religious liberty – Page 6

Rabbinic Wisdom

Rabbi Sandy Sasso has an important column in this morning’s Star.

There has been a lot of heat–and considerably less light–generated by the requirement that health insurance companies make contraception available free of charge to employees of Catholic universities and hospitals. Much of that heat has been deliberately stoked–a politically cynical ploy intended to rile up faithful folks by accusing the administration of religious hostility.

As the good Rabbi reminds us, the conflict between laws of general application and the beliefs of religious groups is not new. Employers who are Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christian Scientists, among others, must offer their employees coverage for procedures their own beliefs prohibit. As she further reminds us, there is a critical difference between telling the faithful they must do something that violates their conscience–use or pay for contraception, in this case–and telling them they may not impose their beliefs on employees who do not share them.

These questions of conscience are inevitable in a country that is constitutionally obliged to respect diversity while acting to advance the common good. At some point, individuals must obey that “inner voice” that tells them not to participate in evil. No one celebrates the obedient German who was “just following orders.” On the other hand, even fewer of us celebrate the zealot who insists that the law must reflect his particular beliefs to the detriment of others who disagree.

If my religion teaches that I must sacrifice my first-born, the government is not required to respect that belief. On the other hand, if I am a competent adult member of a sect that rejects transfusions, the government should respect my right to refuse that procedure, no matter how grave the consequences.

In between, there is plenty of opportunity for good faith dispute.

Last night, at dinner with friends, our host told us a story about his relative who lives in a very small town in Southern Indiana. Her teenage daughter had horrific menstrual cramps, and the doctor prescribed birth control pills to control the pain. When my friend’s cousin went to the only drugstore in town, the pharmacist refused to fill the prescription. Even though the woman explained that the purpose was medical, not sexual, the pharmacist was adamant that filling a prescription for contraception for a sixteen-year-old violated her conscience.

Should pro-life police officers be excused from protecting abortion clinics? What about anti-gay firefighters who are called to extinguish a blaze at a gay bar? Where do we draw the line? Some people will view the “conscience exemption” for pharmacists as an appropriate accommodation. Others will argue that if an individual is unwilling to provide the services the profession exists to provide , she should find a different profession.

There are legitimate, unavoidable conflicts between conscience and the common good in a free society. Playing cynical political games does not advance our ability to deal with those challenges.

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Irony-Challenged Santorum

In the dust-up over contraceptive coverage, Rick Santorum–along with a number of other GOP (male) elected officials–has condemned the Obama administration’s “assault” on “religious liberty.” This charge has produced some truly ludicrous moments; yesterday, for example, the news was filled with photos depicting the witnesses at a trumped-up congressional hearing into the pernicious effects on religious liberty of the requirement that health insurers cover contraception. The witnesses were all male.

But Santorum easily wins my vote for the most audaciously irony-challenged of these protectors of religious liberty.

Santorum is one of those Christian Nation folks who believes that his religious beliefs should dictate public policy; in his 15th-Century view, violations of religious liberty occur when the law fails to follow his version of God’s plan. Santorum’s God doesn’t like gay people, so Santorum believes the law should deny GLBT folks basic civil liberties, let alone the right to marry. Santorum’s God doesn’t believe in abortion, so no one else should be able to have one, no matter how dire the circumstances or how different that woman’s own belief system.

And with respect to contraception, as a fellow Catholic recently wrote:

“This confluence of politics and religion brings me right to Santorum’s public policy opposition to contraception. In his public (and apparently private) life, Santorum has, in effect, hewed to the Vatican line that so-called “artificial” contraception constitutes an “unnatural” frustration of the natural end of the sex act. But, like most good politicos Santorum hides his Catholic animus to contraceptive rights. Notably, he takes cover in legalisms. He opposed Griswold v. Connecticut—the judgment guaranteeing contraceptive right to married couples—because he disagreed with the Court that right of privacy exists in the Constitution. Beyond its cramped legalism, I find this maneuver devious. Santorum dare not say what truly moves him in this debate—namely his unswerving loyalty to the Vatican’s proscription of “artificial” methods of birth control and family planning as against nature.”

During his tenure in the U.S. Senate, Santorum consistently voted to impose his own religious views on others, and he is admirably forthright about his intentions to “Christianize” America should he be elected President. He is breathtakingly oblivious to the true meaning of religious liberty. (Hint, Rick: religious liberty means that you are entitled to live in accordance with your beliefs, but others are equally entitled to live by theirs.)

I am rooting for a Santorum Presidential candidacy. He is the perfect embodiment of today’s GOP base. If Romney is the nominee, and gets crushed, the Republican base will simply conclude he wasn’t conservative enough. A Santorum-Obama contest would allow the general public to send a decisive and needed wake-up message to the culture warriors who have captured one of America’s major political parties.

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Religious Liberty, Contraception and Gay Rights

Amazing—and embarrassing—as it may seem, the American Taliban is once again waging battle against sex. This time, their target is contraception.

Their fig leaf is a definition of “religious liberty” that neither the nation’s Founders nor the courts would recognize—the same definition that they employ in their ongoing war against civil rights for gays and lesbians. Short form: giving rights to women and gays would violate their religious liberties.

A brief recap: When the Obama administration issued regulations for employer-provided health insurance, the regulations required that such coverage include birth control. Churches were exempt from the requirement (an exemption that is required by the First Amendment), but religiously-affiliated institutions like hospitals and universities were not. More than half of the states already had such a requirement, and those employers had been complying for years without any discernable fuss or claim that these rules somehow represented a “war on religion.”

Enter the forces for “religious liberty” aka the Catholic Bishops and the GOP. Their argument was that making religious employers pay for insurance that included birth control was a violation of their freedom of conscience. Under years of Supreme Court precedent, it wasn’t, but the Administration moved to accommodate their sensibilities by requiring the insurance companies to offer the coverage at no cost directly to women, removing the employer from the equation.

As I write this, the Bishops and the (ascendant) Santorum wing of the Republican Party are not mollified, despite the fact that Catholic nuns and a significant majority of American Catholics are fine with it. According to their arguments, simply making birth control available to employees of religiously affiliated employers is itself a violation of their religious liberties.

I know I harp on the public’s lack of civic and constitutional literacy, but this is another perfect example.

When the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, they wanted the “liberty” to impose the correct religion on their neighbors. The idea that Church and State could be separated was unknown to the Puritans who first settled in the new country; the freedom they wanted was the freedom to “establish” the True Religion, and form a government that would require their neighbors to live in accordance with that religion.

A hundred and fifty years later, however, the men who crafted the Constitution for the new nation were products of a dramatically different worldview. The philosophical movement we call the Enlightenment had given birth to science, privileged reason over superstition, and reconsidered the proper role of government. Liberty—religious or otherwise—had come to mean the right of individuals to live their lives in accordance with their own consciences, free of the coercion of the state and free of what the founders called “the passions of the majority.”

Our Constitution may have been a product of the Enlightenment, but we still have a significant number of Puritans in America, and what we sometimes call the “culture wars” are yet another conflict between those two very different visions of liberty.

The Rick Santorums of the world aren’t just against equal rights for gays and lesbians, they aren’t just anti-abortion and anti-birth control (Santorum himself has gone on record saying that birth control should not be available because it allows people to engage in “wrong” sexual behavior). They are deeply Puritan: anti-science, anti-reason, anti-diversity. That they are absolutely convinced of their own possession of the Truth is less disconcerting than their even stronger conviction that “liberty” means they should have the right to make everyone else live by their Truth.

These are the same irony-challenged theocrats who are running around proposing legislation to prevent imposition of “Sharia law.”

I’d guess they don’t have mirrors. Or a capacity for self-reflection.

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A Political Eddie Haskell

As I was driving to work yesterday, NPR was broadcasting a snippet of a speech made the night before by Mitt Romney. That’s when it hit me. I’d been trying for weeks to pin down who it was that Romney reminds me of, and with the patent insincerity of that speech, it finally clicked.

Mitt Romney is the Eddie Haskell of politics.

Eddie Haskell, for those of you too young to remember, was the disgusting little sycophant on “Leave it to Beaver.” The character was so vivid, his very name became synonymous with dishonest sucking up.

In the speech fragment I heard, Romney was feigning outrage over the new regulations promulgated by HHS, requiring all employers who offer health insurance–including religious employers like hospitals and universities–to include coverage for contraception. As I previously blogged, there are legitimate concerns when government issues regulations that are intended to protect or benefit the general public when those rules run afoul of some folk’s religious beliefs. But there was no such nuance in Romney’s attack–not to mention any recognition of the fact that several states have imposed similar regulations for years. Nope, according to Mitt, Obama was purposely attacking religion, and he wouldn’t do that if he were President. No siree!

Let’s just deconstruct that attack.

Romney is a Mormon, and the federal government long ago outlawed polygamy. The effect of that prohibition was to deny Mormons the ability to live by what was at the time considered an essential tenet of their religion, yet Romney has never criticized that restriction–indeed, he has said he agrees with it. The HHS regulation, on the other hand, does not require anyone to use birth control in contravention of their religious beliefs; it merely requires them to make that option available to employees who come from different religious traditions and/or hold different beliefs. The regulation doesn’t apply to churches–just to large religiously-run organizations like hospitals and universities, where employees represent a wide diversity of backgrounds and faith traditions.

There are plenty of laws that have incidental effects on religious practices. For example,laws requiring schoolchildren to be vaccinated pose problems for Christian Scientists. Quakers believe they should not be required to pay taxes that support wars (the courts have not been receptive to that argument). Laws requiring photo IDs for driver’s licenses are a genuine dilemma for fundamentalist Muslim women whose beliefs require them to wear full burkas. (Somehow, I doubt Mitt would get too worked up over that one, since the base he is so shamelessly pandering to tends to be virulently anti-Muslim.)

None of these “attacks on religion” have merited even a passing mention from Mitt Romney.

That’s the problem with channelling Eddie Haskell. The insincerity overwhelms the message.

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