’ based. I suspect the main reasons we hang onto the religious part of the concept is because it makes it harder for people to just claim moral exemptions for anything that they happen to vaguely dislike. But that is a practical problem, not a general principles problem.

@ SebH So are you willing to accommodate women who morally think they should be able to get abortions without waiting periods that various states enforce and women who think they should be able to get an abortion post 20 weeks? Given your arguments on another thread I suspect not.

Employers can pay taxes (though obviously they can’t be expected to be happy about it), but individuals do need the insurance.

And they do – they get it subsidized through the Govt!

What’s your point?

My point is – are you going to let people opt out of any and all laws they morally object to? Where do you draw your line. At the moment it looks more like the “well if you say its in your religion we’ll let you off complying” end of things.

“I anticipate your response that if I believe in contraception coverage, I as employer can just provide that coverage myself without going through the insurance. But I also believe in privacy. I think it would be wrong for me to ask employees for their contraception receipts so that I can reimburse them. That is a real dilemma. ”

First note how quickly you have gone from the government forcing you to do something (the instant case) to the government allowing you to do something (your hypothetical). You’ve completely erased the entire distinction I’m trying to make. That is hardly likely to elucidate anything. But I’ll try to work with you.

You’ve turned the problem from “how do I keep the government from forcing me to do this thing I think is immoral” into “how do I do this additionally moral thing that I want to do”.

Well that is easy. You do what you do with all sorts of things that you positively want to do. You do it. And if those things have countervailing issues in other areas, you decide to work through them–i.e. set up a blinding system, negotiate a flat fee to the pharmacy to cover all of your employees with contraception without you needing to personally identify them, etc. If you have a positive moral imperative which mirrors the negative moral imperative of the actual case, you’ll find a way to do it. And the government won’t stop you. So those who HAVE the moral imperative can do it, those who DON’T won’t.

And that looks a lot like a pluralistic society which respects the fact that different people have different morals and tries to work it out.

Where do you draw your line.

I have no idea. All I’m saying is that these mandates that require you to buy from private companies can create additional, new problems. Real problems. Compared to the traditional ‘collect taxes – provide services’ method, that is already a well established, accepted (albeit highly imperfect) model. What this has to do with restaurant owning racists I’m not sure.

Okay before this goes any further can we at least agree on a few things?

1) No organization is being forced to provide an insurance plan that provides contraception to their employees. As has been pointed out multiple times if an organization truly cannot stomach paying for insurance that will cover contraception they can simply pay the $2000 tax and their employees can get insurance from a non-bigoted source. Everybody wins.

2) The government enforces mandates on businesses all the time. Minimum wage laws, safety regulations, environmental regulations, anti discrimination requirements and so on. I assume that we all agree that a business owner should not be allowed to ignore any of these requirements based on “religious” grounds. Why is contraception different?

3) Everyone should have access to healthcare. In the US (however much I may dislike the current system) the vast majority of people get their healthcare through their employer. And healthcare for women includes access to contraception. To not cover contraception amounts to discrimination against women.

4) The people who are leading this fight are not really concerned with the religious issues. What they are worried about is women having unsanctioned sexy times and not being punished for it.

“But additionally I want to note that there is an actual history of accomodating conscientious objection in the US.”

That “actual history” is very very narrow. Conscientious objection has only ever been considered when a person would have been forced to personally commit an act that was totally contrary to their moral beliefs, and that doesn’t even come close to the health insurance case under debate.

“It seems that bexley and piget and commentors on their side think that was ridiculous.” It has been stated many times that that is not the case and it *seems* that you Sebastian H are arguing in bad faith.

Also, 212. Anybody willing to answer that challenge?

HV 219: I’m seconding 221.
HV 195: do the words “factually wrong” ring a bell? Maybe you think that showing your claims to be factually wrong isn’t a refutation but most of us actually believe in logic and such.
HV 207: “could you explain why employers bother to provide healthcare at all, please.” Again, I call BS on you. Employers do NOT provide health care. Do you ever care at all what you are saying?

Sebastian H-

I’ll take a crack at it. I don’t think claims for religious exemptions (because that’s almost always what “conscientious objections” really are) are always ridiculous. I do think they’re always, inherently, problematic, and should be granted only grudgingly.

Quakers who don’t want to fight a war obviously present a strong, maybe the strongest, case for allowing objection, but that’s largely because the burden the state is otherwise imposing is so extreme. Forced conscription is the state telling an individual that you’ll go HERE and kill THAT person, or you’ll go to jail. It’s easy to see the basis for wanting to accommodate that kind of objection, although even there the fundamental problem with going this route comes up: why should only Quakers get to take a pass on moral grounds? Why isn’t a devoutly pacifist atheist entitled to the same consideration? And if you’re going to allow anyone to object on personal moral grounds, what do you do when you suddenly have a draft full of conscientious objectors? There’s no easy answer, but I can at least respect that when the stakes are so high, a kind of muddling through approach based on whether the objector is a member of an established belief system is a reasonable solution.

None of that applies to the current insurance “controversy,” in which I think the idea of “conscientious objection” is, indeed, ridiculous. If you’re a Catholic bishop and you don’t want to be involved in contraception, you have a very easy way out: don’t be involved in the health care industry, on the hospital or insurance end. Really, it’s that simple. Not being permitted to be in the business of providing medical care, or medical insurance, really isn’t an extraordinary burden; the state heavily regulates both activities, and in fact usually makes it a crime to do either without state approval, which requires all sorts of state-mandated things. Catholic or not, being in the healthcare industry is a state-granted privilege, not a right. No one’s “freedom of conscience” is being trampled merely because they’re asked to do the same things to earn that privilege that everyone else is required to do.

Making this all the more ridiculous is that the Catholic bishops weren’t even presented with a choice as stark as the one discussed aboeve. Instead, they just had to choose between offering insurance that covered contraception, or receiving tax breaks. And that was before Obama’s accommodation. Now, they just have to choose between doing business with an insurance company that will offer their employees contraception coverage, or receiving tax breaks. A fundamental imposition on their “freedom of conscience,” this is not.

One final remark, then I think I’ll be done. The argument in favor of religious exemptions is premised on the idea that such exemptions enhance religious liberty and are therefore mandated by the first amendment: more exemptions, more religious liberty. Right?

In fact, wrong. The First Amendment also contains the establishment clause, which is really a universality principle: the laws should be made for and binding for everyone regardless of their religion. No set of beliefs shall be favored by the state. This principle requires that religious exemptions must be rare *exceptions* granted in a narrow class of cases. A proliferation of religious exemptions on spurious grounds is not enhancing religious liberty – in fact it endangers religious liberty by violating the neutrality and universality principle of the establishment clause. If the state allowed vocal and powerful religious communities to pick and choose which laws to abide by, it would really result in favoring those religions.

The contraception case is a very good case in point. The exemption demanded by the bishops is not about whether or not Catholics can be forced to violate their beliefs – it is about whether the bishops can force their beliefs on church employees who may not share them. That is what is really at issue and nobody in this thread among the defenders of the church, except bjk who must be commended for his honesty, has really addressed it.

MPAVictoria, “The government enforces mandates on businesses all the time. Minimum wage laws, safety regulations, environmental regulations, anti discrimination requirements and so on. I assume that we all agree that a business owner should not be allowed to ignore any of these requirements based on “religious” grounds. Why is contraception different?”

And as I’ve said above (repeatedly but as early as comment 8), when you are making laws about the employer-employee relationship where the employer is a necessary party, you can’t easily exempt the employer.

But here the employer is not a necessary party to the aim of the law. If you want to provide contraception to women, there are hundreds of ways to do that which don’t involve an employer. Because there are hundreds of ways to do that which don’t involve an employer, it isn’t ridiculous to be a bit freer with religious exemptions (especially to long-before-the-rule-was-administratively-clarified objections).

Vlad, thank you for taking a crack at it. I see where you are coming from on the Quaker issue, but I want to explore it a little further. It is not only such an extreme case because of the extremity of the action required [go shoot that person] but also in light of the governmental importance [surviving a war is considered one of the more important things for a government]. The government required actions from a very large number of people, *on a very important issue*, and still offered religious exemptions.

I don’t want to get bogged down in whether or not the Constitution *requires* exemptions. But it seems intuitive that if the nation can make religious exemptions even at a time of serious war, it can probably make them for less serious issues. This is especially true when a) the employer is not a necessary party, b) there are various alternatives available already [Planned Parenthood for example], and c) the government could easily replace the ‘need’ to use the employer if the government wanted to.

I also don’t want to get bogged down in the difficulty of telling a ‘real’ objection from a ‘fake’ objection unless we can at least agree that ‘real’ objections might have some claim to accomodation.

Individuals are forced to buy it; that’s why it’s called a ‘mandate’.

No they aren’t they just pay a tax if they don’t buy insurance. In addition there are the following exemptions for individuals (amongst others):

1. Individuals who cannot afford coverage.
2. Taxpayers with income below the filing threshold
3. People with insurance that features only small coverage gaps.

There is also an exemption for members of religions that have an objection to insurance in any form btw.

Look at number 3. If you are an individual purchasing health insurance then you can go out and buy a plan without contraception covered if you want to. Since that’s a choice you have made for yourself I suspect it will fall under the third exemption. Even if it doesn’t then you can pay the tax instead.

Again you aren’t being forced to buy insurance that covers contraception.

If the catholic church wants to play in the public sector sandbox then they have to follow the rules. They don’t get to come in and insist they don’t have to follow the rules they don’t like. All the other stuff is just obfuscation. If they don’t like it then they should pack up their stuff and go home.

Honestly trying to change the rules for everyone I could respect, but hiding behind religion when the businesses in question are not religious in nature is despicable and dishonest, not exactly christian virtues.

Time to get some perspective from the other side.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-february-13-2012/the-vagina-ideologues—sean-hannity-s-holy-sausage-fest
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-february-13-2012/the-vagina-ideologues

@241 did you not even read what I wrote!

If you don’t buy insurance (of a certain standard) you pay more taxes. With exemptions. You aren’t forced to buy it.

If I make contributions into a pension plan i pay less tax – that doesn’t force me to actually pay towards a pension though.

How hard is that to understand.

Adrian, I completely agree: today’s culture war is mostly smoke and mirrors to distract from the reactionary policies in economy and foreign affairs enacted by both the Reps and the Dems.
In this context, Obama’s big give away to insurance companies is defended in the name of reproductive rights…

@241: The mandate isn’t mandatory, as has been explained multiple times on this very thread. It’s a prerequisite to receive a tax break, and that’s all.

The mandate is mandatory: you’re penalized for not buying. Why the sophistry? If they wanted to to give you a tax break for buying, then they should’ve implemented a new tax and give you a break for buying, but that is not how it’s legislated. The mandate is a big issue and a subject of many lawsuits; a tax break wouldn’t be.

“The mandate is mandatory”

This word… I do not think it means what you think it means.

“Tell it to Chris, 246”

Rather tell it to you Henri.

Do you believe that we should have tried to force Quakers into fighting units and put them in prison for desertion if they didn’t go?

Since individual conscientious objection isn’t magically becoming any less of a red herring with repetition, a more realistic analogy would be granting Friends Hospital the right to violate USERRA for non-Quaker employees who join fighting units.

“Forget the employers. Duh, HV changes the subject. Can you believe that! After arguing ad nauseam that employers should have the moral and legal right to boycott their employees’ personal choices, suddenly it’s not about employers any more.

Don’t you think it’s time to stop feeding the troll?

OK, can we please stop pretending this has anything to do with “religion” now?

@Sebastian

I wrote that “doctrinaire Catholics, the only conservatives concerned with this specific point, are a small minority even within the conservative movement itself”, and didn’t mention evangelicals at all. As you say yourself “I don’t know if your theories require the actual facts, but those are the actual facts”.

“I wrote that “doctrinaire Catholics, the only conservatives concerned with this specific point, are a small minority even within the conservative movement itself”, and didn’t mention evangelicals at all.”

Yes, and I’m saying that those ‘conservatives’ aren’t even Republicans in many cases. So chalking this all up to Republican craziness is seriously misunderstanding the issue.

Catholics tend to be Democrats and tend to vote for Democrats. Catholics also have a very long standing issue about contraception. (Which I think is foolish, and not even particularly biblical, but Catholics don’t care what I think). So the fact that Obama decided to play games with the contraception ‘clarifications’, can’t be blamed on Republicans. Catholics made political issues about contraception well before they even flirted with the idea of voting for Republicans.

This is a Catholics vs. the world issue, not a Republicans vs. Democrats issue. Which makes it MUCH more open to conscientious objection compromises than purer partisan issues in my opinion. Which opinion is clearly not shared here. But analyzing it purely through the “I hate bad Republicans” lens here isn’t obscuring far more than it reveals.

Of course, if the employer “self-insures”, the employer can pretty much do as they please, anyway. In the absence of collective bargaining, the employer, like your bank, is free to change its “contract” with you, the employee, at will, and, as a practical matter, without even the courtesy of prior notice. Extending this institutional pattern is the agenda of the political Right, abetted by the corrupt center represented by Obama.

Coming up with a one-two rhetorical punch of libertarian and theocratic dogma to justify advancing this neo-feudal institutional order is quite clever. The libertarians want you to respect the efforts of the theocrats to create a taboo around contraception. Isn’t that sweet? A rational ethics, in which the moral thing is to take personal responsibility for reproduction and human health, in a society that actively and institutionally supports such exercise of personal responsibility, is put into shadow by such rhetorical distortions.

After arguing ad nauseam that employers should have the moral and legal right to boycott their employees’ personal choices

Not only have I never argued anything like that, I don’t even understand what the hell this means.

Incidentally, there is an employer mandate in ACA as well, I just don’t think it’s as problematic as the individual one.

Incidentally, there is an employer mandate in ACA as well, I just don’t think it’s as problematic as the individual one.

Yes and the RCC have been whining about the employer mandate not the individual mandate. The OP is about the employer mandate and everyone has been talking about the employer mandate here. Right until you suddenly switch tack and start talking about the individual mandate – which is why everyone else is bemused.

However since you now want to talk about the individual mandate I will:

The mandate is mandatory: you’re penalized for not buying. Why the sophistry? If they wanted to to give you a tax break for buying, then they should’ve implemented a new tax and give you a break for buying, but that is not how it’s legislated. The mandate is a big issue and a subject of many lawsuits; a tax break wouldn’t be.

The individual mandate is sooo mandatory it isn’t illegal not to buy insurance. If you refuse to buy insurance and don’t fall into an exemption you pay 2.5% of your income up to a maximum of around $2k. Crazy – that sounds like some kind of income tax. You aren’t prosecuted, no criminal record, nothing.

Moreover one of the exemptions is for those who have a religious objection to purchasing any insurance of any kind (some Amish)! People who believe insurance of any kind is wrong are exempted – they aren’t being forced to buy any damn insurance. I don’t know how to say this simply enough that you can understand.

As I said before another exemption is for people with insurance that features only small coverage gaps. So if you want to buy insurance that doesn’t cover contraception for yourself then it looks like you will be exempt. (Since this isn’t in force yet I’m not actually sure whether this falls into the exemption but it seems likely).

“Bexley. Last month my daughter jumped into a tram without a ticket. Ticket inspectors caught her and fined her the equivalent of about $90.
Should we say, in your opinion, that she forfeited a tax break?”

Oh Henri… Just after I was so impressed by your comments in the Greece thread. Could you try a little bit harder please? Do it for me.

Btw if I earn more than a certain amount of money in a year then I have to pay some money to the Government. I might call these payments “taxes” but by your own logic it must be because people aren’t allowed to earn above this threshold.

Similarly if I die my estate is taxed – presumably because dying isn’t actually allowed in the UK.

“Seriously?” Seriously.

Don’t. Feed. The. Troll.

What, riding the tram without a ticket is a prosecutable offense? Seriously?

Yes. Brought to you by easy answers to easy questions.

http://www.tfl.gov.uk/assets/downloads/tickets/Revenue-enforcement-and-prosecutions-policy.pdf

See section 2.

p. 10: “For the reasons discussed below, the Departments are adopting the definition in the amended interim final regulations for purposes of these final regulations while also creating a temporary enforcement safe harbor, discussed below. During the temporary enforcement safe harbor, the Departments plan to develop and propose changes to these final regulations that would meet two goals – *providing contraceptive coverage without cost-sharing to individuals who want it and
accommodating non-exempted, non-profit organizations’ religious objections to covering contraceptive services as also discussed below*.

Sebastian H: we’ll talk when the first batch of Catholic “conscientious objectors” is marched off to prison. Until then, spare us your whining about the terrible injustice being done to hospital owners through a rule that has already existed in many states for years but that now won’t even be enforced.

Bexley, so, fine, you live in a police state. Where I live now, if you don’t buy the ticket, and they catch you, they take your name and send you a bill. If you do have the ticket, they say ‘thank you’, and no bill. Same as the ACA.

@283
“I do not want anyone other than her and her doctor to decide what is best for her.”

So where does that leave Sebelius and the insurance company? I’m pretty sure the only things that get covered are what Sebelius and the insurance company mandate. If you want the patient and doctor in charge, Obamacare is not your plan.

Boy, rarely have I encountered a horde of trolls as hungry as these.

BTW, everyone realizes that the ‘compromise’ is completely theoretical at this point, and the HHS finalized the original rule without change, right?

Good Lord, they didn’t end up including an exemption from all federal labor laws for Quaker hospitals which fire employees who join the National Guard? Release the liberty hounds, and pray that Congress passes a law establishing religion to protect the First Amendment before it’s too late.

I think that the bishops should get a litle bit more concerned about certain thinks that people from inside of it are doing than to make all this ado about nothing. That is the most polite answer that they deserve after all this faux outrage.