Letters to the Editor
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cry me a river
Oh BOO-effin'-HOO...it's bad enough some tax-exempt organizations are also exempt from actual LAWS pertaining to pretty much every other insured female employee in NY State.
The Catholic Church is notorious for their wretched employment policies...Catholic Charities ought not to get their collective priestly robes in a bunch.
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Deluded.
Okay, we all still know the occasional Catholic family with six kids. But the key word here is 'occasional', and honestly the larger families I know are more often conservative Protestants than Catholics. I grew up in a very Catholic town, and my Catholic peers all had one, maybe two siblings. I dated a Catholic guy with one younger sister.
Does the church honestly think that the Catholic populace really isn't using birth control? Do they think that the married couples in the church have just decided that they don't really like having sex after all? I'll grant that it's probably true in some cases, but across the board like this, it's just hard to believe.
When even your own followers have stopped listening to that doctrine, using it as an excuse not to cover prescriptions for your employees is a little silly. It's not going to stop anybody from using contraception, it's just going to make medical care unfairly more expensive for the women who use birth control (which is to say, almost all of them).
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The real issue
I think this is missing the point. Sure, the catholic charities are obnoxious in not providing birth control coverage to their employees. But really, should the STATE have the power to compel a private religious organization to violate the tenets of its own faith? Isn't that clearly a violation of the separation of Church and State?????
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You have a point cinge
But I think the way it works is that you can be as religious as you want as long as it causes no harm. Such as if you have a religious tenent that says you can beat your children to get them to obey, but the state has child protection laws, your right to beat your kid in service to tradional religious practice is trumped. If you want to sacrafice an animal, you have to follow public health rules. I think it is the same case with birth control, denying it causes harm so your doctrine will be overridden when you are using secular businesses. If the religious want to be free from all things secular, well they can live like the Amish. I think it's also the same principle with how the Federal laws will trump a State law whenever there is a disagreement, such as CA passing a medical marijuana law and the Federal government saying, nope, no you can't, pot is illegal!!!!!! Here have a beer!
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The legislature can't single out religious organizations
But that's not what the legislature did. It mandated the coverage of contraception by insurers and health plans within the dominion of the state. Catholic Charities could exempt itself completely from this mandate by self-insuring as an employee benefit plan subject to ERISA, but that would require it to give up its exemption under that law for church plans, which allows it, among other things, to ignore all kinds of protections that have nothing to do with church related issues. What CC is asking for is an exemption from a law that applies neutrally to insurers and health plans, and indeed, there is an exemption in the law for certain religious employers but CC doesn't qualify for that exemption because, among other reasons, its mission and employees go beyond the Catholic Church. The state tried to balance the interests and by all accounts, it came up with a fair and neutral test that CC flunked on the merits.
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Religious exemption
In theory we can discuss whether a religious organization is subject to laws such as the NYS law noted here.
In reality, Catholic Charities holds several contracts with New York City and New York State, to provide social services. In as much as they are a government contractor, they **really** shouldn't be exempt from these laws.
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Catholic Charities can just hire Catholics
I'm sure that most employees of CC are Catholics. If CC just hired Catholics this would be a moot point for them because no Catholic women use birth control ... right?
This is an issue for CC because the Catholic church cannot even compel their own "faithful" to follow their absurd interpretation of modern biology and medicine. So now they want the state to help them enforce their tenets on not only these unfaithful faithful, but anyone who just happens to work for them as well.
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because no Catholic women use birth control ... right?
That's a highly doubtful proposition.
Even if--IF--no Catholic women were using contraceptives for the purpose of contraception...we all know by now that all kinds of women get prescribed "birth control" for all kinds of things, like acne, PMS symptoms, and regularity problems. I wonder if it was argued in any aspect of the case whether the employer buying the health plan has any right to dictate that a drug may be used by an employee for one purpose but not another.
And what about other drugs that may cause birth defects and therefore require a patient to use birth control? To be consistent, wouldn't CC have to argue that it would be in violation of its philosophy to cover those drugs, too?
I'd hate to see an employer health plan simply not cover prescription drugs to get out of covering birth control, but I think the state made the right decision that if one covers drugs, one has to do so even-handedly and can't then cherrypick which treatments are morally acceptable or not.
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The Catholic Church vs Reality
Before I start this particular screed, let me note that I am and have always been Catholic.
There's two things going on here. The first is that the Catholic Church stands by its prohibition on artificial birth control and 80% of American Catholics completely ignore it except to feel a tiny bit guilty once in a while. EIGHTY percent. Refusing to provide birth control because Catholics don't believe in it is laughable. Obviously Catholics both believe in it and use it, it's the hierarchy that doesn't. Why? Well, because they're men for starters.
However, Catholic thought is that no matter how many people ignore a rule, it doesn't change because the rule is objectively "right" and as such, can never change--even though it wasn't much of an issue until the 60's and remained a non-issue until the 80's. When it did change--got that? That and the fact that the Catholic Church is a dictatorship (or an oligarchy) not a democracy.
The other thing here is a greater problem, one that plagues our whole society at this point. It's the nutcase 20% of religious people thinking that they and only they get to make the rules for the rest of us (the non-nutcase 70% religious people and 10% atheists) and then they either should get to legislate their rules (Our rules should never be legislated, they are **wrong**) or they should be exempt from the rules that would otherwise govern them.
Catholic Charities provides non-religious social services. They employ Catholics, non-Catholics, lapsed Catholics and every other kind of qualified people--most of whom don't give a shit if the Catholic Church believes in using birth control or not. They want and deserve coverage under the law.
Hip Hip Huraah for the State of NY, but bet you this does not survive SCotUS on appeal.