I just happened upon the post below in the comments thread below this online article on how the Catholic Church’s opposition to the White House’s requirement that health insurance plans cover contraception is basically a bunch of megalomaniacal hogwash.
Here’s what one savvy person had to say about this ridiculous brouhaha which is being trumped up to paint OUR President as being “out to destroy organized religion,” when in reality, he is merely “out to make sure the gajillions of people who want and need proper, safe birth control can get it during such tough economic times.”
Thus ensuring… Wait for it…
FEWER ABORTIONS.
The poster wisely writes (with my added emphasis):
“If the Catholic Church got into the pizza business and bought up all the pizza chains in the US thus establishing a pepperoni monopoly would free delivery in 30 minutes or less now be considered a form of ‘worship?’ Would the Catholic bishops therefore consider themselves victims of religious persecution if they had to pay for the birth control of their delivery boys and girls?
Apparently so.
But here is the issue: Once the Church leaves the sanctuary of the church and starts opening businesses alongside other secular institutions in the market like hospitals, schools or even pizza parlors it loses the ability to substitute its values for the values of the democracy by creating its own set of rules within those big pieces of our society the Church has carved out for itself with its money.
A hospital is not a church.
A school is not a church.
A pizza parlor is not a church.
And for government to regulate a Catholic pizza parlor in exactly the same way as a Jewish pizza parlor (Kosher of course) is not an attack on the religious freedoms we enjoy under the First Amendment.
Conservatives are trying to confound us with another of their easy to understand but misleading and simplistic syllogisms: Church says birth control wrong. Church employers told they must provide birth control coverage anyway like all employers. Ergo government is attacking religious liberty.
Simple but wrong because it ignores the fact that all of us wear many hats in life, and that when the Church steps outside the sanctuary of the church to run hospitals, schools and other businesses it is no long a Church engaged in “worship” but an employer running a business.
And these are businesses, we must remember, that get government assistance just like every other business, so the Church leadership wants to have it both ways.
Accommodating everyone’s beliefs as much as possible is part of the challenge of living in a complex society like ours and I am sure some arrangement can be found that gives women access to birth control while preventing the priesthood from feeling complicit in sin.
But one of the prices we pay for a democratic society like ours is that we forfeit the right to make non-negotiable demands like the one the Church is making here when it says the antiquated beliefs on birth control that only a celibate and cloistered priesthood subscribe to must – in the name of RELIGIOUS LIBERTY — take precedence over all other considerations including the health care needs and wants of 99% of women.”
Real talk.
