The editorial in Saturday’s NJ does a couple of dumb and dangerous things in siding with the religious leaders who have been howling about the Obama Administration’s ACA rule that religious institutions need to provide contraceptive coverage to their female employees as part of a preventative care package. This isn’t the first time that the NJ editorial has been quick to join the war on women’s health care. And as usual, the NJ editorial staff doing the writing of this thing never bothered to inform themselves of the facts of this business and pretty much just repeat what they see on cable TV.
What is really dumb about this editorial is that it picks up the media narrative that the Obama Administration somehow “stumbled” in making women’s contraceptive coverage mandatory for religious institutions. And be clear that we are talking about the colleges, the universities, the hospitals and other organizations that work in our communities, and most likely with a river of Federal dollars. Churches that employ mostly people who follow that religion were exempt. Got that? The other thing that has been tough to hear in the reporting on this is that religious institutional have been living with similar rules in the 28 states where the same contraceptive coverage is mandatory. And in other instances, they’ve been living with Title VII requirements against sex discrimination that means that if you provide coverage of prescription drugs and preventative care, you can’t exclude birth control. Here’s the roundup of this situation from the Guttmacher Institute. (pdf) Even better, Think Progress rounds up some of the major Catholic institutions that do provide contraceptive coverage — coverage that they could get around by self-insuring or eliminating their prescription drug coverage — but who have found reasons to abandon their “religious liberty” to comply with local law. NPR finally got around to a good story on this Friday AM.
It isn’t a “stumble” to do what the majority of states already do. More importantly, it isn’t a “stumble” to craft policy that fairly and clearly benefits the health of women. And it has been telling that male pundits all over have been pushing this narrative — even the normally astute E. J. Dionne. President Obama and his staff crafted a policy that lets female employees of any institution make their contraceptive choices in accordance with their own needs and their own faith.
Making sure that the freedom of female citizens of this republic is preserved — and that those same citizens are free to accommodate their faith needs in that decision — is crucial and right (and certainly not a “stumble”). Asking those same citizens to subordinate those decisions to those of people who have no business invoking politics to enforce their “religious conscience” on anyone — this isn’t Iran yet, you know — would have been the real crime here. So let’s take a good look at this bit of tone-deafness from the NJ:
Access to birth control is a positive health benefit and therefore a public good. However, so is freedom of conscience. Our polarized society seems more willing today to disregard other people’s principles. Good political leadership would navigate those polls and extend the benefits as far as possible.
See what is wrong with this? The NJ would have you believe that there is some competition between a church’s conscience and the freedom of women to manage their own lives. Any church will work to ensure that the people who adhere to that religion live their lives within its precepts. But they don’t get to do that to the rest of us. Making sure that the coverage is available does not make practicing Catholics suddenly start taking contraceptives. It leaves the choice of living with Church teaching to its women, and respects the religious and conscience choices of the women who are not practicing Catholics. The needle is nicely threaded here — it puts the business of conscience exactly where it belongs, with women, and it leaves the business of church doctrine exactly where it belongs — between a priest and his congregants.
So the question really is — do you side with the churches and GOP who think they should be in charge or determining the contours of women’s health care, or do you side with those who think that women should decide the contours of their own health care?
No church should be asking the government to be their enforcer. Any church that is claiming “religious conscience” to invoke brute enforcement of its teachings by a government who should not be doing this is a church that has been losing the battle of the teaching for some time. (And is evidenced by the fact that the Catholic Church is already complying with these contraceptive rules in many places.) Church leaders are playing politics here — and playing politics with the lives of women. They are betting (as does the NJ editorial crew) that this is a society that won’t notice that they are trying to subordinate the liberty of women to their own narrow views of the world. It is the business of government to ensure that Liberty for All includes its women — and the Obama Administration’s rule that contraceptives be covered by all except for a narrow group — does that.