The latest news is that the Obama administration has offered what it considers to be an acceptable solution to the objections (primarily by the Catholic Church) to its directive that religious institutions (other than individual houses of worship) provide free birth control and abortifacients to their employees. As best I can understand, the administration's claim is that the religious institutions will not have to pay for these things, after all; their insurance providers will have to provide them.
If you are scratching your head right now, so am I. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that if a religious institution's insurance provider will be required to provide access, free of charge, to birth control methods and so-called 'morning after' pills, then the cost of these items will be passed on to the employer. They are going to be paying for it, no matter how you slice it, and it will be interesting to read the defenses of this 'adjustment' that will no doubt be forthcoming.
What's also been interesting (but not surprising given the administration's apparent unpreparedness for the backlash) is its attempt, aided by the dependable lackeys in the media, to characterize the whole controversy as being about contraception, women's health and women's rights, when it is not. There seems to be almost a deliberate strategy to exploit the sloppy and emotional thinking that contributes to forming opinions these days, to obscure the central fact: this is about government's power to impose its will wherever it wants. By railing about how people opposed to the new policy are mounting "an outrageous assault" as Planned Parenthood put it, on women's health, denying them their 'rights,' and so forth, they expect that people will support this serious encroachment on the First Amendment simply because they support the availability of birth control. (The administration and its defenders are shamelessly politicizing the controversy by assailing 'Republicans' for their opposition, but not very successfully, given that many of their most outspoken Catholic critics are Democrats.)
I support the availability of birth control, should I need to make that clear. I used it for a while during my own marriage, and after we decided our family was complete, my ex-husband had a vasectomy, another procedure which is anathema to the Catholic Church. But I don't think my opinion about a matter is sufficient to determine the best policies government should follow, and I'm amazed at the number of people who apparently do. I am also dismayed that so many people's conception of what constitutes a 'right' has gotten so fuzzy. Our mothers used to caution us that life was not fair, but many people seem to believe it can be made so--indeed, that we have a 'right' that it should be so.
Is it 'fair' that women who work for a Catholic university or hospital have had to pay for their own birth control? Maybe not. But no one forced those women to accept employment there, as opposed to somewhere where the insurance provided it. If the answer to that is that those women needed a job and perhaps there were no other available jobs, well maybe that was true. But does that translate into them having a 'right' to employer-funded birth control? I guess if logic isn't your strong suit, maybe it does. But even if that were true, does their right to birth control trump the religious employer's right to follow the deeply held and long-standing tenets of the faith?
Don't get me wrong; I certainly understand the conviction that a woman's ability to plan her family shouldn't be a financial hardship or an impossibility for some women while it's available to others either through their insurance or because they have adequate means. But nothing is ever 'free.' Free means that the government provides or subsidizes it, which means taxpayers are paying, or in this case, if insurance companies provide it, 'free' means employers and/or people who pay premiums are covering it.
So the central question in this case is, does government have the power to force a religious institution to pay for something that violates a core, deeply held and longstanding pillar of its faith (and your opinion, or mine, on birth control, is not what counts here) or does the First Amendment protect them from that intrusion?
If it doesn't, then be prepared for future encroachments on religious liberty that you might not happen to agree with. But, by then, your opinion on the issue itself won't matter, if a precedent is set.
