Catholic Bishops claim feds’ birth control decision violates First Amendment’s religion clause
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The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops recently released a 35-page comment (.pdf) to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services claiming that the agency’s recent decision to include birth control in its list of preventive care services violates the First Amendment’s religion clause.
Health and Human Services’ decision would allow women to receive insurance coverage for birth control without having to also make co-payments. The decision would be implemented through the Affordable Care Act. Catholic organizations have been the main opponents of this decision — despite a provision that “allows religious institutions that offer insurance to their employees the choice of whether or not to cover contraception services.”
According to the Bishops:
The HHS mandate is unprecedented in federal law and more radical than any state contraceptive mandate enacted to date. Insofar as it requires coverage of drugs that can operate to cause an abortion, the mandate violates the Weldon amendment, certain provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“PPACA” or “the Act”) dealing with abortion and non-preemption, and the Administration’s own public assurances, both pre- and post-enactment, that the Act does not require coverage of abortion.
Finally, as applied to individuals and organizations with a religious objection to contraceptives, sterilization, and related counseling and education, the HHS mandate violates various protections under the Religion Clauses and Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment, as well as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (“RFRA”) and the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”).
The Bishop’s also reiterated the commonly used complaint among Catholic groups that the religious exemption provision is “too limited”:
The exemption provides no protection at all for individuals or insurers with a moral or religious objection to contraceptives or sterilization, who will experience burdens to conscience under this new mandate. Instead, it provides protection only to employers with similar objections, and even then to a very small subset of religious employers.
The exemption is narrower than any conscience clause ever enacted in federal law, and narrower than the vast majority of religious exemptions from state contraceptive mandates. The exemption also fails to make clear whether it covers sterilization and education and counseling about sterilization. By failing to protect insurers, individuals, most employers, or any other stakeholders with a religious objection to such items and procedures, the HHS exemption, like the mandate itself, violates the First Amendment and the APA.
However, the Bishops are not asking for Health and Human Services to expand the exemption, but instead requesting that the mandate be rescinded “in its entirety.”
According to the Bishops, “only rescission will eliminate all of the serious moral problems the mandate creates; only rescission will correct HHS’s legally flawed interpretation of the term ‘preventive services.’”
Jon O’Brien, president of Catholics for Choice, says that the Bishops are using “a contrived legal argument” to dismiss the “conscious rights of those seeking care.”
“This is a strategy we have seen time and time again,” O’Brien says. “They are trying to rely on any argument to push their own perspective.”
Recent polling finds that 66 percent of Americans agree with the federal government’s recent decision to include birth control in its list of preventative services. Furthermore, according to research conducted by the Guttmacher Institute, about “98 percent of sexually active Catholic women have used contraceptive methods banned by the church.”
The Catholic bishops should keep their misongynistic noses up each others’ cassocks and leave the health and reproduction issues of women alone. Religions by men, for men, and against women have nothing positive to offer women.
I think one of the bigger issues is that the Catholic leadership is pretending to “represent” Catholics without bothering to understand how Catholics as a whole actually feel about this. Over 90% of Catholic women have used a modern form of birth control. Religious freedom is not about a small minority within a religion (whether or not they are the leadership) having the right to dictate to others. That is what religious freedom protects us from. It is about every individual for themselves having the right to choose how they interpret religious ideas and believe. The Catholic Church, especially without doing the work to understand and care about the actual desires of actual Catholics as a whole, have absolutely no right to pretend to represent Catholics or use this important right to impress their religion on others.
Why would any thinking human being give a rat’s ass what superstitious Catholics say about birth control? The Pope, who is a Nazi collaborator, by opposing birth control has done more to exacerbate poverty worldwide than any other single figure.
There is nothing ientrovorscal in what I cited above from Ray Brown. All this is a commonplace in contemporary biblical and historical scholarship. But the inevitable paradigm shift in our understanding of Catholic doctrine has not yet happened, at least not in statements such as “Bishops as Teachers.” Cardinal Wuerl seems to write as if the scholarship of the last forty or fifty years has not happened. This does not help the Bishops’ credibility, nor bode well for the possibility of fruitful interaction between theologians and Bishops. Why do you suppose the Cardinal uses the old RSV translation? Unfortunately, I think these two observations bring up the same endemic problem in US RC clergy. Most of them, once they finish seminary and get ordained, think they know all the theology which they will ever need to know and never study again. They are caught up in career management, institutional administration, fund raising. What theology professors and current theology students see as continuity, most clergy see as momentary glimpses of sharp contrast.Note too, that many of the clergy over age 65 were still educated in the Thomistic manual seminary system. They may expect to see one right answer to be given on theology exams as the objective in theological studies.One of the startling things in the seminaries in the late 1960s was how shocked the faculty was at the volume of new ways of looking at things coming out of the council. The seminarians were reading periodicals which dealt with these things which the faculty was often unable or unwilling to teach in the classrooms.I wonder if Cardinal Wuerl is having a similar problem?I repeat my frequent plaint that many fail to grasp the distinction made by Aquinas between the authority of jurisdiction and the authority of expertise and the need of those with jurisdiction to avail themselves of the expertise. Of course, the bishop of Paris burned the works of Aquinas, so this sort of lack of hierarchical humility has been around a long time.
This is why I am not a Catholic.
The Bishops have the right to make their opinion known. We have the right to ignore them.
They wonder why their pews are emptying
So everyone is supposed to take advice on reproductive issues from (supposedly) celibate men in dresses? Tell ya what. If you think birth control is immoral… don’t use it. But stop trying to dictate to everyone else what they should or should not do.
As an X Catholic now a converted Episcoplian – the interpertation of the the 1st Amendment’s Religion Clause has nothing to do with contraception. STOP THE RHETORIC and consentrate on your internal issues. The fall of the church is near for their misinterpertations, and other churches will follow too their hatred and fear they preach!!! Amen!
The problem is the Roman Catholic stance on birth control is uncanonical, and it is not supported by the rest of the Christian world including the even more conservative Eastern Orthodox Christians. Why would the church have such a stand? Easy. It hopes to out populate other religions by forcing members to conceive as many children as possible especially in third world countries.
It is hard not to be impressed by this opinion’s celebration of the moral whacking it thinks it’s giving…what?…the nation? This is absolutely ridiculous, I can’t believe there exists a lawyer craven and greedy enough to think this through. Should I say it? This opinion would have been better aborted, than delivered half-formed, with no brains, and little chance of life.
Theologians vs. Bishops: this is depressing. Ite28099s natrtisg to look like a case of compelling arguments on one side, appeal to authority on the other.The original document of the Bishop’s Committee on doctrine is an argument, not an appeal to authority.Contrawise, the CTSA reply focuses primarily on issues of authority and roles in the Church, rather than on theological argument.e2809cBishops as Teacherse2809d asserts that catechetics since the 1970s has failed to pass on the basics of the faith, and this demands a change in how theology is taught to uninformed Catholic undergraduates. Students done28099t have sufficient background to negotiate the wide variety of opinions in the theological academy. Undergrad theology must become catechetical e28093 that is, it must stick to teaching the basics of the Faith to the uncatechized.That’s not how I read it at all. Wuerl’s discussion is primarily descriptive, not normative. He writes that books used in religious studies/theology courses at Catholic colleges and universities must be seen as de facto catechetical and formational texts. The Bishops teach that every use of artificial conception is morally wrong. But as we learned this week, some 98% of US Catholic women disagree.That’s a complete misreading of the statistic. That people do something doesn’t ipso facto mean that they think it’s morally right. I bet you could survey Catholics and find most of them have stolen something and used the Lord’s name in vain in their life. That wouldn’t mean they disgree with the second and seventh commandements.
I agree that we should protect every individual’s religious beliefs (not as organizations but as individuals because we can’t have a small powerful group within a religion controlling every member – that is how the human rights religious protection pieces are written). However we also protect people from other’s beliefs being forced on them. That is an essential piece of religious freedom.
When a doctor/pharmacist interacts with someone who disagrees with them religiously his/her mandate as a doctor is far more important than their religious mandates. If we made it any other way we would be erasing religious protection and allowing someone’s beliefs to be forced on others. There are some religious groups that believe any medical intervention is wrong. Should they be allowed to become doctors and then refuse care, give their patients false information or as trusted professionals dissuade their patients from necessary care? Should some insurance companies that a person may have no choice but to take under their work coverage be able to cover almost nothing because these religious groups don’t believe in medical intervention? Absolutely not.
We cannot have a health system where everyone’s individual beliefs dictate the care that others get. If I believe that smoking is wrong, should insurance companies not cover lung cancer? What about obesity? There are 100 other examples. Catholic women and men do have a conscience clause already, they don’t have to take birth control, but they can’t keep it from the rest of us. Especially the women and men who need to plan their families the most.
If we allow insurance companies to use the Catholic exemption, waaay too many would find excuses to use it. They don’t have an economic interest in preventive care. That has already been empirically demonstrated. America already has astonishing poor healthcare outcomes (some of them actually make us look like a developing nation) because we allow profit motive to become the healthcare industry’s primary concern instead of healthcare outcomes. We must have an organization that is supposed to represent the interests of the people of this country (the gov’t) control the primary focus of our healthcare industry so that we actually have, crazy as this is, healthcare.
Further, studies show that Catholic women are equally as likely to use modern birth control as any other group (ps, I was raised Catholic). The Catholic Church can be a representative or a dictatorial organization, but they don’t have a right to pretend to be representative while being dictatorial. In short, studies show that the majority of Catholic women and men disagree with the Catholic church on this issue, so stop saying you are protecting their beliefs.
The world will be a much, much better place when the RCC is finally gone.
Oh look, the Catholics are trying to dictate morality.
Surprised they pulled out of their choirboys long enough to issue the statement.
When a doctor/pharmacist interacts with someone who disagrees with him religiously his/her mandate as a doctor is far more important than their religious mandate. There are some religious groups that believe any medical intervention is wrong. Should they be allowed to become doctors and then refuse care, give their patients false information or as trusted professionals dissuade their patients from necessary care? Should some insurance companies that a person may have no choice but to take under their work coverage be able to cover almost nothing because these religious groups don’t believe in medical intervention? We cannot have a functioning healthcare system if other’s beliefs can dictate what care can be received.
My religion says you should put birth control in the mail to every woman.
Checkmate.
The Catholic Church will be against birth control until they allow their priests to get married, then they be begging them to take birth control because all their offspring will be on the payroll.
Since this discussion, which is about the use or misue of athrotiuy, has been sidetracked onto HV, let me just say that, at the time, everyone knew what the Commission’s recommendation was going to be (a change in the Church’s teaching) and, more importantly, why. The discussions had been widely leaked, books had been written about them. Everyone knew a change was coming, and they had already changed their practice in anticipation of that.When Paul VI effectively did the most public U-turn in history (people realized that he would never have set up the Commission if he did not think that a re-examination of the question was needed, and by implication that a change was required), people just wrote him off.The irony is that in attempting to defend the magisterium, the Church’s teaching athrotiuy, he so effectively undermined it that it has never recovered and probably never will. The increasing phenomenon of laying down the law that we see today is a desperate measure that is increasingly counterproductive in proportion to the amount that it is used.For me, the whole thing revolves around communications. We have to realize that no one can blow their nose any longer without the whole world knowing about it, instantly. This is something that the Church, and particularly the Vatican, has had a hard time catching up with, and in fact they have still not acknowledged it.HV was the first instance of the effect of ignoring instantaneous communications. I am quite sure that Paul VI had no idea that everyone knew what was coming, was eagerly awaiting it, and that doing something different would be a masssive faux pas witnessed by the entire world and discussed and dissected everywhere. The latest statement from the US Bishops feels like a kind of lashing out, displaying anger that, once again, everything is under the public microscope. (ctd)
, the best instructor Christians have lywaas had has been the Holy Spirit. When we encounter the Church, we are being prepared to take that leap of faith in believing that Christ is indeed the Son of God. The Holy Spirit helps us to make that leap.For those of us who already have taken that leap, the question becomes, How can we take up the call to preach once more in a way that would address both the need for basic catechism (which, as a GenXer, I had had little in the way of instruction) and the need for an academic/scholarly approach that can offer the student substantive as well as standard information? The Catholic Culture of yesterday is not as readily available to younger adults. We no longer learn by osmosis, so to speak, of Catholic schools, nearby Churches, etc. Today’s young adults need to first encounter practicing Christians who pray and follow the will of God before simply being taught the basics of our faith as well as the findings of scholarly research on God and the Church.We may want to consider teaching students to pray and develop their relationship with God. I find that our role as preachers of the Word is to first evangelize to those who have yet to hear the Good News. (Do we even remember why it is Good News?) With prayer, they, too, can learn from the Holy Spirit, as we have. The Holy Spirit has lywaas been the best teacher, and, in these confusing, post-modernistic times, they and we need the Advocate to guide them and us through the debates and arguments surrounding religion today.We’ll likely find that, as is usually the case in Catholicism, both/and is probably the way to the Truth in Jesus Christ.
Since most of the victims of catholic priests are boys they don’t have worry about getting THEM pregnant… therefore, they are opposed. Besides their #’s have been steadily declining as a result of most modern familys’ use birth control & family planning & only have 2 kids. = less $$$ for the catholic church. They could always start taking all the gold, silver & priceless jewels off coffins for example & have a yard sale.
There is nothing nrotocversial in what I cited above from Ray Brown. All this is a commonplace in contemporary biblical and historical scholarship. But the inevitable paradigm shift in our understanding of Catholic doctrine has not yet happened, at least not in statements such as e2809cBishops as Teachers.e2809d Cardinal Wuerl seems to write as if the scholarship of the last forty or fifty years has not happened. This does not help the Bishopse28099 credibility, nor bode well for the possibility of fruitful interaction between theologians and Bishops. Why do you suppose the Cardinal uses the old RSV translation? Unfortunately, I think these two observations bring up the same endemic problem in US RC clergy. Most of them, once they finish seminary and get ordained, think they know all the theology which they will ever need to know and never study again. They are caught up in career management, institutional administration, fund raising. What theology professors and current theology students see as continuity, most clergy see as momentary glimpses of sharp contrast.Note too, that many of the clergy over age 65 were still educated in the Thomistic manual seminary system. They may expect to see one right answer to be given on theology exams as the objective in theological studies.One of the startling things in the seminaries in the late 1960s was how shocked the faculty was at the volume of new ways of looking at things coming out of the council. The seminarians were reading periodicals which dealt with these things which the faculty was often unable or unwilling to teach in the classrooms.I wonder if Cardinal Wuerl is having a similar problem?I repeat my frequent plaint that many fail to grasp the distinction made by Aquinas between the authority of jurisdiction and the authority of expertise and the need of those with jurisdiction to avail themselves of the expertise. Of course, the bishop of Paris burned the works of Aquinas, so this sort of lack of hierarchical humility has been around a long time.
