Religious Businesses Will Have To Provide Birth Control

Religious Freedom  rapidly is going the way of the buggy whip. The Obama Administration has passed an edict that businesses who employ anyone must provide contraceptives even though the owners are against the practice.  Where are their rights to follow their own personal religious beliefs?

The answer is that this Administration has no interest in your personal beliefs. You see, they know better than you. They know that religion is not an important fact in your lives since it is not in theirs. Hey, religion is just old stuff that was written down by old people dead thousands of years ago. It has no importance in today's world unless it is Islam and those words are sacred.

We wrote a blog a couple months ago about the Catholic Church and its support of ObamaCrapCare while it was in Congress. Later when the Obama Administration turned on the Church by mandating that Catholic universities, schools and hospitals provide abortions and contraceptives, it was not so supportive, in fact, it sued the Administration.  All religious organizations must understand that it cannot get along with Obama and his henchmen.

Now all businesses will be made to provide contraceptives and abortions regardless of the owner's religion. That seems wrong to us. What about you?

Conservative Tom

U.S. Refuses to Expand Birth Control Religious Exemption

inShare

JULY 1, 2013

By Bloomberg News Service

An exemption allowing religious groups to avoid covering the cost of birth control as required by the U.S. Affordable Care Act won’t be expanded, the Obama administration said.

Churches and religious groups don’t have to comply with a provision of the law requiring that most employer health plans cover the cost of contraceptives. Universities, hospitals and other nonprofits associated with faith groups also are exempt from paying for the coverage. The administration, in its final regulation issued yesterday, rejected a request by some businesses for a similar accommodation.

Companies including Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. have challenged the government over the provision of the 2010 U.S. health law requiring employers and insurers to provide preventive health services without charge to their workers, a category the administration said includes birth control. The final rule largely adheres to a proposal made in February that was designed to dispel concerns of companies and organizations that objected on religious grounds.

The decision “reinforces our commitment to respect the concerns of houses of worship and other nonprofit religious organizations that object to contraceptive coverage, while helping to ensure that women get the care they need, regardless of where they work,” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement.

The rule was issued by HHS, the Labor Department and the Internal Revenue Service.

Lawsuits Filed

The administration has been sued 65 times over the birth control requirement, including 33 cases filed by for-profit companies, according to the National Women’s Law Center, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C., that supports insurance coverage for contraception. Twenty companies have been granted an injunction or other temporary relief from the requirement while the cases wind their way through court, according to the NWLC.

A federal appeals court in Denver ruled June 27 that Hobby Lobby and another company, Mardel Inc., were likely to succeed at challenging the requirement by arguing that it violates their religious freedom. The ruling granted the companies an injunction against having to cover birth control, reversing a lower court’s decision.

Hobby Lobby’s owner, David Green, has said he doesn’t object to providing preventive birth control. He refuses to cover two emergency birth-control pills, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. (TEVA)’s Plan B One-Step and Actavis Inc. (ACT)’s Ella, which are taken after sex, because he believes they cause abortions.

Legal Situation

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a nonprofit in Washington representing Hobby Lobby and eight other groups suing the government over the birth control issue, said the final rule doesn’t change the legal landscape.

“There’s a fundamental conflict that’s really just going to get resolved in court,” Eric Rassbach, deputy general counsel at the Becket Fund, said in a conference call with reporters.

Under the rule, workers at Catholic universities and hospitals, or similar institutions associated with other faiths, will get birth control coverage with minimal involvement in the process by their employers.

A nonprofit associated with a religious group that doesn’t want to pay for the coverage must inform its insurer or the company that administers its health plan, if it is self-insured, the government said. The insurer then pays for the services without using any money received from the nonprofit.

Insufficient Protection

That process doesn’t sufficiently protect religious nonprofits from having to provide access to morning-after pills like Plan B and Ella, Rassbach said. Four of the fund’s clients are colleges and universities with religious affiliations that are suing the government over the requirement.

“They’re being asked to be the gatekeepers to these services,” Rassbach said.

The government said it doesn’t know of any self-insuring nonprofits that don’t employ a separate company, called a third-party administrator, to handle their benefits. If there are nonprofits without such an administrator, the rule provides a “safe harbor” from enforcement of the birth control requirement, meaning they wouldn’t have to comply with it.

The rule is unlikely to add costs for insurers who have to pay for the services, said Chiquita Brooks-Lasure, deputy director of policy and regulation at the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight at HHS, which is implementing much of the Affordable Care Act.

“We do strongly believe that the cost of contraceptive services will be absolutely cost-neutral and offset by improvements to women’s health as well as reduced pregnancies,” she said at a briefing with reporters.

Third-party administrators, which won’t financially benefit from reduced births, will be reimbursed for the coverage by the government. The administration offered no estimate of what those reimbursements would cost.

To contact the reporter on this story: Alex Wayne in Washington at awayne3@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Reg Gale at rgale5@bloomberg.net

Americans Are Reasonable When It Comes To Contraceptive Mandate

A majority of Americans in the most recent poll, say that individual employers should have the right to decide if they want to provide contraceptives. This is a rational decision by citizens who realize that Obama is on the wrong track.


Read the rest of the story at http://cnsnews.com/news/article/nyt-poll-majority-americans-say-employers-should-be-able-opt-out-contraception-mandate


Conservative Tom

The ObamaCare Mandate Fight Is Far From Over

Religious Freedom is being challenged by none other than the Obama Administration through its mandate for abortions and contraceptives in the ObamaCare law.  This is not a skirmish, it is a full frontal attack on religions and religious people who do not believe in forcing their institutions, hospitals and organizations to provide procedures and drugs that are against their moral teachings. 


Not only is the Obama "compromise" not being included in the administrative rules, the White House in discussions with Catholic Bishops lectured them to "get with it" by listening to  more accommodating voices. In other words, do what we want you to do or there will be hell to pay. This is scary talk!


It appears as if the Administration intends to fully implement the regulations regardless of opposition. Imposing these requirements on Catholic and other religious organizations who oppose the rules, it a blatant anti-democratic move. It must be stopped.


We have a Constitution and it guarantees that we have religious freedom. Why cannot this Administration understand this?  Wasn't the President a lecturer on the Constitution?  He must not have read or understood it!  


All religious and non-religious people must band together to make sure that this mandate is struck down.  If not, all of our freedoms will hang in the balance!


Conservative Tom

CARDINAL DOLAN: OBAMA ADMIN LECTURED BISHOPS TO LISTEN TO ‘ENLIGHTENED’ VOICES IN PRIVATE MTG.

• Posted on March 7, 2012 at 7:31am by  Billy Hallowell
• »

Over the past week, the media firestormsurrounding Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke and Rush Limbaugh has eclipsed the larger issue of religious liberty that stands at the forefront of the contraception mandate.

With the distracting debate raging, Fluke has received the majority of the media attention surrounding the subject. New developments in the faith world, unfortunately, have gone unnoticed. Of particular note is a public letter that was penned on March 2 by Cardinal Timothy Dolan (also president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops).

The letter recaps a bizarre conversation U.S. Conference staff recently had with White House officials regarding the mandate. In fact, Dolan seems to allege that government officials lectured Catholic leaders about church teaching, writing:

At a recent meeting between staff of the bishops’ conference and the White House staff, our staff members asked directly whether the broader concerns of religious freedom—that is, revisiting the straight-jacketing mandates, or broadening the maligned exemption—are all off the table. They were informed that they are.  So much for “working out the wrinkles.”  Instead, they advised the bishops’ conference that we should listen to the “enlightened” voices of accommodation, such as the recent, hardly surprising yet terribly unfortunate editorial in America.  The White House seems to think we bishops simply do not know or understand Catholic teaching and so, taking a cue from its own definition of religious freedom, now has nominated its own handpicked official Catholic teachers.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops

Dolan went on to explain that this situation is “hardly partisan” and that church officials will continue to meet with Republicans and Democrats, alike, to address the issue of religious freedom.

“But as we do so, we cannot rely on off the record promises of fixes without deadlines and without assurances of proposals that will concretely address the concerns in a manner that does not conflict with our principles and teaching,” he continued.

In the letter, the archbishop of New York went on to say that opponents have changed the debate to focus on women’s rights rather than religious freedom. “We will not let this deception stand,” he proclaimed. Dolan mentions both Congress and the courts as possible avenues to both protect and restore religious freedom. Despite this “light” that could be at the end of the proverbial tunnel, he warns that Catholics should “prepare for tough times.” He continues:

Brothers, we know so very well that religious freedom is our heritage, our legacy and our firm belief, both as loyal Catholics and Americans. There have been many threats to religious freedom over the decades and years, but these often came from without. This one sadly comes from within. As our ancestors did with previous threats, we will tirelessly defend the timeless and enduring truth of religious freedom.

Dolan concluded the letter by saying that he looks forward to opportunities in the near future to discuss the issue of religious freedom in more detail. You can read his letter in its entirety here

Catholic Organizations Might Disappear Under Obama Mandates

The predictions in the following article are not scare tactics, they are reality. Do we really want hospitals to go out of business? Will those hospitals which are in low income areas be able to be sold to profit making organizations or will they be forced to close their doors? Will these mandates improve or degrade care? These are all questions that should be concerning all Americans.


The Obama Mandate that all employers must provide abortions, contraceptives and morning after pills will have devastating results, many of which will be unintended.  Even the "compromise" that Obama did with himself will not solve the issue as many of these organizations self-insure therefore making the hospital still pay for the services it finds reprehensible.  When will "do-gooders" realize that ObamaCare is an abomination?


Our only hope is that the Supreme Court decides that the law is unconstitutional. Maybe then we can get some rational attempts to solving the actual problems with the health care system rather than throwing out the entire system and starting all over again.


Should the Cardinal be accurate, the system would be degraded severely as something like 20% of all hospitals are Catholic.  We cannot afford to lose that much capacity.


Conservative Tom

Cardinal George: Catholic Hospitals Will Be Gone in ‘Two Lents' Under Obamacare Regulation

By Thomas Cloud

February 28, 2012

Subscribe to Thomas Cloud's posts

    

Cardinal Francis George, Catholic archbishop of Chicago. (AP Photo)

(CNSNews.com)

– Unless the Obama administration’s mandate that all health insurers offer abortifacient drugs and sterilization is rescinded, Catholic hospitals and health care institutions in the United States will be gone in a couple years, said Cardinal Francis George, the archbishop of Chicago and former head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB).

Cardinal George made his prediction in his weekly column for Catholic New World, the newspaper for the Archdiocese of Chicago.

“If you haven’t already purchased the Archdiocesan Directory for 2012, I would suggest you get one as a souvenir,” wrote Cardinal George. “On page L-3, there is a complete list of Catholic hospitals and health care institutions in Cook and Lake counties. Each entry represents much sacrifice on the part of medical personnel, administrators and religious sponsors. Each name signifies the love of Christ to people of all classes and races and religions. Two Lents from now, unless something changes, that page will be blank.”

Under the Obamacare regulation, as finalized by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), all health insurance companies in the United States must offer sterilization, artificial birth control, and abortion-inducing drugs free of charge to whoever may request them. The rule is set to go into effect on Aug. 1 and strictly religious institutions will have one more year to fully comply with the regulation.

Regardless of one’s religious beliefs, all health insurers will have to offer these services and drugs. Individuals or businesses will not have to pay for them directly but the premiums they pay to the insurer, which keep the insurer in business, will indirectly subsidize abortifacient drugs, artificial birth control, and sterilization. These services are contrary to Catholic moral teaching (and the regulation has been denounced by leaders of several other religions and denominations).

Plan B, emergency contraceptive drug. (AP Photo)

As a result, the Catholic Church in the United States is being told that it must give up its health care operations, according to the cardinal. “Catholic hospitals, universities and social services have an institutional conscience, a conscience shaped by Catholic moral and social teaching,” said Cardinal George. “The HHS regulations now before our society will make it impossible for Catholic institutions to follow their conscience.”

He continued: “What will happen if the HHS regulations are not rescinded? A Catholic institution, so far as I can see right now, will have one of four choices: 1) secularize itself, breaking its connection to the church, her moral and social teachings and the oversight of its ministry by the local bishop. This is a form of theft. It means the church will not be permitted to have an institutional voice in public life. 2) Pay exorbitant annual fines to avoid paying for insurance policies that cover abortifacient drugs, artificial contraception and sterilization. This is not economically sustainable. 3) Sell the institution to a non-Catholic group or to a local government. 4) Close down.”

In his column, Cardinal George also argues that the Obamacare regulation would destroy religious liberty as understood and practiced for more than two centuries in the United States by essentially segregating faith to a church building and not allowing people to practice their faith outside their house of worship.

“Liberty of religion is more than freedom of worship,” says the cardinal. “Freedom of worship was guaranteed in the Constitution of the former Soviet Union. You could go to church, if you could find one. The church, however, could do nothing except conduct religious rites in places of worship -- no schools, religious publications, health care institutions, organized charity, ministry for justice and the works of mercy that flow naturally from a living faith. All of these were co-opted by the government. We fought a long cold war to defeat that vision of society.”

Catholics attending Mass. (AP Photo.)

If the Obamacare rule is not rescinded, says Cardinal George, people will not be allowed to hold true to their religious beliefs in all areas of their lives because the federal government would be forcing them (or their employer) to subsidize a product that is in violation of their religious faith – or they can pay a fine.

Under Obamacare, if an employer drops its health insurance plan, it will face financial penalties. An employer with at least 50 employees, for instance, would be fined $2,000 per employee every year for the total number of employees minus 30, resulting in penalties of thousands of dollars.

The Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN), for example, would face $620,000 in fines per year beginning in 2014, according to the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. The group says that Colorado Christian University, as another example, would face $500,000 in fines every year.

In conclusion to his column, Cardinal George wrote: “The observance of Lent reminds us that, in the end, we all stand before Christ and give an accounting of our lives. From that perspective, I ask lay Catholics and others of good will to step back and understand what is happening to our country as the church is despoiled of her institutions and as freedom of conscience and of religion become a memory from a happier past. The suffering being imposed on the church and on society now is not a voluntary penance. We should both work and pray to be delivered from it.”

Michael W. Chapman contributed to this report.

Who Is Next After The Catholics? Jews? Hindus? Sikhs? Protestants?

By David P. Goldman

Bio

Get Updates From David P. Goldman

This is a dangerous time, not only for Catholics, but more importantly for all religious people who have customs and traditions which might be different from those of the Obama Administration.  Should they ignore the current issue, it will be at their peril as this Administration will not stop with the Catholics.

The following is an article talks about  Jews but there should be similar concerns with all religious and non-religious communities who might be effected by future edicts from this Administration. Additionally, all religious people should consider the Catholic situation when voting this fall.

As always, your comments are encouraged.

Conservative Tom

Memo to Jews: After They Come for the Catholic Church, They Will Come For Us

February 19, 2012 - 7:54 am - by David P. Goldman

 

Today it is contraception and the morning-after pill. Tomorrow it will be kosher slaughter, or matrilineal descent, or circumcision, or other matters of existential importance to Jewish observance. If the Obama administration gets away with forcing Catholic institutions to step across lines of life and death in the name of “health,” the federal government will have a precedent to legislate Judaism out of existence — as several other countries have already tried to do.

Now the Obama administration has told Catholic institutions that they don’t have to dispense pills that kill babies. Instead, they can pay the insurance company, and the insurance company will dispense the pill for them. It is an accounting trick (as Paul Ryan called it) that the White House misrepresents as a compromise. The Catholic bishops, of course, reject it. And only one Jewish organization, the haredi organization Agudath Israel, offered a sharp response. Its Washington director Abba Cohen stated:

Whether or not the White House’s new “compromise” proposal adequately addresses the religious freedom concerns raised by the Catholic Church is for the Catholic Church to say, not us – and, frankly, not the White House, either. The important points here are that no religiously sponsored entity, and no religiously motivated individual, should be forced by government to violate its or his sincerely held religious principles; and that the determination of religious propriety must be left to the religious entity or individual, not to the government.

The Orthodox Union, according to press accounts, guardedly praised the “compromise,” saying: “The president’s stated commitment is a positive first step forward, the details of implementation are crucial and we look forward to working with the administration to see that through.” As a late-in-life returnee to Jewish observance, I habitually defer to  the Orthodox Union leadership in such matters. Having had the misfortune to have spent half my life among the atheists and religion-haters, though, I know how embittered and unrelenting are the supposed disciples of science. They are in fact  religious fanatics of the worst kind. You can’t make a deal with them. After they come for the Catholics, they will come for us. They already are coming for us all over the world.

It isn’t happening in the United States — not yet, except for a laughable referendum in San Francisco last year to prohibit circumcision. But it’s happening in England, where the country’s highest court has ruled that the religious definition of Jewish identity is racist. It’s happened in several European countries as well as New Zealand, which have banned or might ban kosher slaughter.

Contraception is not the issue. The issue is whether science has the right to decide the ultimate matters of life and death, or whether this is reserved to faith. We can argue the practical consequences all day and not get anywhere. It’s not as if contraception has ushered in a glorious era of human reproduction in which every child is planned and wanted. More than half of births to American women under 30 now occur outside of marriage, the New York Times reported Feb. 18, and overwhelmingly to working-class women who are economically unprepared for single motherhood. And 71% of total African-American and 53% of Hispanic births are out of wedlock as well. The cultural shift from the nuptial mystery of religion to the blandishments of recreational sex has left us with a catastrophic rate of illegitimacy and the prospect of a self-perpetuating underclass.

But that isn’t the issue. The fact that the liberals have left us with a social dystopia instead of a golden age is beside the point. The issue is: Who has the right to draw the lines where life and death are concerned? Morning-after pills may not seem too horrible to most of us. It’s not the same as sucking out the brains of a fully-developed fetus in a so-called “partial birth abortion,” or dismembering a 3-month-old fetus that responds to stimuli and can feel pain, is it? The Australian comic Jim Jeffries has made a career out of a routine that claims heaven must be boring; if you think of eternal bliss as a simple extension of ordinary time, you’d get used to it eventually. That sort of paradox of time has been in the literature since St. Augustine. But the paradox cuts both ways. If you don’t like sucking the brains out of a fully-developed fetus at eight months, how about 7 months? Or six months? Or five months? Three months? How about three months less one minute? Or less one second? Where do you draw the line? Nothing in our science can tell us where life begins. If you can overrule the Catholic assertion that life begins at conception on putative scientific grounds and require Catholic institutions to pay for morning-after pills, you have given “science” carte blanche to determine where life begins — and ends.

patrilineal descent. But Jewish law remains clear on this subject as it has for thousands of years.

England’s Supreme Court, though, ruled in 2009 that it was “racist” to determine Jewish status by maternal descent, as opposed to such criteria as belief, observance, and so forth. The ruling responded to a lawsuit by an intermarried couple who sought admission for their child at the Orthodox-led Jewish Free School. The application was rejected because the child was not Jewish by Orthodox criteria, but Britain’s highest court overruled the religious authorities. Britain’s chief rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks, declared, “An English court has declared [the religious definition of Jewish status] racist, and since this is an essential element of Jewish law, it is in effect declaring Judaism racist.”

Britain’s Catholic leaders supported Jewish leaders strongly and without qualification.  Oona Stannard, director of the Catholic Education Services of England and Wales, announced, “We support our Jewish colleagues and feel that it is important that the right to determine who is a member of any religion ought to lie with the religious.” The Church of England refused to comment (as an editor at First Things magazine at the time, I tried and failed to obtain a comment).

Think it can’t happen here? Wait. Some insidious liberal will devise a way to label Judaism “racist” through the courts. It is not much of a leap from “Zionism is racism” to “Judaism is racism.” If it can happen in America’s mother country, the cradle of Anglo-Saxon liberty, it can happen in America.

The same issues of life and death emerge in the matter of kosher slaughter, which is now banned in Norway, Iceland, Sweden, and Switzerland, and is under threat elsewhere. All of these require electric stunning before slaughter, which under Jewish law is effected by a single cut by a trained specialist that severs all the major arteries and causes near-instant loss of consciousness. But stunning renders the animal unfit for consumption under religious law. The Dutch have been debating a similar ban for the past year under pressure from animal rights activists, and a dubious compromise is now under discussion. The Dutch ban almost certainly would have passed, if not for the serendipitous publication of an Israeli scientific study showing that electric stunning of animals causes them pain. Well and good: but what if someone were to invent a method of stunning that made slaughter entirely painless? Would that constitute grounds to outlaw a method of slaughter that Jews have employed for more than three millennia?

Kosher slaughter is consistent with the Torah’s concern for the welfare of animals, including not only their physical well-being but also their feelings (one can’t muzzle an ox that is threshing grain, for example, or kill a calf in the presence of the mother cow). I wrote about that here in Asia Times during the Dutch debate. It may seem quaint, or even primitive, to enlightened secularists that we refuse to eat some animals (although one might ask why they do not eat dogs, cats, or chimpanzees, and by what criteria they draw the line). And it may seem strange that we require animals to be slaughtered through the severing of the major arteries. It happens to be the case that kashrut is consistent with the most stringent requirements for humane treatment of animals, but that is not the main point: Our consumption of meat is bound up with the mysteries of life and death, and observant Jews consume animal life for our own sustenance only with divine sanction, and under the supervision of religious authorities.

Kashrut thus bears on the divine origin of life and our recognition of its sanctity. If we do not recognize the absolute right of the Catholic Church to act in accordance with its doctrine regarding sanctity of life, to whom will we appeal when the campaign against kosher slaughter comes to America? Animal rights activists have been preparing the ground for this since 2004, when PETA circulated videos alleging abuses at one of the largest kosher meat processors.

Open the door to “scientific” determination of matters of life and death, and America’s Orthodox Jews — a minority within a minority — will be vulnerable to a new Inquisition. On this issue, there can be no compromise. Agudath Israel is right: Jews should stand by the right of the Catholic Church to determine what is acceptable by its standards, just as we one day will ask the Catholic Church to stand by our right to determine what is acceptable by our standards. To its credit, Britain’s Catholic Church stood by us in 2009 when the English courts shamefully and wrongly ruled that our most basic religious criteria were “racist.” Shamefully and wrongfully, some Jews have failed to stand by the Church under the Obama administration’s persecution. I appeal to these Jews: Don’t be naive. We’re next.