USA TODAY International Edition
Birth- control mandate combines bad policy with bad politics
Decision tramples religious freedom
Few Americans of any political stripe would disagree with the simple proposition that the government should steer away from meddling in church affairs. Certainly, it should never try to force a religiously affiliated institution to violate a central tenet of its faith.
Yet in drawing up the rules that will govern health care reform, the Obama administration didn’t just cross that line. It galloped over it, requiring employers affiliated with the Catholic Church to include free birth control in their health insurance plans. That’s contrary to both Catholic doctrine and constitutional guarantees of religious freedom.
In the two weeks since the rule was finalized, setting off a predictable backlash from Catholic bishops and others, the administration has mounted three lines of defense for its decision, all of which sidestep the central issue.
The first is that churches and other houses of worship are exempt, which at least shows the administration weighed the issue. But then it whiffed. The exemption does not cover Catholic organizations that employ or serve large numbers of people of different faiths — the very definition of many Catholic colleges, hospitals and charities. Those organizations and the people who lead them would be put in the impossibly awkward position of facilitating contraception even though the church teaches that it is “intrinsically wrong to use contraception to prevent new human beings from coming into existence.”
The administration’s second line of reasoning is medical. It argues that nearly all women use contraception at some point in their lives ( or want to), that it is expensive, and that the prestigious Institute of Medicine says birth control should be part of a comprehensive health care plan. We’re sympathetic to the medical reasoning, but good intentions are not sufficient grounds to override religious freedom. The government is free to promote contraception in other ways. In fact, it already does.
The third rationale is that 28 states already have contraception mandates. But 15 of those states have broader exemptions. Only three states have exemptions as narrow as the new federal rule, and some of the eight states with no exemptions still give Catholic- run institutions ways to get around the mandate.
In an election- year hothouse, the issue has quickly become caricatured as the Obama administration’s “war on Catholics” versus the Republicans’ “war on contraception.” It is neither. The administration tried to strike a balance and simply failed. The First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom deserves more weight than the administration allowed.
The administration’s best option now is to reopen discussion with those affected and widen the exemption in a suitable way. The number of people affected will be relatively small — far too small to justify yet another court fight over the Affordable Care Act — and having freely chosen their employer, they’d have a dubious case for grievance against institutions that choose not to offer contraception coverage. As Sister Mary Ann Walsh of the U. S Conference of Catholic Bishops put it, “When you go to a Jewish deli, you are not expecting pork chops.”
The rules don’t take effect until August 2013, so there’s plenty of time to work out a compromise, perhaps building on the approach in Hawaii, where women at exempted institutions can buy inexpensive contraception coverage outside their workplace. And wouldn’t that be a refreshing way to deal with the unavoidable conflicts required for overhauling the nation’s health care system?