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So Religion's for Fools, eh? Fools and Liberals! [Separation of Church and State Thread]
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And it was boring. A better way to make atheists I couldn't imagine! One dreary hymn each day from a selection of six that never changed. I can't even remember the contents of the prayers, but they must have been snoozeworthy.
Maybe Americans should put the prayers back in schools and leave the religion out of politics!
This is a pretty big failure of basic understanding, spool.
No, it is not discriminatory to remove one insurance coverage item from every employee. There is no test whereby one religious faith gets one kind of treatment, and another faith gets another kind.
No, the Church is not trampling on religious rights of others - they are not preventing anyone from using contraception, nor are they discriminating against anyone who does so. They are simply not paying for it.
How? I mean, you edited out my explanation, and then didn't provide one of your own. Can you elaborate?
If you want to run a church in this country, you have to meet certain requirements in order to maintain your 501(c)(3) status; if you want to run a hospital in this country, there are different requirements. Same goes for schools. Hospitals, schools, and churches are all subject to different regulations, because they're different institutions. Church-owned hospitals are still hospitals, still have to have licensed medical care professionals on staff, and are still subject to the same labor laws as any other hospital. If the Church feels that following said labor laws violates their religion so much, then they need to get the fuck out of the hospital business. Are we going to stop requiring doctors to know biology because the Christian Scientists have decided they want to open up a hospital?
We're not placing any limits on their religious practices; we're placing limits on their employment practices and their medical practices. And if they want to avoid those, they just need to stick to being a Church, and stop trying to be a hospital or a school. Honestly, I have difficulty imagining much that could be better for the long-term health of this country than the Catholics closing down their hospitals.
Most people get their medical care through their insurance. Where is this plethora of charities handing out free contraception employed people you seem to think exists conveniently located everywhere from San Francisco to Peoria? Can you provide names and locations? Any sort of studies?
Bull fucking shit they shouldn't. A janitor is not a religious position in the Catholic church. I don't care how badly they don't want to be responsible and provide health care for their employees.
Which reminds me. How is this different from requiring vaccines?
Um, "hard to do" is one of the standard reasons for contraceptive failure. For instance, using a condom wrong is a big cause of their failure rate.
Also, abstinence is not 100% reliable, due to rape.
Let's write laws for the universe we actually live in, instead of the universe that Republicans think/wish we lived in.
Well, other than regular ol' basic human awareness lacking here (which is a whole other issue I'm not going to address in this post), let's get these facts out of the way:
Care facilities are public institutions, even privately-owned ones, and are beholden to the same rules (like EMTALA) as publicly-owned or secular healthcare institutions. Meaning, no matter what, they can't refuse service to any potential client, nor can they require their staff to maintain certain religious practices or expressions, and that includes restricting their access to certain kinds of healthcare and medicine. Think what would happen if a Jehovah's Witness organization owned a hospital; can their staff not get blood transfusions now? "Sorry, sir, I know you just got fucking run over by a train, but you're at the wrong hospital for this kind of thing, and your insurance doesn't cover it anyway. It has a distinct 'no-bleeding' clause."
Then, think of the ramifications of what you're saying: if your logic holds, what's preventing every business in the US from suddenly becoming a religious institution to avoid insurance payouts? What if McDonalds decides that being sick is against their corporate religion? What if GM decides that having cancer is sacrilegious?
C'mon, McFly. Think.
Supposed functional equivalency is not relevant. I must have a car to get to work, but the government does not subsidize my travel. Am I being prevented by the government from travelling? No.
I refuse to sell you dinner insurance, Skyrim. Have I prevented you from eating? No. Even though eating costs you hundreds of dollars a year and you'll die without doing it, I still haven't prevented you from doing it. Contraceptives are, I think we can agree, less important to life than food.
Refusal to share the cost of something for a person is not the same as preventing a person from buying it. While the outcome in both cases may be that the person does not acquire the thing, there is no equivalency in the two actions themselves, and it is the actions we are discussing.
Much like with healthcare.
I understand you taking the time to address this though, since you are using this to dodge every other valid point people have made, because your arguments are full of holes and you've got no evidence to back you up, coupled with a very poor understanding of religious freedom within the jurisprudence of the U.S.A.
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I cannot see the win here.
http://troublethinking.wordpress.com (Updated Wed) http://twitter.com/#!/Durandal4532
Let's reframe a bit, and see if we can get back on track. Skyrim, you seem to have completely lost the plot with that last post. Take a couple of deep breaths and see if you can tamp down the righteous indignation.
Than, I'm not suggesting that we write the law such that abstinence is an acceptable contraceptive. I think you missed the point here entirely - the government needs to first show that forcing a religious institution to offer insurance for contraception furthers a compelling government interest. You and others argued that contraception has strong public health benefits, and irrespective of the intentional broadening with blanket terms like "women's health" and "reproductive health", it's a pretty solid argument. So, OK. There is a compelling interest, but! Arguing further that insurance needs to cover the cost is a higher bar to get over, and one that brings in all the financial discussions. Arguing still further that the method covered needs to be effective irrespective of the behavior of the user is a very much higher bar to clear. I don't think you want to set the bar that high. To move on, you'd be better served not discussing methods at all when determining if there's a compelling interest. It's enough of a challenge to argue that cheap contraception is a compelling government interest, and i don't think anyone has solidly made that case yet.
Secondly, they government needs to show that the action has a good reason beyond administrative convenience - in effect, if it's more difficult for the government to address the compelling interest by allowing the exception, then tough shit. It needs not to be easy, but to be necessary. I've offered a collection of reasons why it's not necessary, and so far none of them have been addressed except by demanding impossible proof (prove contraception is available everywhere!) and even then the main point, namely that the government should be taking its own steps to offer contraception if it feels such a compelling interest, hasn't been addressed at all. You guys need to show why the government cannot do it alone in order to justify forcing the Catholic Church to do it.
This neatly answers the vaccine question, because those vaccinations that need to happen pretty much immediately cannot be offered except by asking church hospitals to do them. Furthermore, they aren't mandatory! No one is forcing either the church or the parents to vaccinate.
Now, you guys can neatly avoid the entire challenge by showing that a hospital owned by a church is somehow different than, say, a cathedral owned by a church. I'm open to arguments for why this is true, but somebody needs to pull them together, purge them of goosery, and lay 'em out again for me if we're going to discuss this angle.
If this is the only level of discussion this thread can offer, I humbly suggest to the mods that we shut it down.
Which I'm doing right now.
You, I am sure, would be opposed to being forced to receive medical care from the Church of Christ Scientist.
http://troublethinking.wordpress.com (Updated Wed) http://twitter.com/#!/Durandal4532
I think this misses the point - the government is forcing them to provide contraceptive coverage as part of employee insurance. That they provide a service otherwise unavailable seems unrelated to me.
Let me be more clear: why should a hospital owned by a church be different than a cathedral owned by a church in terms of the services it offers its employees?
The difference is that the Cathedral is a "Place Of Worship" subject to all manner of treatment that is objectively different from a Hospital. No church is required to hire a non-believer because that would infringe upon their religious freedom, but Hospitals (and all other employers other than churches) are expressly forbidden from using a religious test for hiring because that would be religious discrimination in hiring which is illegal and should be. Doesn't matter if a church sends the other employer money or owns the other employer, they are still not a church and are subject to an entirely different employment standard than churches.
You really needed that explanation?
One is a place of worship, one is a hospital.
If they want to perform religious tests on their employees, they can stop running hospitals and stick to running cathedrals.
Also, it never ceases to amaze me how tone-deaf the Catholic leadership is. Yeah, batten down the hatches for contraception, you geese. Your laity are right there with you!
http://troublethinking.wordpress.com (Updated Wed) http://twitter.com/#!/Durandal4532
The employer is the Church in both cases, though. What you're saying is that the Catholic church can discriminate in the services it offers to its employee the cathedral groundskeeper, but not to its employee the hospital groundskeeper.
Apparently, this is shocking to him.
Real simple: All healthcare facilities, nationwide, are both completely open to the public, and completely barred from discriminating hiring practices based on religion, sex, race, or whatever else. This protection extends to insurance coverage.
Because there is nothing about running a hospital that requires the employees to follow the church's rules. As has been pointed out, if they can't run a hospital like every other entity ever, they can let someone else do it and spend their money on making prettier churches. Mind, the moment they do that there will probably be massive backlash and drop in attendance, also greater support of more secular charities, but I think I could live with that.
Also, check my edit to that post.
And you especially don't get the tax breaks from running said hospital.
Refusal to provide coverage for a specific prescription is now discrimination?
No one is talking about forcing either the church or the parents to use contraception, either, just mandating that--like vaccination--it be offered under the insurance plan. Your "collection of reasons why it's not necessary" has been (correct me if I'm wrong):
1) There are tons of charities giving away contraception like it was going out of style (for which you have offered no proof).
2) People can just stop having sex.
A hospital is providing a secular service, a church is providing a religious service. Churches are treated differently, in that they're allowed to discriminate on the basis of suspect classes (like, for instance, religion), and subject to much less stringent regulations than pretty much any other entity in the U.S. This is in order to comply with the demands of the first amendment.
Hospitals, however, are there to provide medical care. The moment we start saying "well, since this is owned by the church, you have religious freedom," what stops every corporation from just claiming that its holdings are "church-owned," and therefore not subject to employment laws and regulations?
Edit checked, and we seem to be talking a lot about discriminatory hiring, and conflating that with a blanket refusal to cover a specific medicine under employee insurance. I'm not seeing the dots connected here.
Edit: It's like saying that a business is being discriminatory because it isn't hiring anyone.
The Church may own the hospital, but it is a separate entity from the church. If the Church wants the hospital to be a church, then they can simply stop offering licensed medical care there, and bam! Church!
The better argument is that reproductive health is vital to women's health. This policy discriminates against women. Also, I'll give good odds that these same health plans already cover Viagra, because they usually do.
Which led to some hilarious trolling by one of the delegates in Virginia, who proposed some highly invasive procedures be required for men to get a prescription for that.