Bala Cynwyd, PA — On August 1, 2011, the Secretary of HHS effectively mandated that abortifacients, contraceptives, and sterilization be offered and subsidized by all insurance plans and issuers, and proposed to exempt only a narrow set of “religious employers,” using a definition supplied by the ACLU and recognized in only 3 states. Today, the CMA submitted comments to HHS, criticizing this mandate and HHS’s draconian approach to respect for religious freedom.
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Prominent RCs Write To Sebelius on Conscience Protections
National Catholic Reporter
Distinctly Catholic
26 August, 2011
Reprinted by permission of National Catholic Reporter,
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At noon today, a group of prominent Catholics released a letter to Health & Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius recommending that she amend the proposed rule on mandated health care coverage to provide for more expansive conscience protections for religious organizations. The letter is signed by some of the same academics who penned a letter to Speaker of the House John Boehner in advance of his commencement address at Catholic University in May, calling on him to support policies that reflect Catholic social teaching. The main organizer of both letters is Professor Stephen Schneck, Director of CUA’s Institute for Policy Research & Catholic Studies.
In addition to academics such as Schneck, Georgetown’s Rev. Thomas Reese, S.J., Lisa Sowle Cahill of Boston College, Margaret Steinfels of Fordham and Duquesne University law professor Nicholas Cafardi, the letter is signed by former Congresswoman Kathy Dahlkemper, one of the pro-life Democrats unseated in last year’s midterm elections as well as Kristen Day, executive director of Democrats for Life, and Sr. Simone Campbell of the social justice group NETWORK. These are the kinds of Catholics that the Obama administration has reached out to in the past, especially during the battle over health care reform, and so the impact of their call for more expansive conscience protections is likely to be heard in the White House. Indeed, the full list reads like a “Who’s Who” of prominent Catholics whose politics tilt to the left.
The letter will be delivered to Secretary Sebelius formally and will be submitted under the guidelines governing public comment on the new rule, which was announced August 1 with a 60-day comment period. The full text of the letter follows.
Dear Secretary Sebelius,
We are an ad hoc group of Catholic leaders and professors, many of whom were associated with the letter addressing Speaker Boehner’s legislative commitment to the poor ahead of his commencement address at The Catholic University of America in May. We write to you, however, to advocate enlarging conscience protections in the mandated insurance programs of the Affordable Care Act.
The Institute of Medicine’s recent determination that insurance mandated by the Affordable Care Act must extend contraception coverage in all plans—to include even post-fertilization drugs and sterilization—raised conscience protection concerns for a number of religious organizations. In response to those concerns, Health and Human Services (HHS) has proposed interim final rules that do provide limited exemptions to religious organizations. However, those exemptions as currently proposed would not extend to many important religious organizations.
The current language limits conscience protection to organizations that 1) have the inculcation of religious values as their purpose; 2) primarily employ those that share their religious tenets; 3) primarily serve persons who share their religious tenets; and 4) are a non-profit organizations. This language is too restrictive.
Catholic charities and Catholic hospitals do not fit the rule’s definition of religious organization. Catholic schools, colleges, and universities also might not fit the current definition. In light of the First Amendment’s protection of religious practice and of the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s forbidding of discrimination for religious belief and insistence on accommodation of religion in the workplace, we propose expanding the definition of religious organization in the final rule to extend conscience protection to religious charities, religious hospitals, and religious schools in regards to mandated health insurance coverage.
Title 26 of the United States Code offers appropriate guidance for defining religious organizations. The HHS interim rule references Title 26 for such consideration. Accordingly, we propose defining a religious organization as one meeting the following criteria:
If it 1) is non-profit religious, educational, or charitable organization; 2) if it engages its religious, charitable, or educational activities for bona fide religious purposes or reasons; and if 3) it holds itself out to the public as a religious organization.
Courts have applied a similar set of criteria in various contexts and have found that organizations should be exempt as “religious” because their charitable or educational activities were deeply religiously motivated, even though those activities did not primarily involve explicit proselytizing or teaching of religion and were not limited to members of the faith community in question. See, e.g., Spencer v. World Vision, Inc., 633 F.3d 723 (9th Cir. 2011) (en banc) (“religious organization” exempt under Title VII; evangelical Protestant humanitarian relief agency); LeBoon v. Lancaster Jewish Community Center Assn., 503 F.2d 217 (3d Cir. 2007) (same Title VII exemption for Jewish-oriented community organization); University of Great Falls v. NLRB, 278 F.3d 1335 (D.C. Cir. 2002) (ecumenically oriented Catholic college protected from NLRB jurisdiction over faculty); Universidad Cent. de Bayamon v. NLRB, 793 F.2d 383 (1st Cir. 1985) (Breyer, J.) (Catholic college; NLRB jurisdiction over faculty). As the court stated in Great Falls, 278 F.3d at 1346, limiting “exemption to religious institutions with hard-nosed proselytizing, that limit their enrollment to members of their religion, . . . is an unnecessarily stunted view of the law, and perhaps even itself a violation of the most basic command of the Establishment Clause-not to prefer some religions (and thereby some approaches to indoctrinating religion) to others.”
Secretary Sebelius, the language of Title 26 more fully reflects the intentions of the First Amendment and the Civil Rights Act as they pertain to matters of religious conscience. In regard to the mandated insurance coverage of the Affordable Care Act, the language of Title 26 would extend conscience protections to religious organizations on the front lines of the Catholic Church’s ancient mission to the poor and the sick.
Equality legislation used to defend conscientious objection to abortion
(United Kingdom: 2011)
- John Smeaton* | The two nurses . . .were employed at a hospital for ordinary nursing duties. They were then allocated to work once a week at an abortion clinic in the hospital. The abortion process did not involve surgical abortion but the increasingly common process of “early medical abortion” . . .When they became aware that they were participating in abortion they told their management that they did not want to continue but were then told that they had no choice in the matter. . . Full Text
New birth control requirements are a loss for conscience
Desert News
9 August, 2011
Last week, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued new federal regulations that run roughshod over the moral conscience of many Americans.
Promulgated under the health care reform act commonly referred to as “Obamacare,” the new regulations would require an employer to have a health plan that covers sterilization and contraception — which could include drugs that cause abortion — as part of a larger set of “preventative services” for women. These practices are morally repugnant to many Americans — for some, because it directly contradicts their faith. For example, the doctrine of the Catholic Church, which includes roughly a quarter of Americans, explicitly prohibits such practices.
HHS, apparently recognizing the regulations’ tension with religious belief, did include an exemption from the new regulations for a “religious employer.” But close examination reveals that the exemption may actually cover very few religious employers. So the rule may force out of existence those social service and educational organizations that are the core manifestations of the Catholic doctrine to serve the poor and needy among us. . . . [read more]
Obama Plays Catch 22 with Religious Groups
NEWS RELEASE
Catholic League president Bill Donohue addresses the dilemma that the Obama administration has created for religious employers:
Yesterday, the Obama administration mandated that all health insurance plans cover contraceptives and sterilization for women, though it made an exception for religious employers. But did it? Not really. To wit: a religious employer is defined, in part, as one that primarily employs, and serves, persons who share its religious tenets.
Cardinal Daniel DiNardo said this means that “our institutions would be free to act in accord with Catholic teaching on life and procreation only if they were to stop hiring and serving non-Catholics.” He’s right: Catholic schools, hospitals and social service agencies have a long and distinguished record of serving everyone, regardless of religious affiliation; most even employ non-Catholics. However, there are matters, like foster care programs, where same-religion requisites make sense.
The situation is even more pernicious than it looks. Consider that three years ago, then presidential candidate Barack Obama said he opposes allowing faith-based programs to hire only their own people. Since becoming president, he has authorized his administration to consider this issue on a case-by-case basis, and just recently many of his allies lobbied him to gut the religious liberty provision in hiring altogether.
In other words, the Obama administration is playing Catch-22 with religious employers. If they are too religious, Catholic social service agencies risk losing federal funds, but if Catholic hospitals are not sufficiently religious, they cannot be exempt from carrying health insurance policies that transgress their religious tenets.
The Obama administration knows exactly what it is doing, and what it is doing is burning religious institutions at both ends. This is a pretty sick game. But it is one where there is plenty of time left on the clock.