WASHINGTON (AP) – Millions of women stand to gain free access to a broad menu of birth control methods, thanks to a recommendation issued Tuesday by health experts advising the government.
An Institute of Medicine panel recommended that the government require health insurance companies to cover birth control for women as preventive care, without copayments. Contraception — along with such care as diabetes tests during pregnancy and screening for the virus that causes cervical cancer — was one of eight recommended preventive services for women.
"Unintended pregnancies carry health consequences for the mother — psychological, emotional and physical — and also consequences for the newborn," said Dr. Linda Rosenstock, panel chairwoman and dean of public health at the University of California, Los Angeles. "The overwhelming evidence was strongly supportive of the health benefit" of contraception.
A half century after the introduction of the birth control pill, the panel's recommendations may help to usher in another revolution. Medical experts say easier access could start a shift to more reliable forms of long-acting birth control, such as implants or IUDs, which are gaining acceptance in other economically developed countries. Emergency contraception, known as the morning-after pill, would also be covered.
All but one member of the 16-person IOM panel supported the final recommendations.
The New York Times calls the IOM the United States' "most esteemed and authoritative adviser on issues of health and medicine, and its reports can transform medical thinking around the world."[4]
And stop the "it costs 0 dollars" nonsense. Abstinence only shit is known to not work out in a large percent of cases.
My school in the UK had compulsory prayer every day at school. Probably you could get out of it if you weren't Christian but I never heard of anyone doing so.
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!
0
Options
AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
A Catholic-owned institution is a Catholic institution. If they aren't required to provide contraception insurance for their priests and bishops, they shouldn't be required to do so for their janitors and nurses.
This is a pretty big failure of basic understanding, spool.
I'm just going to repost this point from the SGK thread:
The whole point of changing the rules about health insurance is to end the discriminatory practice of religious organizations shitting on the religious freedoms of the people that work for them who don't share Catholics beliefs on contraception = critical sin failure. What Catholics fail to understand is that religious groups, particularly Catholic charitable organizations, are CURRENTLY trampling on the religious rights of others (their millions of non-Catholic employees) by refusing to cover birth control for religious justifications, and now the Feds are saying that if you are a large enough employer "you don't get to discriminate against people who don't share your religious beliefs in the workplace anymore".
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.
A Catholic-owned institution is a Catholic institution. If they aren't required to provide contraception insurance for their priests and bishops, they shouldn't be required to do so for their janitors and nurses.
This is a pretty big failure of basic understanding, spool.
How? I mean, you edited out my explanation, and then didn't provide one of your own. Can you elaborate?
1) We're not talking about banning contraception. The 'furtherance of a compelling interest' test requires that the government show the specific action must be done in service to a compelling interest, and the action in question here is not "provide contraception", it is "provide insurance coverage for contraception". The Catholic church is not threatening to discriminate in hiring, pay, or promotion against contraceptive users (stop being goosey, Than). They are simply refusing to offer insurance coverage for a specific service, one among dozens they also refuse to provide. Obesity is also a public health issue, but the church is not mandated to provide insurance coverage for Weight Watcher's!
No, but neither is anyone else mandated to provide insurance coverage for Weight Watcher's. Everyone else is, however, mandated to provide coverage for contraception. And the fact is that the Catholic Church doesn't have to provide anything to anyone; they have an exception to the rule. It's only non-church Catholic-owned institutions (like hospitals and schools) that have to provide contraception coverage. If the Catholics don't like it, then they should get the fuck out of the education and health care businesses.
A Catholic-owned institution is a Catholic institution. If they aren't required to provide contraception insurance for their priests and bishops, they shouldn't be required to do so for their janitors and nurses. I've worked for a Catholic hospital before - perhaps you don't understand the degree of involvement or institutional control they exert. This is not like an investment the Church has made, that they don't touch except when the time comes to reap the profits. At least for the Daughters of Charity organization, they're intimately involved with the operation of the hospital from the executive board right on down to the cafeteria and janitorial services. It's clearly a religious institution, through and through.
The government's job here is to demonstrate why the action is necessary in the furtherance of a compelling interest. It's not clear that contraceptive insurance is a compelling interest, and it's definitely not clear that this violation of the Free Exercise clause is necessary to its furtherance. "We do it for everybody else" Is an argument against its necessity, not for.
The argument that "well, if you don't like the constraints we've placed upon your Free Exercise of religion, you can just stop exercising it!" is definitely not a winning one.
A hospital is not a church, period, full stop. They're not incorporated the same way, structured the same way, and they don't serve the same goals and interests.
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.
2) The government is free to violate religious beliefs in its behavior, and in fact is often forced to do so or run afoul of the Establishment clause. The taxation angle is a giant red herring, and I think we can all discard it safe in the knowledge that it would derail the topic with ridiculous arguments. Conversely, the government is not free to demand that a religion behave in a certain way outside very limited restrictions. For example, the Catholic Church is also free to exclude women from the priesthood despite the fact that equal opportunity for employment is a compelling government interest. Contraceptives are not prohibitively expensive, and prevention of pregnancy can be had for $0.00 without insurance coverage. For those too poor to buy contraceptives, the government provides medical insurance. If the issue here is that contraceptives are not widely or easily available and the government feels it necessary to remedy the issue, it should act through its own programs, not by forcing a religious entity to do the work for it in violation if the religion's teachings.
Again, these are not restrictions on the Catholic Church; these are restrictions on Catholic hospitals, schools, etc.
2) This section of the argument follows the second part of test, namely that the government's compelling interest, assuming it can demonstrate one in 1) above, is not one of administrative convenience and can only be accomplished through the action taken. So far, most of my alternate avenues for addressing the assumed (but IMO not yet proved) government interest haven't been invalidated.
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?
I'm just going to repost this point from the SGK thread:
The whole point of changing the rules about health insurance is to end the discriminatory practice of religious organizations shitting on the religious freedoms of the people that work for them who don't share Catholics beliefs on contraception = critical sin failure. What Catholics fail to understand is that religious groups, particularly Catholic charitable organizations, are CURRENTLY trampling on the religious rights of others (their millions of non-Catholic employees) by refusing to cover birth control for religious justifications, and now the Feds are saying that if you are a large enough employer "you don't get to discriminate against people who don't share your religious beliefs in the workplace anymore".
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.
I'll just say that you're analysis is totally incorrect, because not paying for something is functionally equivalent to preventing access for many women in this case. Besides:
Strictly religious organizations — churches, missions and such — will be exempt, but not universities, hospitals and charities. As a public health matter, this is excellent news: for women whose health plans don't cover birth control, it can be difficult to obtain and costs hundreds of dollars a year out of pocket...
Why should the bishops be exempt from the costs of living in a pluralistic society? Walsh cites the Amish, who are exempt from buying health insurance because they have a conscientious objection to it, but the Amish are a self-isolated band of would-be nineteenth-century farmers; they don't try to make others read by kerosene lamps or demand the government subsidize their buggies. The Catholic church, by contrast, runs institutions that employ, teach and care for millions of people, for which it gets oceans of public money. A great many of those employed and served aren't even Catholic: at Jesuit universities, almost half the students aren't in the church; at Notre Dame, almost half the faculty is non-Catholic, and that is not unusual. The vast majority of Catholics long ago rejected the Vatican's ban on contraception. Catholic women are as likely to use birth control as other women. What about their consciences?
A Catholic-owned institution is a Catholic institution. If they aren't required to provide contraception insurance for their priests and bishops, they shouldn't be required to do so for their janitors and nurses.
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.
And stop the "it costs 0 dollars" nonsense. Abstinence only shit is known to not work out in a large percent of cases.
Abstinence is 100% effective for 100% of the people who use it as a birth control method. Of course, most people end up not being abstinent because it's really hard to do, but now you're arguing something completely different - that the government's compelling interest is not just making chemical contraception available, and not just covering it with insurance, but making sure it's effective even when it isn't used. That's a very high bar, and I don't see you getting over it yet.
And stop the "it costs 0 dollars" nonsense. Abstinence only shit is known to not work out in a large percent of cases.
Abstinence is 100% effective for 100% of the people who use it as a birth control method. Of course, most people end up not being abstinent because it's really hard to do, but now you're arguing something completely different - that the government's compelling interest is not just making chemical contraception available, and not just covering it with insurance, but making sure it's effective even when it isn't used. That's a very high bar, and I don't see you getting over it yet.
Nice attempt to spin actual facts, but contraception is far more effective than abstinence training in the real world and this is numerically verifiable. I'm sorry that the facts simply don't support you in the slightest, but that's what happens when you insist on using the theoretical maximum rather than empirical data. Good thing that the U.S. government isn't that myopic (usually).
Catholic hospitals are not part of the Catholic Church. The employees of the hospitals are employees of the hospital and not the Church. I don't see why they should be exempt simply because they have a partly religious nature. That would allow them to get away with a ton of shit.
If the "compelling interest" test is to be applied at all, then, it must be applied across the board, to all actions thought to be religiously commanded. Moreover, if "compelling interest" really means what it says (and watering it down here would subvert its rigor in the other fields where it is applied), many laws will not meet the test. Any society adopting such a system would be courting anarchy, but that danger increases in direct proportion to the society's diversity of religious beliefs, and its determination to coerce or suppress none of them. Precisely because "we are a cosmopolitan nation made up of people of almost every conceivable religious preference," Braunfeld v. Brown, 366 U.S. at 606, and precisely because we value and protect that religious divergence, we cannot afford the luxury of deeming presumptively invalid, as applied to the religious objector, every regulation of conduct that does not protect an interest of the highest order. The rule respondents favor would open the prospect of constitutionally required religious exemptions from civic obligations of almost every conceivable kind -- ranging from [p889] compulsory military service, see, e.g., Gillette v. United States, 401 U.S. 437 (1971), to the payment of taxes, see, e.g., United States v. Lee, supra; to health and safety regulation such as manslaughter and child neglect laws, see, e.g., Funkhouser v. State, 763 P.2d 695 (Okla.Crim.App.1988), compulsory vaccination laws, see, e.g., Cude v. State, 237 Ark. 927, 377 S.W.2d 816 (1964), drug laws, see, e.g., Olsen v. Drug Enforcement Administration, 279 U.S.App.D.C. 1, 878 F.2d 1458 (1989), and traffic laws, see Cox v. New Hampshire, 312 U.S. 569 (1941); to social welfare legislation such as minimum wage laws, see Susan and Tony Alamo Foundation v. Secretary of Labor, 471 U.S. 290 (1985), child labor laws, see Prince v. Massachusetts, 321 U.S. 158 (1944), animal cruelty laws, see, e.g., Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye Inc. v. City of Hialeah, 723 F.Supp. 1467 (S.D.Fla.1989), cf. State v. Massey, 229 N.C. 734, 51 S.E.2d 179, appeal dism'd, 336 U.S. 942 (1949), environmental protection laws, see United States v. Little, 638 F.Supp. 337 (Mont.1986), and laws providing for equality of opportunity for the races, see, e.g., Bob Jones University v. United States, 461 U.S. 574, 603-604 (1983). The First Amendment's protection of religious liberty does not require this. [n5] [p890]
Which reminds me. How is this different from requiring vaccines?
Abstinence is 100% effective for 100% of the people who use it as a birth control method. Of course, most people end up not being abstinent because it's really hard to do,
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.
And stop the "it costs 0 dollars" nonsense. Abstinence only shit is known to not work out in a large percent of cases.
Abstinence is 100% effective for 100% of the people who use it as a birth control method. Of course, most people end up not being abstinent because it's really hard to do, but now you're arguing something completely different - that the government's compelling interest is not just making chemical contraception available, and not just covering it with insurance, but making sure it's effective even when it isn't used. That's a very high bar, and I don't see you getting over it yet.
The effective rate for contraception usually takes into account fuckups. We don't live in lalaland where we assume a perfect use rate. The medical establishment and government doesn't work that way either.
And stop the "it costs 0 dollars" nonsense. Abstinence only shit is known to not work out in a large percent of cases.
Abstinence is 100% effective for 100% of the people who use it as a birth control method. Of course, most people end up not being abstinent because it's really hard to do, but now you're arguing something completely different - that the government's compelling interest is not just making chemical contraception available, and not just covering it with insurance, but making sure it's effective even when it isn't used. That's a very high bar, and I don't see you getting over it yet.
If you get to veto the tax discussion, I'm vetoing the discussion where we pretend we're writing laws for a magical universe where everyone will just stop having sex.
Let's write laws for the universe we actually live in, instead of the universe that Republicans think/wish we lived in.
Thanatos on
0
Options
AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
A Catholic-owned institution is a Catholic institution. If they aren't required to provide contraception insurance for their priests and bishops, they shouldn't be required to do so for their janitors and nurses.
This is a pretty big failure of basic understanding, spool.
How? I mean, you edited out my explanation, and then didn't provide one of your own. Can you elaborate?
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?
And stop the "it costs 0 dollars" nonsense. Abstinence only shit is known to not work out in a large percent of cases.
Abstinence is 100% effective for 100% of the people who use it as a birth control method. Of course, most people end up not being abstinent because it's really hard to do, but now you're arguing something completely different - that the government's compelling interest is not just making chemical contraception available, and not just covering it with insurance, but making sure it's effective even when it isn't used. That's a very high bar, and I don't see you getting over it yet.
If you get to veto the tax discussion, I'm vetoing the discussion where we pretend we're writing laws for a magical universe where everyone will just stop having sex.
Let's write laws for the universe we actually live in, instead of the universe that Republicans think/wish we lived in.
I'm just going to repost this point from the SGK thread:
The whole point of changing the rules about health insurance is to end the discriminatory practice of religious organizations shitting on the religious freedoms of the people that work for them who don't share Catholics beliefs on contraception = critical sin failure. What Catholics fail to understand is that religious groups, particularly Catholic charitable organizations, are CURRENTLY trampling on the religious rights of others (their millions of non-Catholic employees) by refusing to cover birth control for religious justifications, and now the Feds are saying that if you are a large enough employer "you don't get to discriminate against people who don't share your religious beliefs in the workplace anymore".
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.
I'll just say that you're analysis is totally incorrect, because not paying for something is functionally equivalent to preventing access for many women in this case.
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.
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.
You don't really have the option of refusing to sell him dinner insurance, since the government hugely subsidizes food production and distribution, and tremendously regulates and mandates the practices involved therein. You're selling him dinner insurance whether you like it or not, whether or not it's against your religion.
I'm just going to repost this point from the SGK thread:
The whole point of changing the rules about health insurance is to end the discriminatory practice of religious organizations shitting on the religious freedoms of the people that work for them who don't share Catholics beliefs on contraception = critical sin failure. What Catholics fail to understand is that religious groups, particularly Catholic charitable organizations, are CURRENTLY trampling on the religious rights of others (their millions of non-Catholic employees) by refusing to cover birth control for religious justifications, and now the Feds are saying that if you are a large enough employer "you don't get to discriminate against people who don't share your religious beliefs in the workplace anymore".
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.
I'll just say that you're analysis is totally incorrect, because not paying for something is functionally equivalent to preventing access for many women in this case.
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.
Frankly you have gotten so silly it is hard to even respond anymore. As far as food insurance, what the fuck do you think compensation and taxation are for silly goose? No employer can avoid paying food insurance post Civil War. :P
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.
Arguing against providing coverage that potentially provides contraception maybe seems like a heck of a lot of work just to be a big old bag of geese to people for no real gain.
I sense the tone shifting dramatically over the last few posts. That's a shame, because there's a good legal discussion to be had in here and you guys are fucking it up with your mounting rage.
And stop the "it costs 0 dollars" nonsense. Abstinence only shit is known to not work out in a large percent of cases.
Abstinence is 100% effective for 100% of the people who use it as a birth control method. Of course, most people end up not being abstinent because it's really hard to do, but now you're arguing something completely different - that the government's compelling interest is not just making chemical contraception available, and not just covering it with insurance, but making sure it's effective even when it isn't used. That's a very high bar, and I don't see you getting over it yet.
If you get to veto the tax discussion, I'm vetoing the discussion where we pretend we're writing laws for a magical universe where everyone will just stop having sex.
Let's write laws for the universe we actually live in, instead of the universe that Republicans think/wish we lived in.
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.
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.
A hospital owned by a church is different than a cathedral owned by a church. It is the only source of health care for many people, in a way that cathedrals can never be the only source of religion.
You, I am sure, would be opposed to being forced to receive medical care from the Church of Christ Scientist.
It doesn't really matter, since as Charles Pierce has been saying for the last week, Catholics stopped listening to the bishops about birth control 50 years ago. This is some old patriarchal assholes trying to preserve their tax breaks.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
A hospital owned by a church is different than a cathedral owned by a church. It is the only source of health care for many people, in a way that cathedrals can never be the only source of religion.
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?
I will take the "Cathedral is no different than a Hospital" argument @spool32.
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.
A hospital owned by a church is different than a cathedral owned by a church. It is the only source of health care for many people, in a way that cathedrals can never be the only source of religion.
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?
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!
I will take the "Cathedral is no different than a Hospital" argument on here. The difference is that one is a place of worship subject to all manner of treatment that is objectively different from the 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.
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.
0
Options
AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
I will take the "Cathedral is no different than a Hospital" argument on here. The difference is that one is a place of worship subject to all manner of treatment that is objectively different from the 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.
You really needed that explanation?
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.
A hospital owned by a church is different than a cathedral owned by a church. It is the only source of health care for many people, in a way that cathedrals can never be the only source of religion.
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?
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.
I will take the "Cathedral is no different than a Hospital" argument on here. The difference is that one is a place of worship subject to all manner of treatment that is objectively different from the 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.
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.
Correct, except I'm not actually arguing that is the case, I'm just relating to you what American jurisprudence has stated shall be the case in America given the First Amendment and many, many SCOTUS precedents. That's the law, not my argument of what the law should be.
A hospital owned by a church is different than a cathedral owned by a church. It is the only source of health care for many people, in a way that cathedrals can never be the only source of religion.
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?
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.
And you especially don't get the tax breaks from running said hospital.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
I will take the "Cathedral is no different than a Hospital" argument on here. The difference is that one is a place of worship subject to all manner of treatment that is objectively different from the 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.
You really needed that explanation?
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.
Refusal to provide coverage for a specific prescription is now discrimination?
If you get to veto the tax discussion, I'm vetoing the discussion where we pretend we're writing laws for a magical universe where everyone will just stop having sex.
Let's write laws for the universe we actually live in, instead of the universe that Republicans think/wish we lived in.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I will take the "Cathedral is no different than a Hospital" argument on here. The difference is that one is a place of worship subject to all manner of treatment that is objectively different from the 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.
You really needed that explanation?
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.
Refusal to provide coverage for a specific prescription is now discrimination?
When the justification is religious, it has always been discrimination.
I will take the "Cathedral is no different than a Hospital" argument on here. The difference is that one is a place of worship subject to all manner of treatment that is objectively different from the 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.
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.
Correct, except I'm not actually arguing that is the case, I'm just relating to you what American jurisprudence has stated shall be the case in America given the First Amendment and many, many SCOTUS precedents. That's the law, not my argument of what the law should be.
Also, check my edit to that post.
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.
I will take the "Cathedral is no different than a Hospital" argument on here. The difference is that one is a place of worship subject to all manner of treatment that is objectively different from the 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.
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.
No, the employer is the Church in one case, and the hospital in the other.
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!
I will take the "Cathedral is no different than a Hospital" argument on here. The difference is that one is a place of worship subject to all manner of treatment that is objectively different from the 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.
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.
Correct, except I'm not actually arguing that is the case, I'm just relating to you what American jurisprudence has stated shall be the case in America given the First Amendment and many, many SCOTUS precedents. That's the law, not my argument of what the law should be.
Also, check my edit to that post.
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.
No sir. You asked what the difference was between a Hospital and a Cathedral, and you got it -> one is allowed to religiously discriminate in all kinds of ways by virtue of being a "House Of Worship" (catherdral), the other is not (hospital). No one but you tried to pretend that was anything but a waste of everyone's goddam time to define that for you. This is a separate issue and if you are now confused about how your question related to the OP, then you finally agree with the rest of the posters on something. :P
I will take the "Cathedral is no different than a Hospital" argument on here. The difference is that one is a place of worship subject to all manner of treatment that is objectively different from the 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.
You really needed that explanation?
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.
Refusal to provide coverage for a specific prescription is now discrimination?
When the justification is religious, it has always been discrimination.
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.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
Posts
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.
Like
I cannot see the win here.
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.
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!
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.