I know everybody's been writing all week about Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, the Right Rev. Ross Douthat, and the sad he's having about the awful prospect of the rules announced last week by HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius for the Affordable Care Act, requiring employers to provide health insurance covering family planning services with no co-pays, including the dreaded "morning-after pill", which some of those Jesuits regard as an extra-sneaky way of getting an abortion. But I just had to put in my two cents.
It's about the exemption for religious institutions that is built into the rules, which isn't enough for young Ross:
the White House has settled on an exemption that only covers religious institutions that primarily serve members of their own faith. A parish would be exempt from the mandate, in other words, but a Catholic hospital would not.
Ponder that for a moment. In effect, the Department of Health and Human Services is telling religious groups that if they don’t want to pay for practices they consider immoral, they should stick to serving their own co-religionists rather than the wider public. Sectarian self-segregation is O.K., but good Samaritanism is not. The rule suggests a preposterous scenario in which a Catholic hospital avoids paying for sterilizations and the morning-after pill by closing its doors to atheists and Muslims, and hanging out a sign saying “no Protestants need apply.”
But you know what? That's really not what the rule does: it's about insurance provided by employers to employees, and the exemption applies to
employers such as churches whose primary purpose is to inculcate religious beliefs and that mainly employ and serve individuals who share those beliefs. [my emphasis]
The reason that the hospitals, colleges, and charity conglomerates don't qualify isn't just that their clients--patients, students, aid recipients--may not belong to the religion paying the bills, but that their employees don't. The hospital doesn't buy insurance for the patients, for heaven's sake, it's the folks emptying the bedpans, and filling out the forms, and making the diagnoses, and of course they want contraception, including the
99% of Catholic women who use birth control.
Thus the sign Reverend Ross fears might be hung out the door is really designated for the back door—it's about no jobs for atheists and Muslims and Protestants and Catholic women who can't live with the idiotic rules. And what the Church is asking for, by this argument, is anything but religious freedom—they want to enforce their unenforceable mandate, and they are demanding federal help in doing it. And if anyone's religious freedom is affected by the rule, it is not America's Catholics, but a much smaller class of people, the CEOs of Catholic hospitals, colleges, and charitable foundations.
I think of them, rightly or wrongly, as America's Catholic bishops; that is, as a relatively small number of elderly and largely virginal men who have never had and will never have a reason to ask their doctors for birth control pills themselves and have extremely little experience of those who have (let alone of a girlfriend missing a period). It is their tender consciences that revolt at the thought of paying for insurance that pays for family planning for others, including Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, and nonbelieving employees, not to mention those Catholic employees who defy the papal edict, which is virtually all of those who are or ever have been sexually active women.
In New York State since the effective date of the Women's Health and Wellness Act in 2003, every health care plan that covers any prescription drugs must also cover family planning, by law. Catholic Charities sued against the provision and lost every round of appeals, up to the US Supreme Court, which declined to hear it. Thus it is settled law that such provisions do not offend religious freedom.
Worrying about those tender consciences is 1% thinking; these people are not exactly martyring themselves for a cause. They haven't shut down Catholic Charities yet, or Fordham University, on account of the New York State Women's Health and Wellness Act. Do you know why? Because they don't really care that much. So forget about it.
REVISED FROM A COUPLE OF POSTS AT MY PLACE
Thu Feb 02, 2012 at 7:22 AM PT: Wow, Spotlighted! Thanks, folks!
Thu Feb 02, 2012 at 8:10 AM PT: Incidentally, I only checked out New York state, but Sebelius said there were 28 states with requirements for family planning coverage and religious exemptions that HHS used as a model for theirs. I'm wondering if any of the bishops currently wailing against the rule--those cited in this Morning Edition story for example--are in any of those states, so you could say they ought to know better.