There can be no compromises or accommodations when it comes to our religious freedom.  Obama is not a dictator who can make declaratory actions.  Any Catholic who thinks this compromise is acceptable doesn’t have their head screwed on correctly and most certainly is not a proponent of liberty and religious freedom as much as they may claim to be.  The insurance companies were always going to be the entity which provided the birth control. Nothing has changed.   Instead, Obama is trying to force insurance companies to provide contraceptives for “free”.  Every product which is made costs something to make it so for the President to dictate that that company must eat the costs and provide it for free is absurd.  That is something that would happen in China, not America.  Obama and his administration are living in fantasy land if they think that insurance companies can be forced to provide contraceptives for free.  Insurance companies can always finagle the way they allocate the costs in order to pass them onto the consumer.  So there ends up being the same outcome – religious groups and other non-profit organizations will be paying for the contraceptives and sterilization procedures in the end.  Those from all backgrounds, all ways of life, Catholic or otherwise, need to stick together and stand up for our religious liberty.  Some Catholics have already been duped into thinking that this contraception “compromise” is sensible.  Please do not be fooled by this administrations trickery. This so called accommodation or so called compromise is a violation of our religious liberty.  God Bless All.

Here is a statement released by religious scholars:

Unacceptable

Today the Obama administration has offered what it has styled as an “accommodation” for religious institutions in the dispute over the HHS mandate for coverage (without cost sharing) of abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization, and contraception. The administration will now require that all insurance plans cover (“cost free”) these same products and services. Once a religiously-affiliated (or believing individual) employer purchases insurance (as it must, by law), the insurance company will then contact the insured employees to advise them that the terms of the policy include coverage for these objectionable things.

This so-called “accommodation” changes nothing of moral substance and fails to remove the assault on religious liberty and the rights of conscience which gave rise to the controversy. It is certainly no compromise. The reason for the original bipartisan uproar was the administration’s insistence that religious employers, be they institutions or individuals, provide insurance that covered services they regard as gravely immoral and unjust. Under the new rule, the government still coerces religious institutions and individuals to purchase insurance policies that include the very same services.

It is no answer to respond that the religious employers are not “paying” for this aspect of the insurance coverage. For one thing, it is unrealistic to suggest that insurance companies will not pass the costs of these additional services on to the purchasers. More importantly, abortion-drugs, sterilizations, and contraceptives are a necessary feature of the policy purchased by the religious institution or believing individual. They will only be made available to those who are insured under such policy, by virtue of the terms of the policy.

It is morally obtuse for the administration to suggest (as it does) that this is a meaningful accommodation of religious liberty because the insurance company will be the one to inform the employee that she is entitled to the embryo-destroying “five day after pill” pursuant to the insurance contract purchased by the religious employer. It does not matter who explains the terms of the policy purchased by the religiously affiliated or observant employer. What matters is what services the policy covers.

The simple fact is that the Obama administration is compelling religious people and institutions who are employers to purchase a health insurance contract that provides abortion-inducing drugs, contraception, and sterilization. This is a grave violation of religious freedom and cannot stand.

It is an insult to the intelligence of Catholics, Protestants, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Jews, Muslims, and other people of faith and conscience to imagine that they will accept as assault on their religious liberty if only it is covered up by a cheap accounting trick.

Finally, it bears noting that by sustaining the original narrow exemptions for churches, auxiliaries, and religious orders, the administration has effectively admitted that the new policy (like the old one) amounts to a grave infringement on religious liberty. The administration still fails to understand that institutions that employ and serve others of different or no faith are still engaged in a religious mission and, as such, enjoy the protections of the First Amendment.

Signed:

John Garvey

President, The Catholic University of America

 

Mary Ann Glendon

Learned Hand Professor of Law, Harvard University

 

Robert P. George

McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, Princeton University

 

O. Carter Snead

Professor of Law, University of Notre Dame

 

Yuval Levin

Hertog Fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center

 

Fr. Jonathan Morris

Ethics and Religion Analyst, Fox News

Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral, NYC

 

Jean Bethke Elshtain

Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics in the Divinity School, Department of Political Science and the Committee on International Relations, The University of Chicago

 

Tom Farr

Director of Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs,

Georgetown University

 

Richard W. Garnett

Associate Dean and Professor of Law, University of Notre Dame

 

Patrick MacKinley Brennan

John F. Scarpa Chair in Catholic Legal Studies and Professor of Law, Villanova University

 

Gerard V. Bradley

Professor of Law, University of Notre Dame

 

Paolo Carozza

Professor of Law and Director, Center for Civil and Human Rights, University of Notre Dame

 

George Weigel

Distinguished Senior Fellow and William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies, Ethics and Public Policy Center

 

Gilbert Meilaender

Duesenberg Professor in Christian Ethics, Valparaiso University

 

President Timothy O’Donnell

Christendom College

 

Steven Smith

Class of 1975 Endowed Professor of Law, San Diego University

 

Stephen Smith

Professor of Law, University of Notre Dame

 

Michael Stokes Paulsen

Distinguished University Chair & Professor of Law The University of St. Thomas

 

Prof. Alan Mittleman

Professor of Modern Jewish Thought

The Jewish Theological Seminary

 

Micah J. Watson

Director, Center for Politics and Religion and Assistant Professor of Political Science, Union University

 

Helen Alvare

Associate Professor of Law, George Mason University

 

Michael Moreland,

Associate Professor of Law, Villanova University

 

Matthew J. Franck

Director, William E. and Carol G. Simon Center on Religion and the Constitution, the

Witherspoon Institute

 

Kristina Arriaga

Executive Director

The Becket Fund

 

Christopher Tollefsen

Professor of Philosophy, University of South Carolina

 

Rusty Reno

Editor, First Things

 

Austin Ruse

President, C-FAM

 

Ramesh Ponnuru

Senior Editor, National Review

 

Donna Bethell

Chairman of the Board at Christendom College

 

Fr. Terence Henry, TOR President of Franciscan University of Steubenville

Michael Hernon, Vice President of Advancement

 

Michael Stokes Paulsen

Distinguished University Chair & Professor of Law The University of St. Thomas

 

Prof. Alan Mittleman

Professor of Modern Jewish Thought

The Jewish Theological Seminary

 

Marianne Evans Mount, Ph.D.

President

Catholic Distance University

 

William Edmund Fahey, Ph.D.

President

The Thomas More College of Liberal Arts

 

Bernard F. O’Connor, OSFS, President

DeSales University

 

Thomas S. Kidd

Associate Professor of History

Baylor University

 

Jacqueline M. Nolan-Haley

Professor of Law

Fellow, Chartered Institute of Arbitrators

Director, ADR & Conflict Resolution Program

Fordham Law School

 

After reviewing the “accommodation” the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops blasted the plan.  The bishops stated: “We think there needs to be a legislative fix to protect our religious liberties,” Bishop William Lori, a member of the Conference, told Fox News on Saturday. “I think that our First Amendment religious rights are far too precious to be entrusted to regulatory rules.”   The bishops have made it clear that they want the mandate to be rescinded.

Continued….

“And in the case where the employee and insurer agree to add the objectionable coverage, that coverage is still provided as a part of the objecting employer’s plan, financed in the same way as the rest of the coverage offered by the objecting employer. This, too, raises serious moral concerns,” the statement said.

Here is the bishops complete statement: 

The Catholic bishops have long supported access to life-affirming healthcare for all, and the conscience rights of everyone involved in the complex process of providing that healthcare. That is why we raised two serious objections to the “preventive services” regulation issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in August 2011.

First, we objected to the rule forcing private health plans—nationwide, by the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen—to cover sterilization and contraception, including drugs that may cause abortion. All the other mandated “preventive services” prevent disease, and pregnancy is not a disease. Moreover, forcing plans to cover abortifacients violates existing federal conscience laws. Therefore, we called for the rescission of the mandate altogether.

Second, we explained that the mandate would impose a burden of unprecedented reach and severity on the consciences of those who consider such “services” immoral: insurers forced to write policies including this coverage; employers and schools forced to sponsor and subsidize the coverage; and individual employees and students forced to pay premiums for the coverage. We therefore urged HHS, if it insisted on keeping the mandate, to provide a conscience exemption for all of these stakeholders—not just the extremely small subset of “religious employers” that HHS proposed to exempt initially.

Today, the President has done two things.

First, he has decided to retain HHS’s nationwide mandate of insurance coverage of sterilization and contraception, including some abortifacients. This is both unsupported in the law and remains a grave moral concern. We cannot fail to reiterate this, even as so many would focus exclusively on the question of religious liberty.

Second, the President has announced some changes in how that mandate will be administered, which is still unclear in its details. As far as we can tell at this point, the change appears to have the following basic contours:

• It would still mandate that all insurers must include coverage for the objectionable services in all the policies they would write. At this point, it would appear that self-insuring religious employers, and religious insurance companies, are not exempt from this mandate.
• It would allow non-profit, religious employers to declare that they do not offer such coverage. But the employee and insurer may separately agree to add that coverage. The employee would not have to pay any additional amount to obtain this coverage, and the coverage would be provided as a part of the employer’s policy, not as a separate rider.
• Finally, we are told that the one-year extension on the effective date (from August 1, 2012 to August 1, 2013) is available to any non-profit religious employer who desires it, without any government application or approval process.

These changes require careful moral analysis, and moreover, appear subject to some measure of change. But we note at the outset that the lack of clear protection for key stakeholders—for self-insured religious employers; for religious and secular for-profit employers; for secular non-profit employers; for religious insurers; and for individuals—is unacceptable and must be corrected. And in the case where the employee and insurer agree to add the objectionable coverage, that coverage is still provided as a part of the objecting employer’s plan, financed in the same way as the rest of the coverage offered by the objecting employer. This, too, raises serious moral concerns.

We just received information about this proposal for the first time this morning; we were not consulted in advance. Some information we have is in writing and some is oral. We will, of course, continue to press for the greatest conscience protection we can secure from the Executive Branch. But stepping away from the particulars, we note that today’s proposal continues to involve needless government intrusion in the internal governance of religious institutions, and to threaten government coercion of religious people and groups to violate their most deeply held convictions. In a nation dedicated to religious liberty as its first and founding principle, we should not be limited to negotiating within these parameters. The only complete solution to this religious liberty problem is for HHS to rescind the mandate of these objectionable services.

We will therefore continue—with no less vigor, no less sense of urgency—our efforts to correct this problem through the other two branches of government. For example, we renew our call on Congress to pass, and the Administration to sign, the Respect for Rights of Conscience Act. And we renew our call to the Catholic faithful, and to all our fellow Americans, to join together in this effort to protect religious liberty and freedom of conscience for all.

 

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