Linda Greenhouse on the Supreme Court and the law
Whose Conscience?
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
NYT
In the escalating conflict over the new federal requirement that employers include contraception coverage without a co-pay in the insurance plans they make available to their employees, opposition from the Catholic church and its allies is making headway with a powerfully appealing claim: that when conscience and government policy collide, conscience must prevail.
The rhetoric in which this claim is put forward grows more inflammatory by the day. “The Obama administration has just told the Catholics of the United States, ‘To Hell with you!’ ” according to Bishop David A. Zubik of the Diocese of Pittsburgh. The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a nondenominational organization that litigates on behalf of religious interests, is circulating a petition under the heading: “The Obama Administration is giving you one year to stop believing” (a reference to the one-year delay the regulation offers to religious employers). Mitt Romney, the likely Republican presidential nominee, joined the chorus this week, calling the regulation “a violation of conscience.”
This aggressive claiming of the moral high ground is close to drowning out the regulation’s supporters, inside and outside of the Obama administration. Maybe I’m missing something, but I haven’t seen a comparably full-throated defense of the regulation, issued last month by the Department of Health and Human Services, except on pure policy grounds. (And there are indications this week that even some in the administration, or at least in President Obama’s campaign apparatus, may be getting cold feet.) While the policy grounds are fully persuasive – the ability to prevent or space pregnancy being an essential part of women’s health care, one that shouldn’t be withheld simply because a woman’s employer is church-affiliated – the purpose of this column is to examine the conscience claim itself, directly, to see whether it holds up.
An obvious starting point is with the 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women who, just like other American women, have exercised their own consciences and availed themselves of birth control at some point during their reproductive lives. So it’s important to be clear that the conscientious objection to the regulation comes from an institution rather than from those whose consciences it purports to represent. (Catholic women actually have a higher rate of abortion than other American women, but I’ll stick to birth control for now.) While most Catholics dissent in the privacy of their bedrooms from the church’s position, some are pushing back in public. The organization Catholics for Choice, whose magazine is pointedly entitled Conscience, is calling on its supporters to “tell our local media that the bishops are out of touch with the lived reality of the Catholic people” and “do not speak for us on this decision.”
(More here.)
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
NYT
In the escalating conflict over the new federal requirement that employers include contraception coverage without a co-pay in the insurance plans they make available to their employees, opposition from the Catholic church and its allies is making headway with a powerfully appealing claim: that when conscience and government policy collide, conscience must prevail.
The rhetoric in which this claim is put forward grows more inflammatory by the day. “The Obama administration has just told the Catholics of the United States, ‘To Hell with you!’ ” according to Bishop David A. Zubik of the Diocese of Pittsburgh. The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a nondenominational organization that litigates on behalf of religious interests, is circulating a petition under the heading: “The Obama Administration is giving you one year to stop believing” (a reference to the one-year delay the regulation offers to religious employers). Mitt Romney, the likely Republican presidential nominee, joined the chorus this week, calling the regulation “a violation of conscience.”
This aggressive claiming of the moral high ground is close to drowning out the regulation’s supporters, inside and outside of the Obama administration. Maybe I’m missing something, but I haven’t seen a comparably full-throated defense of the regulation, issued last month by the Department of Health and Human Services, except on pure policy grounds. (And there are indications this week that even some in the administration, or at least in President Obama’s campaign apparatus, may be getting cold feet.) While the policy grounds are fully persuasive – the ability to prevent or space pregnancy being an essential part of women’s health care, one that shouldn’t be withheld simply because a woman’s employer is church-affiliated – the purpose of this column is to examine the conscience claim itself, directly, to see whether it holds up.
An obvious starting point is with the 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women who, just like other American women, have exercised their own consciences and availed themselves of birth control at some point during their reproductive lives. So it’s important to be clear that the conscientious objection to the regulation comes from an institution rather than from those whose consciences it purports to represent. (Catholic women actually have a higher rate of abortion than other American women, but I’ll stick to birth control for now.) While most Catholics dissent in the privacy of their bedrooms from the church’s position, some are pushing back in public. The organization Catholics for Choice, whose magazine is pointedly entitled Conscience, is calling on its supporters to “tell our local media that the bishops are out of touch with the lived reality of the Catholic people” and “do not speak for us on this decision.”
(More here.)
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1 Comments:
Wasn't it Voltaire who procalimed that God invented sex and priests invented marriage? I've always appreciated that quote and must admit that while I understand the theology of the Catholic Church's position on contraceptives, I have not always been a faithful Catholic in following church doctrine. That being said, Obama and his government thugs need to butt out. What a church decides is up to the church, not government.
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