“Remedial Education On Birth Control”: It Never Fails, Arrogance And Ignorance Often Go Together
You’d really think that an institution with as rich an intellectual history and educational capacity as the Roman Catholic Church could find ways to keep its national spokespeople from saying things as dumb as this:
Is the ability to buy contraceptives, that are now widely available — my Lord, all you have to do is walk into a 7-11 or any shop on any street in America and have access to them — is that right to access those and have them paid for, is that such a towering good that it would suffocate the rights of conscience?
That would be Timothy Cardinal Dolan, Archbishop of New York, on Face the Nation yesterday. It was Dolan who, as president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops from 2010 until 2013, guided the bishops into a firm alliance with conservative evangelicals (and implicitly, with the Republican Party) in a crusade for “religious liberty” defined as the right of employers to refuse their employees insurance coverage for contraceptives–typically those they regard, in defiance of standard medical profession and scientific definitions, as “abortifacients.”
Dolan’s dismissive comments about contraceptives and 7-11’s are reminiscent of those of conservative Catholic layperson Justice Antonin Scalia, who said this during oral arguments in the Hobby Lobby case:
You’re talking about, what, three or four birth controls, not all of them, just those that are abortifacient. That’s not terribly expensive stuff, is it?
Well, yes, IUDs, the real crux of the “abortifacient” argument being made by Hobby Lobby’s lawyers, are quite expensive, and you cannot simply acquire them by strolling into a convenience store.
Arrogance and ignorance often go together, but you’d figure men as accomplished as Dolan and Scalia would have the wherewithal to avoid sounding like yahoos. Men–especially celibate men like Dolan–should go to the trouble of becoming at least marginally expert on reproductive science and economics before devoting so much of their time and attention to denying women reproductive rights.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, April 21, 2014
“Stunning Hypocrisy”: Hobby Lobby 401(k) Discovered To Be Investor In Numerous Abortion And Contraception Products While Claiming Religious Objection
In what just may be the most stunning example of hypocrisy in my lifetime, Mother Jones has uncovered numerous investments on the part of Hobby Lobby’s retirement fund in a wide variety of companies producing abortion and contraception related products.
Hobby Lobby is currently seeking relief from certain contraception benefit requirements of Obamacare in a United States Supreme Court case that promises to be a landmark decision on the rights of corporations and the extension of personal religious protections to corporate entities. In the case of the Hobby Lobby corporation, the company is closely held by the Green family who purport to have strong religious objections to certain types of contraceptive devices and are suing to protect those religious rights.
Remarkably, the contraceptive devices and products that so offend the religious beliefs of this family are manufactured by the very companies in which Hobby Lobby holds a substantial stake via their employee 401(k) plan.
As I suspect many readers will find this as hard to believe and digest as I, the data can be confirmed by reviewing the company’s 2012 Annual Report of Employee Benefit Plan as filed with the Department of Labor.
This according to Mother Jones’ Molly Redden:
“Documents filed with the Department of Labor and dated December 2012 (see above)—three months after the company’s owners filed their lawsuit—show that the Hobby Lobby 401(k) employee retirement plan held more than $73 million in mutual funds with investments in companies that produce emergency contraceptive pills, intrauterine devices, and drugs commonly used in abortions. Hobby Lobby makes large matching contributions to this company-sponsored 401(k).”
In a brief submitted to the Court in support of Hobby Lobby’s position in the case, the company specifically names contraceptive products such as Plan B, Ella, and IUDs as violating their religious beliefs because they work by preventing a fertilized egg from implanting in a woman’s uterus. According to the Green family, interfering with an already fertilized egg is tantamount to abortion—an act unacceptable to the family and one they refuse to participate in no matter what the Affordable Care Act may require .
However, it turns out that the owners of Hobby Lobby do not appear to have any problem with profiting from the companies that manufacture the very products that so grievously offend their religious principles.
The following is a summation of the companies manufacturing these products that are held by the Hobby Lobby employee retirement plan, as set forth by Ms. Redden’s remarkable reporting:
“These companies include Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, which makes Plan B and ParaGard, a copper IUD, and Actavis, which makes a generic version of Plan B and distributes Ella. Other holdings in the mutual funds selected by Hobby Lobby include Pfizer, the maker of Cytotec and Prostin E2, which are used to induce abortions; Bayer, which manufactures the hormonal IUDs Skyla and Mirena; AstraZeneca, which has an Indian subsidiary that manufactures Prostodin, Cerviprime, and Partocin, three drugs commonly used in abortions; and Forest Laboratories, which makes Cervidil, a drug used to induce abortions. Several funds in the Hobby Lobby retirement plan also invested in Aetna and Humana, two health insurance companies that cover surgical abortions, abortion drugs, and emergency contraception in many of the health care policies they sell.”
When added up, the nine funds holding the stated investments involve three-quarters of Hobby Lobby’s 401(k) assets.
You may be thinking that it must have been beyond Hobby Lobby’s reasonable abilities to know what companies were being invested in by the mutual funds purchased for the Hobby Lobby 401(k) plans—but I am afraid you would be wrong.
Not only does Hobby Lobby have an obligation to know what their sponsored 401(k) is investing in for the benefit of their employees, it turns out that there are ample opportunities for the retirement fund to invest in mutual funds that are specifically screened to avoid any religiously offensive products.
“To avoid supporting companies that manufacture abortion drugs—or products such as alcohol or pornography—religious investors can turn to a cottage industry of mutual funds that screen out stocks that religious people might consider morally objectionable. The Timothy Plan and the Ave Maria Fund, for example, screen for companies that manufacture abortion drugs, support Planned Parenthood, or engage in embryonic stem cell research.”
Apparently, Hobby Lobby was either not aware that these options existed (kind of hard to believe for a company willing to take a case to the Supreme Court over their religious beliefs) or simply didn’t care.
By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, April 1, 2014
“A Blatant Violation Of Civil Rights”: When ‘Religious Liberty’ Was Used To Deny All Health Care To Women And Not Just Birth Control
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear Hobby Lobby’s and Conestoga Wood Specialties’ claims that they should be exempt from their legal obligations to provide a full range of health coverage — in this case, contraceptive care for women — because they object to providing this coverage on religious grounds. Yet, for women who worked for a California private school in the 1980s, this lawsuit must feel like déjà vu. Nearly three decades ago, the Fremont Christian School claimed a similar right to deny health coverage to its female employees, citing its religious beliefs as justification for doing so. Fremont Christian’s case does bear one important difference from Hobby Lobby’s, however, they did not just want to deny birth control to their employees — they wanted to deny all health coverage to many of the women in their employ.
Fremont was owned by a church which claimed that “in any marriage, the husband is the head of the household and is required to provide for that household.” Because of this belief, they had a very unusual compensation package for their employees — though Fremont offered a health plan to its workers, the plan was only available to “heads of households” which Fremont interpreted to mean single people or married men. When a woman became married, she was to rely on her husband for health care.
(In what Fremont described as an “act of Christian charity,” there was an exemption to this rule. A married woman could receive health benefits if “the husband is incapable of providing for his family, by virtue of non-working student status, or illness” though the school also emphasized that “the husband is still scripturally the head of the household.”)
Offering one set of employee benefits to men and a different, inferior package to women is a blatant violation of federal civil rights law, which prohibits employers from “discriminat[ing] against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” While Fremont claimed that their religious liberty gave them a trump card, a federal appeals court disagreed. “Congress’ purpose to end discrimination,” the court explained, “is equally if not more compelling than other interests that have been held to justify legislation that burdened the exercise of religious convictions.”
So could a victory for Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood cause the courts to rethink Fremont Christian? Probably not. Society’s compelling interest in eradicating discrimination against women is widely accepted, even by conservative judges, and Fremont Christian is an extreme case. Nevertheless there is reason to be concerned about what happens with religious employers who push the envelope only slightly less than Fremont Christian School did.
The Supreme Court has long recognized that the “First Amendment mandates governmental neutrality between religion and religion, and between religion and nonreligion.” But a decision in Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood’s favor would place courts in the awkward position of picking and choosing among religious faiths. What happens to sects of the Jehovah’s Witness faith, who have religious objections to blood transfusions? Or to faiths that object to certain vaccines? Or to Scientologists who object to psychiatry? Or to Christian Scientists who object to modern medical science altogether?
If Hobby Lobby wins, are these faiths now empowered to deny health coverage to their employees as well? And if not, why not? If the Court rules in Hobby Lobby’s favor, it will either need to abandon its longstanding neutrality among religions, or it will need to allow every sect to exempt itself from health coverage laws that it does not want to follow — including, potentially, sects like the one in Fremont Christian. Moreover, Hobby Lobby’s brief argues that any law burdening an employer’s religious exercise must survive “the most demanding test known to constitutional law.” That is not a good position to be in if your employer objects to blood transfusions or mental health care.
Although there is a superficial basis for Hobby Lobby’s argument, they are asking the Court for a massive shift in the law. For decades, the Supreme Court has respected the principle that one person’s religious liberty stops at another person’s body — and this is especially true in the business context. As the Court explained in United States v. Lee, “[w]hen followers of a particular sect enter into commercial activity as a matter of choice, the limits they accept on their own conduct as a matter of conscience and faith are not to be superimposed on the statutory schemes which are binding on others in that activity.” If the law were otherwise, Lee warned, employers could “impose” their “religious faith on [their] employees.”
Any decision favoring Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood will have to drive a massive hole through Lee. The essence of both businesses claims is that they should not have to follow the same health care laws that apply to all other businesses, and that employers should be able to limit their employees’ ability to obtain contraception because the employer objects to its use. But once Lee falls, it is not at all clear what rises in its place, or how easily courts are going to be able to draw a distinction between relatively narrow claims like Hobby Lobby’s and sweeping attempts to deny health care like Fremont Christian’s — not to mention the many grey areas in between.
By: Ian Millhiser, Think Progress, March 23, 2014
“Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?”: Bobby Jindal Goes Panhandling
In the post this morning on the Romney donor network, I noted that in the underlying article from WaPo’s Wesley Lowery on that network’s favorite and slightly-less-favorite ‘16ers, there was nary a mention of onetime GOP “savior” Marco Rubio.
But there was another famous name missing from a list that ultimately included non-world-beaters like Mike Pence along with the notation that Mitt’s donors generally love GOP governors: the two-term governor of Louisiana.
I was reminded of that fact in reading a separate piece from National Review’s Eliana Johnson about Bobby Jindal’s preparations for an almost certain presidential run:
Though Jindal skewered Mitt Romney just a week after the 2012 election, he’s now turning to the Romney camp in an effort to beef up his fundraising operation. Sources say he is looking to tap Romney’s vast donor network and has asked Romney’s finance director, Spencer Zwick, for an assist with introductions to some of the Romney campaign’s top givers.
A number of the GOP’s likely Republican presidential candidates, including Rand Paul, are looking to Zwick to make these introductions. That’s in part a rite of passage – presidential contenders always want access to the fundraising list compiled by the previous candidate – and in part because the Romney team, which opted out of the public-financing system, was able to raise over $1 billion, an unprecedented amount for a GOP candidate. Romney and Zwick’s stable of top-dollar donors also has an especially loyal reputation relative to that of other nominees from both parties.
So even as the Romney donor network discusses their relationships with and preferences among a long list of potential 2016 candidates (including Paul, who was mentioned in surprisingly favorable terms in the Lowery piece), Bobby Jindal is looking for ways to invite himself into that world to make a pitch. This is not a good sign for him. Nor is it a particularly good sign, BTW, that he designated himself head of the crusade for “religious liberty” in a Big Speech in California right before said crusade fell into a giant ravine next door in Arizona.
Poor Bobby. Here’s a guy so brilliant and accomplished that you’d think all he’d have to do is stand in front of GOP “invisible primary” audiences with his resume in hand and just say: “Ecce Homo!” Instead he’s running around throwing himself in front of cameras, and seeking access to donor networks, like he’s just another pol. Makes you want to cry.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, February 28, 2014
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