There is a culture war in America today, and it mostly involves the cultural Left using the brute force of government to make it illegal — or at least very difficult — for religious conservatives to conduct their own affairs according to their conscience.
The latest instance is the Obama administration’s decision to impose its free-contraceptives-for-all mandate even on Catholic schools, charities, and hospitals.
Obama’s mandate itself is an undue intrusion into liberty. Employers should be broadly free to set their own terms of employment, and anyone willing to provide you health insurance should be willing to set limits on what they will insure for you. Any time you start talking about a religious exemption, that’s a pretty good indicator that government is micromanaging people’s lives.
The mandate has nothing to do with federal funds. You are subjected to the law for the crime of providing health insurance to your employees (and, of course, you are forced to provide health insurance to people for the crime of employing too many of them). The Obama admnistration tailored the “religious exemption” so narrowly that it basically only applies to priests and nuns. If a Catholic school has non-Catholic students (and DC Catholic schools teach mostly non-Catholic students) it is not protected from this law. And Catholic hospitals? Forget about it.
Contraception harms marriage and the family, and it subverts the nature of sex, the Church teaches. I understand this isn’t a popular belief this days, even among Catholics, but it is a belief many of us still hold. Obama has decided to force folks who oppose contraception to pay for contraception.
Michael Brendan Dougherty at the Business Insider puts it this way:
Liberals represent the issue as a matter of “equality” and “the right to health-care.” But the following three statements more accurately represent this ruling by the Obama administration:
- It is now illegal to offer any employees health insurance if you do not also insure 100% of the cost of their birth control, including sterilization and abortifacient morning-after pills.
- It is now illegal to employ 50 or more employees unless you pay for 100% of their birth control, incluing sterilization and abortifacients.
- It is now illegal for a religious group that doesn’t cover 100% of all birth-control costs to aid someone who doesn’t share their religious belifs.
So yes, somebody is imposing their morality on somebody.
