Why The Catholic Contraception Controversy Is A Phony Battle
Public health and women’s autonomy collided with religion last week. Elders in the Catholic Church were incensed as the regulations implementing the federal healthcare law would have required institutions affiliated with the Church (but not the Church itself) to provide health plans covering contraception. The rules (part of the normal regulation-writing process that comes after a sweeping law is enacted) would not have forced the Church or its clergymen to hand out birth control; they only would have required Catholic-affiliated schools, hospitals, and universities to play by the rules everyone else has to follow, and provide for full healthcare coverage for women.
The Obama administration, under fire as the health issue turned into a political issue, offered a compromise: health insurance companies would have to provide the free birth control to the female employees (some of whom are not even Catholic), but the religious-affiliated institutions would not have to pay for it.
It was a dodge of sorts, to be sure, but it gave the bishops the cover they needed to maintain the Catholic Church standard opposing contraception. Still, it was a generous compromise. And now the bishops are suggesting it is not enough, citing “serious moral concerns” about the compromise, particularly as it might apply to entities that self-insure.
That, on its own, is a bit of a stretch. The Church, after all, has given marriage annulments to politically-connected people who had not only been married for years, but have had children. If that’s not an inartful dodge around the Church rule forbidding divorce, nothing is. And while it’s probably not helpful to resurrect the painful episode of the decades of child sexual abuse by priests and the failure of the Church to stop them, it’s also true that the institution of the Church is still rebuilding its “moral” brand.
Picking a fight with the Obama administration does nothing to advance that goal. Nor does it improve the Church’s power over its own flock—98 percent of whom have used birth control. Government should indeed protect religious freedom, which is why no one’s asking priests to marry same-sex couples or forcing Catholic hospitals to perform abortions. But what the Church is dangerously close to doing is an equally invasive reverse: asking the government to try to enforce a rule the Church has been wildly unsuccessful in imposing on its own members.
There’s one clear reason why both the Church and the GOP presidential candidates have been raising the tired old accusations of the a war on Catholicism (an allegation that is extremely insulting to Catholics, to whom faith in God is sincere and unshakeable—certainly not threatened by a coworker getting free birth control pills). It’s an election year, so it’s prime time for making hyperbolic and incendiary accusations that have little basis in fact. Social issues have been largely absent from the campaign so far, and for a reason: the economy has been so bad that it was enough of an issue for GOP candidates to run on. But now that the unemployment rate is creeping slowly down and the stock market is stabilizing, the economy may retreat somewhat as an issue. And that leads candidates to insert wedge issues like the contraception debate.
Remarkably, opponents of the Obama administration rule, along with self-described liberal pundits, are convinced that the “Catholic vote” will rise up against Obama in the fall. That analysis assumes that all Catholics vote according to their Church’s dictates, which is absurd, especially in this case. If nearly all Catholics use birth control, why on earth would they vote against a president who tried to make access to birth control easier? Those who are that upset about contraception weren’t planning to vote for this president, anyway.
There will be more social issues raised during this election year, especially after the GOP nomination is sealed. But the contraception debate is a phony one.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, February 13, 2012
Republican Women Senators Breaking Ranks With Party, Come Out In Favor Of Obama Contraception Rule
While GOP senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has pledged to fight the Obama’s administration’s modified regulation requiring health insurers and busnisses to offer contraception coverage without additional cost sharing, the revised rule “appears to have won over” two of the five Republican women senators.
Sens. Olympia Snowe (ME) and Susan Collins (ME) — both of whom have sponsored legislation requiring insurers to offer contraception benefits in all health plans — are in favor of the new compromise, which would allow religiously affiliated colleges, universities, and hospitals to avoid providing birth control. Their employees will still receive contraception coverage at no additional cost sharing directly from the insurer:
“It appears that changes have been made that provide women’s health services without compelling Catholic organizations in particular to violate the beliefs and tenets of their faith,” Snowe said in a statement. “According to the Catholic Health Association, the administration ‘responded to the issues [they] identified that needed to be fixed,’ which is what I urged the president to do in addressing this situation.
“While I will carefully review the details of the president’s revised proposal, it appears to be a step in the right direction,” Collins said in a statement. “The administration’s original plan was deeply flawed and clearly would have posed a threat to religious freedom. It presented the Catholic Church with its wide-ranging social, educational, and health care services, and many other faith-based organizations, with an impossible choice between violating their religious beliefs or violating federal regulations. The administration has finally listened to the concerns raised by many and appears to be seeking to avoid the threat to religious liberties posed by its original plan.”
Republicans in the senate seem determined to oppose the compromise and have introduced legislation that would allow employers or individuals to opt out of any benefit that undermines their moral beliefs. “They don’t have the authority under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution to tell someone in this country or some organization in this country what their religious beliefs are,” McConnell told “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “This issue will not go away until the administration simply backs down,” he said.
Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), who led the GOP’s opposition to the original rule, has yet to issue a statement on the measure and did not respond to ThinkProgress’ query about her position. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) also did not respond. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) co-sponsored a 1999 bill requiring contraception equity in insurance coverage and has not yet to weigh in on the current debate.
By: Igor Volsky, Think Progress, February 13, 2012
Romney Shows He Hasn’t Read Obama’s Modified Birth Control Reg During Rowdy Maine Town Hall
Mitt Romney doubled down on his new-found objection to contraception coverage during a town hall in Maine on Friday. Romney — who remained mum as Massachusetts implemented a measure requiring insurance companies to cover contraception in 2003, signed into law a health care reform bill that has greatly expanded access to state-funded birth control, and required Catholic hospitals to provide emergency contraception to rape victims — told a rowdy crown in Portland, Maine that President Obama’s modified contraception rule does not go far enough:
At the event, Romney also waded into the political fray over the decision by the Obama administration today to require insurers, rather than private employers, to pay for coverage of contraception. The move reversed an earlier decision that would have required religious-affiliated organizations, such as Catholic hospitals, to provide the coverage, prompting an outcry from across the political spectrum.
“Today he did the classic Obama retreat all right, and what I mean by that is, it wasn’t a retreat at all. It’s another deception,” Romney said, arguing that that religious organizations still will have to pay for contraception after insurance companies pass the costs along to employers.
“Companies consist of people, and someone has to pay — the owners, the employees or the customers, and they pass those costs on to the customers,”
he said.
But it’s Romney who is being devious here. Actuaries and real world experiences in covering contraception in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan (FEHBP) have found that contraception coverage is at the very least cost neutral within the context of the benefits of the health care plan. And in announcing its compromise on Friday, the administration pledged to work with insurers to issue future regulations that would specifically stipulate that if a religiously affiliated nonprofit chooses to avoid offering contraception in its health care plan, “there be no charge for the contraceptive coverage” for the employer or the employee.
As a senior administration official explained to the Washington Post’s Sarah Kliff, “Our policy is saying that the Catholic hospital doesn’t want to cover contraceptives, and they don’t include that in their policy. It also says that Aetna needs to provide contraceptive services for free to workers in the plan. Aetna sets the premium, but it cannot be higher than it would have been without birth control. The premium does not include contraception.” “There is a sort of bank account,” says the official. So, in this particular hypothetical, “Aetna is sucking it up.”
In other words, providing contraception without additional cost sharing will become “a legitimate cost of doing business” for health insurers who work with religious nonprofits, and while they may not be all too thrilled at the prospect, administration officials expect them to agree “that this is going to be a cost-neutral benefit.”
By: Igor Volsky, Think Progress, February 13, 2012
“Boundaries Of A Mindset”: The Undermining Of The Freedoms Of Others
How a political party, movement — or nation — thinks is more important than WHAT it thinks. This is the larger lesson to be learned in the dispute between President Obama and the Catholic bishops over birth control.
With the President’s reasonable compromise announced on Friday the controversy with the Catholic leadership has been resolved in ways that I think strengthens the President’s hand and exposes the Republican Party, yet again, as the faction of reactionary anti-women extremists.
Some have mocked the President for stumbling into a dispute with a powerful religious constituency, which conventional wisdom says is the last thing a president up for contract renewal wants to do in an election year. I am not so sure and think critics of the President — both liberal and conservative — reveal their own bias in favor of the Catholic hierarchy at the expense of the Catholic faithful when critics speak so confidently about what “the Church” believes about anything in this controversy.
Nevertheless, the deeper and more important issue in the present controversy between Obama and the bishops is what are we to make of the claim by an absolutist institution, the Catholic Church, that a republic’s guarantee of freedom of religion gives to that church absolute sovereignty over all those areas of society where the Church’s interests intersect?
Fundamentalism is not a religion. It is a mindset. A liberal society can accommodate the demands of radical freedom expressed by the Catholic Church just so long as liberalism itself remains the dominant governing mentality. But a society in which the radical freedom of religious fundamentalists prevails would be a society that sooner or later descends into either anarchy or tyranny.
And this is an autonomy the Church says exists not only over the Church proper where actual religious worship takes place. It also extends everywhere the Church has business and economic interests, such as its schools, hospitals, universities — even it’s pizza parlors and taco stands if the Church decided to diversify into the fast food business as well.
The reason this issue matters is that we are talking about the governing mentality of our republic — HOW our republic will think as it tries to solve the problems we face, not only WHAT we eventually do think about the possible solutions to embrace. And it matters a great deal whether that overriding mentality is a liberal one or is one authoritarian, fundamentalist, or absolutist in nature.
The Founding Fathers were not anti-religious. But the wall of separation they built between church and state recognized that the absolutism so necessary in giving church followers the comforting sense of certainty they require was death to democratic republics where secular authorities had to accommodate and reconcile many such faith-claims. As James Madison said when talking about the system of federalism within the Constitution and of the mediating and political qualities thus necessary in democratic office-holders: When you “extend the sphere you enlarge the views.”
When they are working to attain power, and before they do attain it, “the fascist and communist parties invoke all the guarantees of the bill of rights, all the prerogatives of popular parties, of elections, of representation of the assemblies, of tenure in the civil service. But when they attain power, they destroy the liberal democratic institutions, as on a broad staircase, they climbed to power.”
That was written by the great American journalist Walter Lippmann in his 1955 classic, Essays in the Public Philosophy, and it applies equally to all illiberal political parties that seek to impose a faith or political ideology on an unwilling audience.
It was a book Lippmann started when Hitler’s rise in Germany threatened Western civilization and concluded during the height of the Cold War. Lippmann’s aim was to better understand the inner dynamics and pathologies by which liberal democracies were nearly made extinct in the 20th century — and often with the connivance of those democracies’ own citizens.
Democracy, Lippmann concluded, is for those who are for it. Democracy is for those willing to do more than simply claim a democracy’s freedoms for their own but to protect those freedoms for others. And this requires, first of all, recognizing the danger which non-negotiable and absolutist faith-claims by anyone pose to the fabric that supports the democratic way of life.
And the “borderline between sedition and reform,” writes Lippmann — the borderline between legitimate and illegitimate politics — is the boundary between a mindset that says there can be only one “Truth” and another that accepts the “sovereign principle” that in a democracy “we live in a rational order in which, by sincere inquiry and rational debate, we can distinguish the true and the false, the right and the wrong.”
Indeed, using a religious metaphor, Lippmann says that “rational procedure is the ark of the covenant of the public philosophy” of democratic republics. There are no election laws or constitutional guarantees which cannot be changed, says Lippmann. But what must always be unchangeable if a democracy is to survive “is the commitment to rational determination.”
The counter-revolutionists, says Lippmann, will in the end try to “suppress freedom in order to propagate their official doctrine.” They will, he says, “reject the procedure by which in the free society official policy is determined.”
And among these counter-revolutionaries I would include the present right wing, politically aggressive Catholic Church hierarchy that is now demanding the entire society give to the Church the same deference in the political realm which the Church demands of the faithful in the religious one, by accepting and accommodating the Church’s non-negotiable and absolutist faith-demands on birth control wherever the writ of the Catholic Church runs — whether in the sphere of religious worship or wherever the Church has business interests of any kind — as it uses its resources to carve out little Vatican Cities within our republic where the Church claims ultimate sovereignty and might as well start appointing ambassadors.
It is not possible to reject this faith in the efficacy of reason over absolutist faith, says Lippmann, “and at the same time believe that communities of men enjoying freedom could govern themselves successfully.”
It it not possible, in other words, to give the Catholic Church the power it seeks to shape a political agenda based on its own internal dogmas alone and at the same time still believe we have a democratic republic, not really.
Conservatives have tried to change the subject in order to deflect criticisms of them that they are ideologues who seek to impose reactionary beliefs on an unwilling American public. They have done this by trying to redefine liberalism — or “secularism” — to be somehow a competing “religion” itself so as to assert that liberals are equally dogmatic in trying to “impose” their “religious beliefs” of religious tolerance, open-mindedness and official state neutrality regarding all forms of religious worship on an unwilling traditionalist or fundamentalist audience that thinks Judeo-Christian orthodoxy ought to be the law of the land.
Like all religious fundamentalists and absolutists who seek political power, the Catholic Church is showing us again that the undermining of the freedoms of others begins with the demands for absolute freedoms for themselves.
By: Ted Frier, Open Salon Blog, February 12, 2012
“Beyond Pelvic Politics”: Choosing Between Bishops’ Sensibilities And Women’s Health
I may not be as theologically sophisticated as American bishops, but I had thought that Jesus talked more about helping the poor than about banning contraceptives.
The debates about pelvic politics over the last week sometimes had a patronizing tone, as if birth control amounted to a chivalrous handout to women of dubious morals. On the contrary, few areas have more impact on more people than birth control — and few are more central to efforts to chip away at poverty.
My well-heeled readers will be furrowing their brows at this point. Birth control is cheap, you’re thinking, and far less expensive than a baby (or an abortion). But for many Americans living on the edge, it’s a borderline luxury.
A 2009 study looked at sexually active American women of modest means, ages 18 to 34, whose economic circumstances had deteriorated. Three-quarters said that they could not afford a baby then. Yet 30 percent had put off a gynecological or family-planning visit to save money. More horrifying, of those using the pill, one-quarter said that they economized by not taking it every day. (My data is from the Guttmacher Institute, a nonpartisan research organization on issues of sexual health.)
One-third of women in another survey said they would switch birth control methods if not for the cost. Nearly half of those women were relying on condoms, and others on nothing more than withdrawal.
The cost of birth control is one reason poor women are more than three times as likely to end up pregnant unintentionally as middle-class women.
In short, birth control is not a frill that can be lightly dropped to avoid offending bishops. Coverage for contraception should be a pillar of our public health policy — and, it seems to me, of any faith-based effort to be our brother’s keeper, or our sister’s.
To understand the centrality of birth control, consider that every dollar that the United States government spends on family planning reduces Medicaid expenditures by $3.74, according to Guttmacher. Likewise, the National Business Group on Health estimated that it costs employers at least an extra 15 percent if they don’t cover contraception in their health plans.
And of course birth control isn’t just a women’s issue: men can use contraceptives too, and unwanted pregnancies affect not only mothers but also fathers.
This is the backdrop for the uproar over President Obama’s requirement that Catholic universities and hospitals include birth control in their health insurance plans. On Friday, the White House backed off a bit — forging a compromise so that unwilling religious employers would not pay for contraception, while women would still get the coverage — but many administration critics weren’t mollified.
Look, there’s a genuine conflict here. Many religious believers were sincerely offended that Catholic institutions would have to provide coverage for health interventions that the church hierarchy opposed. That counts in my book: it’s best to avoid forcing people to do things that breach their ethical standards.
Then again, it’s not clear how many people actually are offended. A national survey found that 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women use birth control at some point in their lives. Moreover, a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute reported that even among Catholics, 52 percent back the Obama policy: they believe that religiously affiliated universities and hospitals should be obliged to include birth control coverage in insurance plans.
So, does America’s national health policy really need to make a far-reaching exception for Catholic institutions when a majority of Catholics oppose that exception?
I wondered what other religiously affiliated organizations do in this situation. Christian Science traditionally opposed medical care. Does The Christian Science Monitor deny health insurance to employees?
“We offer a standard health insurance package,” John Yemma, the editor, told me.
That makes sense. After all, do we really want to make accommodations across the range of faith? What if organizations affiliated with Jehovah’s Witnesses insisted on health insurance that did not cover blood transfusions? What if ultraconservative Muslim or Jewish organizations objected to health care except at sex-segregated clinics?
The basic principle of American life is that we try to respect religious beliefs, and accommodate them where we can. But we ban polygamy, for example, even for the pious. Your freedom to believe does not always give you a freedom to act.
In this case, we should make a good-faith effort to avoid offending Catholic bishops who passionately oppose birth control. I’m glad that Obama sought a compromise. But let’s remember that there are also other interests at stake. If we have to choose between bishops’ sensibilities and women’s health, our national priority must be the female half of our population.
By: Nicholas Kristof, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, February 11, 2012
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