An Important Clarification

In a recent column in the Pittsburgh Post-Dispatch, Duquesne Law professor Bruce Ledewitz makes an important point about the Affordable Care Act and contraceptive coverage –a point that has gotten lost in all the language of victimization and self-righteousness: religious institutions are not required to provide contraception and other objected-to medical coverage under the Affordable Care Act. Instead, the religious institution is required only to forward a list of its employees to its insurance carrier, which must then provide the coverage itself if the employees want it, without cost to the employer.

That, boys and girls, is what has given rise to the assertion that the employers’ religious liberty is being violated–or “burdened” excessively, to use the terminology of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). RFRA was passed in response to a series of Supreme Court decisions rejecting claims that obedience to laws of general application–laws against drug use, zoning and historic preservation laws and the like– shouldn’t apply in situations where they prevented people from acting on their religious beliefs. (For example, the Court held that Native Americans could believe in smoking peyote as part of a religious ritual, but they couldn’t act on that belief.)

As Ledewitz notes, the claim that having to send a list to your insurance carrier “burdens” your religious exercise strains credulity.

To see how extreme this position is, imagine that the Obama administration had offered yet another compromise: that the religious institution need only offer a list of its employees to the government and the government would provide health insurance ecoverage. If religious employers had really wanted to compromise, they could have lobbied for this option. But, undoubtedly, they would have objected even to this requirement…..

Even closely held for-profit corporations have claimed exemption under RFRA, as if these corporations had religious consciences. The owners of these corporations assert that their corporations are alter egos of their human shareholders, when, in fact, the whole point of the corporate form is to shield the shareholders from the debts of the businesses. When it comes to money, the corporations and the owners are quite separate.

RFRA was never intended to operate in this maximalist fashion. Under the free-exercise-religion claims that RFRA replaced, religious plaintiffs usually lost their cases against the obligations of generally applicable laws. And even today most religious believers find ways to compromise with government programs and requirements with which they disagree. Catholic judges, for example, for years have granted divorces, even to Catholic couples. These judges have not asked for exemptions in these cases.

But instead of compromise and goodwill, the Affordable Care Act has provoked overheated rhetoric and over-the-top objections on the part of religious institutions and individuals, many of whom opposed the act from the beginning and are now continuing their political campaign in the courts.

Commentators have noted the hypocrisy of Hobby Lobby’s assertion of religious objections–it happily does business in China despite that country’s one child policy and forced abortions. Given the tenuous connection of employers to contraceptive coverage availability under the Obama administration compromise, it’s abundantly clear that the objections are motivated by politics, not religion.
But even if the objections were sincere, where would it stop? If your religion teaches that women are to be submissive, can you be exempted from compliance with EEO regulations? If your theology holds that blacks are inferior (as Mormon teachings did until the late 1970s), can you ignore civil rights laws? As Ledewitz warns,
 If RFRA really means what the plaintiffs in the Affordable Care Act litigation claim that it means — that religious believers are free to invoke the protections of the act no matter how minuscule their legal obligations appear to be and despite a commercial and even profit-making context — then RFRA is unworkable and will inevitably be repealed. If that occurs, religious believers will have inadvertently undermined the very religious liberty that they now invoke and that America rightly prizes.

American law has made numerous concessions to religious belief, but this is a bridge too far. As the old saying goes, pigs get fed–but hogs get slaughtered.
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Ironies of the Season

A former student of mine, Derek Thomas, is a policy analyst at the Institute for Working Families–a local think-tank that focuses on policies affecting (duh!) working families. He has a recent post at the Institute’s website documenting the toll taken on those families by the ongoing sequester.

I couldn’t help feeling a twinge of guilt as I read the catalog of the sequester’s consequences for my fellow Hoosiers, not because I consider myself culpable (I didn’t vote for those responsible, nor did I support the use of this meat-ax approach to budgeting), but because I hadn’t really thought about the sequester in such concrete terms.

Most Americans who share my good fortune–still middle-class, still employed, still able to make my mortgage payments–think of the sequester in terms of policy, assuming we think of it at all. It was stupid and cowardly, evidence of Congressional dysfunction. We haven’t thought about it in terms of Indiana children thrown out of Head Start, or elderly folks who aren’t getting hot Meals from Meals on Wheels, or the landlords and tenants alike who no longer receive housing vouchers both depend upon…let alone the multiple other hardships detailed in Derek’s report.

Worse still, the full impact of the sequester hasn’t yet hit.

While low-income working families are struggling with the consequences of decisions made by people those decisions wouldn’t affect, our news media has focused on the Black Friday near-riots at big-box stores, as shoppers fought each other for the presumed “bargains” on display.

What was really on display was the disconnect between the “still-haves” and the “no-longer-haves.”

Also on display was the evident lack of concern about the latter category by those of us in the former one.

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Some Unsolicited Advice to the Warriors

It’s “War on Christmas” time again, so let me suggest a tactic that might make those who don’t appreciate the insulting nature of wishing someone “Happy Holidays” take the Christian Warriors more seriously.

Listen, guys, if you really want to make the case that everyone needs to acknowledge the sanctity of Christmas and implicitly, the cultural and moral superiority of your belief system, here’s a great way to do that: start acting like Christians. Not just in December, either, but all year.

It’s really hard for Jews, Muslins, Pagans, et al to respect your demands for obeisance when you blithely and consistently ignore the rules upon which your claims of Christian superiority are based.

When people see you refusing to pay your employees a living wage, when they see you get all pissy about the very idea of giving poor folks access to health insurance, that doesn’t look very Christian to them.

When elected officials like Mike Pence publicly parade their piety but then screw over  400,000 Hoosiers by refusing to use federal dollars to expand Medicaid–all the while pontificating about the need for poor people to take “personal responsibility”–you can’t blame other folks for wondering whether they missed that place in your bible where Jesus refused to share loaves and fishes with the irresponsible masses.

When you make shit up in order to bolster your political arguments, when you get oh-so-offended because someone wished you well without including the magic words, when you wrap yourself in a blanket of victimization whenever a court doesn’t allow you to impose your beliefs on people who don’t share them….well, it gets really hard to see the light of Christian charity in your behavior.

Maybe you’d have better luck–and earn more respect– if you lived in accordance with the religion you want to cram down everyone else’s throat.

Just a thought.

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When Abstaining Isn’t

There’s been an unpleasant little episode playing out at IUPUI, where I teach. Although both Indiana University and IUPUI have officially come out in opposition to HJR6–passage of which would make it incredibly difficult to recruit first-rate faculty–the Executive Committee of IUPUI’s Staff Council recently decided to abstain, and remain neutral.

As the name suggests, the Staff Council is an organization of staff–the administrative assistants, IT experts, development professionals and others without whom the university simply couldn’t operate. And evidently (unlike the situation with faculty, virtually all of whom oppose the measure), some staff members support HJR6.  So the Executive Committee–without a staff vote and in what I take to be an effort to avoid controversy–decided to sit this one out.

The problem is, there are some things you can’t sit out. There are some issues–and this is one of them–where taking “no position” is taking a position.

We don’t think kindly these days about the white Southerners who decided to “stay neutral” about segregation, or the whites (North and South) who “stayed neutral” about discrimination in housing and on the job.

When you say “Well, maybe black children should be entitled to go to school with white ones, but a lot of my neighbors think blacks are inferior and I don’t want to piss off my neighbors so I’ll just stay quiet and accept the status quo,” you are endorsing that status quo. When you say “I know gay people already can’t marry in Indiana, but some of my colleagues want to make sure we outlaw civil unions too, and I don’t want to argue with them,” you are endorsing the legitimacy of your colleagues’ anti-equality position.

I understand that some Christians–certainly not all, or these days even most–consider homosexuality a sin. That is their right. Their churches have a right to preach that doctrine, a right to refuse to marry same-sex couples, to write letters to editors and to fulminate to their family members at Thanksgiving. But in our constitutional system, they should not have a right to deny gay people equal treatment under the law, and (however grudgingly and inconsistently) most courts, government institutions and everyday Americans have come to agree.

The right to equal treatment by civil authority is more than a constitutional requirement; it is a moral touchstone of American culture. It’s not something one can be neutral about.

Refusing to engage–abstaining from the struggle in an effort to placate everyone–satisfies no one. It’s cowardice–and betrayal.   

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My Very Own, Home-Hatched Conspiracy Theory

Maybe I’ve been drinking too much of the seasonal eggnog.

Yesterday, I began to hear reports that Brian Bosma and David Long had decided to reject Common Core. Now, in the real world, that makes no sense–Indiana is well along the trajectory of implementing Common Core, some 75% of teachers endorse it, and most of the opposition comes from folks who automatically resist anything promoted by the federal government (because, you know, it’s being promoted by the federal government), and others who don’t know the difference between standards and curriculum.

Changing back to state-specific standards now will be very costly. So why would a couple of fiscal watchdogs who supported Common Core when Tony Bennett was in office take this sudden U-Turn?

Here’s where my eggnog addled conspiracy theory kicks in: Bosma and Long really, really want to extricate themselves from the no-win mess they’ve gotten themselves into over HJR6. They want to change that second sentence and kick that can down the road. But there’s Eric Miller, with his mega-church primary voters, and he needs to be appeased by winning something. There must be some bone to throw him. The media has turned up the heat on the negligent and/or abusive “Church ministries” daycare operations he’s intent upon protecting. So–let’s let him “win” the battle against those awful feds and their Common Core!

LIke I say, maybe it’s the eggnog.

Maybe it isn’t.

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