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PDF versionObama's Choice
by Michael Sean Winters on Nov. 21, 2011
Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire, said: “It just doesn’t make sense to take this benefit away from millions of women. Americans of all religious faiths overwhelmingly support broad access to birth control.”
President Obama has returned from his trip to Asia and he faces a major decision, actually two of them. The first decision is the more easily grasped: He must decide whether or not to enlarge the conscience exemption for religiously based organizations regarding mandated coverage for contraception, sterilization and abortifacients under the Affordable Care Act.
An article in yesterday’s New York Times reported that a group of congressional Democrats had two conference calls last week with highly placed White House staffers. The congressional Democrats urged the White House not to enlarge the exemption. According to the Times,
First of all, the women in question may or may not “support board access to birth control” but few women are as univocal in their concerns as Sen. Shaheen suggests. We know one thing about a woman who attends Notre Dame or works at a Catholic hospital: She choose to go there and, presumably, knew what she was signing up for. You do not go to work at a Jewish hospital, or attend Yeshiva University, and then complain that the cafeteria does not serve ribs. The women who decided to go to a Catholic school or work at a Catholic social service provider may be inspired by their faith or they may not. They may agree with the teachings of the Church, or they may not. But, when faced with a secular or non-Catholic option, and the University of Indiana is a fine school and I was happily born at Mt. Sinai Hospital, these women chose a Catholic school or hospital for their studies or their employment. There is something a little demeaning in the way Shaheen reduces the many urgings of the human heart to a singular concern to have free birth control.
Second, no one is proposing to “take away” any benefit from anyone. It is the pro-choice groups that are trying to change the status quo. More importantly, the effort to narrow the conscience exemption, in fact, is likely to end up in less access to all health care, because some religious organizations will decline to offer any health care coverage rather than violate their conscience. That might strike some people as an extreme consequence, but it is a foreseeable one. People get touchy about conscience rights, as liberals of all people should understand.
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I noted last week that there is something more than a little ironic about these liberal champions, the type of people who normally celebrate the “wall of separation” between Church and State, now clamoring over that wall as fast as they can to tell Notre Dame and Providence Hospital what they can and cannot do. Ironic, too, that liberalism which was founded on the principle of conscience rights, and at a time when the Catholic Church was unalert or hostile to the idea of conscience rights, has grown so indifferent to them while it is the Catholic Church today that champions them. But, irony is the coldest of comforts.
The second decision facing the President is intimately linked to the first. He must decide whether he is going to throw away years of effort by the Democratic Party to reach out to moderate Catholic swing voters. In the wake of John Kerry’s defeat in 2004, groups such as Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good and Catholics United have worked closely with the progressive political community to close what my colleague Amy Sullivan termed “the God gap,” the disproportionate association of religiously motivated voters with the Republican Party. These groups have sought both to make the Democratic Party more receptive to the concerns of moderate Catholics and to make Catholics more attuned to the dire consequences for a host of social justice concerns if Republicans win. The fact that Obama won the Catholic vote in 2008 after Kerry had lost it in 2004 is a monument to the success of those efforts.
If Obama decides not to enlarge the conscience exemption, he can forget about Catholic outreach in 2012 and beyond. I cannot think of a single decision he could make that would more certainly feed the GOP-inspired narrative that the Democrats are hostile to religion. I do not believe the President is hostile to religion, but if he fails to expand the conscience exemption, I could not make the case with a straight face. Democrats who hope to be running for office next year or in 2016 should be calling the White House now and urging the White House not to undo the years of effort to build bridges to moderate Catholics who are, according to all the polls, the quintessential swing voters.
One person who was not involved in those political efforts, but who found herself in the midst of navigating the same terrain, is Sister Carol Keehan, head of the Catholic Health Association. Sr. Carol, joined by other religious women like Sr. Simone Campbell, helped to carry the Affordable Care Act across the finish line. Indeed, it is commonly understood that without the nuns, the bill would have failed. It is a strange way to thank them for their help to now hang them out to dry. Rep. Diana DeGette and the other members of the Pro-Choice caucus may represent “safe” districts, but Sr. Carol does not. She has taken more hits on behalf of President Obama than any other Catholic with the possible exception of Father John Jenkins, President of Notre Dame, and both of them would be severely jammed up if the President does not extend the conscience exemption.
Another person who should be profoundly concerned about the President’s decision is Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Shortly after the 2012 midterm elections, a friend of mine who is normally very smart said something very stupid: “Well, at least we don’t have to deal with the Blue Dogs anymore.” That’s right – a large number of moderate to conservative Democrats lost their seats to the GOP in 2010 and, as a consequence, Pelosi is now the Minority Leader rather than the Speaker. But, Rep. DeGette’s pro-choice friends, you will pardon the expression, don’t stand a prayer of winning back those districts the Democrats need to secure if they ever want to reclaim the majority. In Pennsylvania’s Third Congressional District, or Ohio’s First, or Virginia’s Fifth, anyone adopting the position articulated by Shaheen and DeGette would get clobbered.
Last month, I was meeting with a friend who works at a progressive political organization in town and the subject of the conscience exemptions came up. My friend said that women’s groups were still smarting from their defeat on abortion coverage in health care reform. I pointed out that the U.S. Catholic bishops did not think they had “won” on health care reform either. To their credit, however, the USCCB has refused, repeatedly, to endorse efforts to repeal the ACA. They want to fix the parts they do not like, to be sure, but they have not advocated repealing the entire law. I can assure you that there are plenty of conservatives urging the bishops: if we lose on the conscience exemption, they should support repeal.
But, my friend’s comment bothered me for a deeper reason than its asymmetry. The passage of the Affordable Care Act was a huge accomplishment for liberals. Where Truman and Johnson and Clinton had failed, Obama and the Democrats in Congress passed universal health care coverage. Was the bill perfect? Of course not. But, to somehow suggest that it was a “defeat” in any way, because it failed to cover abortions, is to miss the forest for the trees. And, the ACA could not have been passed except with the support of pro-life Catholic members of Congress. Last week, discussing the Republicans, Michael Gerson wrote, “Many political activists have adopted a form a fundamentalism: the belief that a return to power can be achieved only by a return to purity…this approach makes for bad politics. There is a reason that the purest candidates are often not the strongest candidates.” The pro-choice caucus would like to impress its own fundamentalism upon the President and the Democratic Party and that is a program that may prevent members of the pro-choice caucus from facing a primary challenger to their left. It is not a program that will help Obama with Catholic swing voters in Florida, Ohio or Wisconsin, nor will it help Pelosi become Speaker again. The Democrats must choose: Big Tent or Minority Status.
It would be difficult to overstate the anxiety swirling around those Catholic Democrats in the wake of yesterday’s article in the Times. They have tried to build bridges. They have tried to establish communications. They have been accosted as “bad Catholics” by some and as “bad Democrats” by others. This weekend, there was a palpable unease that all their efforts could come a cropper in an instant, that some in Congress and some in the White House might not grasp the devotion Catholics have to these cultural institutions our Church has built, from our vast network of hospitals, to our great universities, to our extensive and effective social service ministries, how these organizations flow from our faith – as we were reminded at Mass yesterday, listening to the Gospel reading from Matthew 25 – and that we will not take kindly to being forced against our conscience to do what our Church proscribes. At a personal level, I highly doubt that in his three years in office, President Obama has ever encountered a more authentic soul than Sr. Carol – if he throws her under the bus, shame on him.
I do not know what the President will decide. I hope and pray he will carefully consider not only the merits of the issue, but the consequences. DeGette and Shaheen may not like the idea of broader conscience exemptions, but I suspect they will like the idea of a Republican president overturning the ACA even less.
The question of "religious
The question of "religious freedom" in regard to health care provision is grossly overrated. If the Catholic institutions which are requesting this "religious freedom" exemption provided health care benefits free of charge to their employees, and everyone else, there might be a case. But they do not. Benefits are given on the basis of employment, and are paid for by the employee. If the institution did not offer a benefit program, it would have to compensate the employee with cash. This is the opinion provided by the Cato as it writes in its "Handbook for Policy Makers" - "A survey by economists Michael Morrisey and John Cawley found that 91 percent of health economists agree that the money that employers use to purchase health insurance comes out of workers’ wages. In other words, if employers were not
providing health benefits to workers, they would have to return that $9,000
to workers in the form of higher cash wages." (p. 142, http://www.cato.org/pubs/handbook/hb111/hb111-14.pdf)
If this interpretation is true, then my point above is true: it is not a benefit that is provided by the institution. If there is to be a "religious freedom" choice, then it should apply to the individual who is insured, and not to the institution which merely acts as a conduit. The institution is not being asked to provide its funds for the benefit.
By all means, let there be an exemption based on "religious freedom," but do not let the institutions impose their idea of "religious freedom" on everyone who works for them.
Good points. What is
Good points.
What is important to know is that compensation and benefits are two sides of the same coin. Both make up the total compensation package of employees. The employee is free to use what he is paid, as compensation in the pay check or compensation in the form of benefits, without seeking the employer's permission and in ways the employer cannot control.
It is a false assumption on the part of Catholic employers that they are not now paying for contraceptives, sterilizations, even abortions, invitro fertilization, and contributions to the Susan B. Anthony fund. If they pay a salary/wage to someone who chooses any of those things, then they are paying for them. They are just paying for them in the wages they paid the employee rather than in the benefit package they supplied the employee. And, they are forcing their employees to pay more for them than they would if these health care services were covered by insurance - more than their neighbor down the street who works for the non-Catholic employer.
What is next? Will the bishops ask for a religious exemption from privacy laws that requires employees to sign an employment contract that they will not use any wages for a "forbidden" bit of health care and willingly turn over access to all health records so the Catholic organization can be sure they don't?
The bishops are fighting a silly and losing battle on this one.
Michael, There are more than
Michael, There are more than a few flaws in your argument. Fact is, most
catholics fully support access to birth control. Humanae Vitae has been
rejected by catholics. You might think that you are in the right by thinking
the small percentage who are willing to have their reproductive history dictated by a hierarchy which has no grasp of reality is a reasonable defense
of the problem. But birth control is a reality to which most of us is a
perfectly reasonable way to determine the size of our families. The official
church position is a scandal of major proportions. The Biblical increase and
multiply would seem to make sense 2000 BC, but here in 2000 + AD we have now reached 7,billion. You can easily find the world population back in 2000
bc when it was very very small. We stand to see 14 Billion within the next generation. This is a geometrical exponentiation and the consequences are
disastrous. There is nothing moral to insist on reliance on a control process
that is patently ridiculous. We can have rational birth control or we can have a natural birth control and this unfortunately is War, famine and Pestilence. We will not overpopulate the planet the controls are already in place. All experiments in overpopulation crash. We are as subject to natures laws as the lemmings. That is the science of it. But, for most of us its
not about science, it about rejecting the idea that any cleric has control over our bodies. We wouild like them to stick to the Gospel, to Christs message. Services made available does not mean that they have to be used.
I view the current drive of the Hierarchs to be a blatent effort to regain control over people. It cannot work. We will continue to make personal decisions in this arena of our lives. The only problem here is one that
the government cannot cave in on. The Government cannot allow that giving
certain rights to individuals can then be controlled by the hierarchy.
Catholics who believe sincerely in the official humanae approach, few as they
are are absolutely free to follow their conscience. Those of us, some 98% by
some accounts are also free to follow our consciences. You simply cannot have
a system where in a given hospital the services are at the mercy of the
local ordinary unless that hospital is totally removed from all government
funds and assistance. I will not comment much on the abortion issue. That
topic brings out the irrational. Most of us agree that the process is abhorrent. However, most of us also believe that it is not an absolute. There
are circumstances where it is necessary. In general we need to realize that
in all of nature and for all animals abortion is the norm and conception is the exception. Its simply a mathematical fact. A woman has x number of eggs
and only a few will make it to conception, all the rest are simply aborted.
In scientific balanced view this simply means that the process was interrupted
by nature itself. This is how we were created, do you really want to blame God for this less than perfect system? Put in simple human terms, most of us
consider sexual/reproductive matters to be our personal domain. Making insurance available does not make the hierarch culpable in the use or misuse
of the product. Religious freedom has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Bless You.
TomC
POST PENN ST. POLITICS
POST PENN ST. POLITICS ....Thank you, Tom C, for cutting through the conservative smokescreen.
Obama knows now what most Americans, including most Catholic voters. sadly know as well, after the unending revelations about the cover-up by bishops of priest rapes of defenseless children. The ongoing Penn State horrors all over the media are now forcing all Americans to face this reality existentially.
Obama also knows what the Irish PM, Enda Kenny, found among a very conservative Catholic electorate, namely, that taking on bishops and Rome is a winning strategy.
The fact is the Church hierarchy has little credibility and influence any more among Catholic voters. Obama has little to lose and much to gain by taking on the politically weak and ineffective US bishops over their "religious liberty" charade.
For more information on the US bishops' US presidential election efforts, please note the NCR comment and related cross links under the comment heading, "Roman Clique Fears?" , accessible by clicking on at:
http://ncronline.org/blogs/distinctly-catholic/dolans-first-presidential...
Speaking of flaws in
Speaking of flaws in arguments:
Straw man arguments and ad hominems are to no one's benefit. I think this article takes a fair and balanced approach to the entire debate. Furthermore, you should check out the hasty generalizations made in the above comment.
I would like to point out that I, a Catholic, do NOT reject Humanae Vitae. My reproductive history is dictated by G-d, through the infallible teachings of the Magisterium (I'll pause as people laugh and ridicule my firm Faith in the Catholic Church). I'll also appeal to the Church Fathers and the Bible long before I'll appeal to your "modern approach."
It should also be noted that the world's population is slowing down proportional to the number of people currently populating the world. In other words, most of the "West" is below or barely at the replacement fertility rate. Besides, want to know the best form of birth control? Not having sex. I would hope that we could have enough control to time ourselves on when we can and cannot have sex.
As someone who is faithful to the Church's teachings, I'm prepared for the laughter and scorn I'll inevitably attract on this website.
Brett, why don't you convince
Brett, why don't you convince the Bishops to add erectile dysfunction drugs to their list of substances they don't want in their insurance programs? It just seems to me that if women are expected to follow nature without any chemical assistance, so should men.
What "infallible teachings of
What "infallible teachings of the magisterium" deal with your reproductive history?
Tom C. I agree with your
Tom C. I agree with your comments.I think the church would be more convincing if they separate birth control from abortion and I do believe there are times when abortion, abhorrent as you say, is called for.
Catholic outreach was never
Catholic outreach was never about reaching out to the Bishops - and frankly a "conscience exemption" which changes the status of birth control procedures (sterilization), devices (IUDs) and birth control pills would involve changes to the formulary that would, in some cases, impact existing coverage that does not include the exclusions they wish to add. How does one differentiate between progesterone doses to aid an at risk pregnancy or estrogen supplements for menopause versus those used for birth control? The people in the pews want no such carve outs and they won't be suddenly voting Republican if they don't get them.
If the Church does not want its employees and students getting birth control, it needs to pay them better - giving an explict increase of $1000 a month in either pay or student aid whenever a child is born to an employee or student - including arranging for free tuition and stipends for students in high school and including the fathers in that. Nothing will keep boys under control like a realistic financial option to birth control and abortion and the expectation of impending marriage.
Catholics are not going to
Catholics are not going to vote on the basis of conscience rights in 2012. They are going to vote on the economy. There is no "anxiety swirling" in anyone's mind but yours. The rest of us are worried about feeding our families. You need to stop reading editorials and get out with the people.
I hope you're able to stick
I hope you're able to stick to your guns, Mr. Winters.
Tom, you might be correct
Tom, you might be correct that "most catholics fully support access to birth control" and that "Humanae Vitae has been rejected by catholics"; after all, many protestant denominations consider themselves small c catholics. But Catholics, with a capital C—that is to say us—have not rejected Humanae Vitae. What you mean, of course, is that you have rejected it; people intuitively seek to shroud their own preferences as representative of a broader class, be it "the 99%," "we the people," or "catholics think." (The legal availability of contraceptives, as apart from their use, is a distinct issue that I don't tackle in this comment.)
The scandal is not the Church's position; that would be absurd. Rather, the scandal is the persistent grind of a small yet vocal minority who reject everything of the Church yet still want to claim her name.
I have to wonder, would this
I have to wonder, would this even be a problem if we had a clergy that included women and married men?
Yes, because it would still
Yes, because it would still be wrong to contracept, but nice non sequitur. How hard is it to figure that out? Not only is it wrong, it is also bad for a woman's health, and it damages relationships between men and women, whether they are married or not. So if a woman's health gets in the way of reproductive rights, then the non-existent things get the benefit of the doubt? Oh, and it snuffs out a life that has begun to develop.
TomC: "There is nothing moral
TomC:
"There is nothing moral to insist on reliance on a control process that is patently ridiculous."
The only ridiculous thing here is your ignorance about natural family planning. My wife and I have been using successfully over 16 years of marriage and it works just fine, thank you.
As for the Malthusian baloney about exponential population growth, I will refer you to the last UN projections. Aside from sub-saharan Africa, most of the world is witnessing plummeting birth rates. My own country (Italy) faces demographic collapse (not decrease: collapse) within two generation, and its effects on the pension system are already wrecking our w=economy right as we speak. The 1960's ended a long time ago, please wake up.
TomC, While the world's
TomC,
While the world's population may have reached seven billion, Japan and Europe (including Russia) are have declined in their native populations due to low birth rates. The U.S. birth rate is barely at the replacement level (2.1) and that may only be due to the size of Hispanic families. We can see before our very eyes what this low birth rate is doing to countries like Greece and Spain -- there are simply not enough young people to support the older generation who are living off of generous government pensions. Couple this with an ever-growing Muslim population that is not assimilating with European culture and you don't need a crystal ball to see that Europe will undergo significant cultural changes over the next century.
What countries like Russia, Spain, Italy and Greece need in order to survive is more children not fewer. That may fly in the face of progressive doctrine, but the sad reality is that the West will change because of shrinking populations. The irony is that the new dominant culture will not in any way be progressive.
Peace.
I still think that, as
I still think that, as strange as it sounds, if the next prez was Republican there will be more of what we saw under G.W. Bush and Reagan, iow more horrendous acts against people and other nations. That is just the way they are. The popes supported them despite what they did, as did enough Catholics, at the popes behest.
E.G,in America--- economists report that every time the Republicans have gained control over government (both houses and the presidency)in the past 100 hundred years our nation has been plunged into another economic mess. That's what they do and that's what they will continue to do because they cannot escape their ideologies, no matter how destructive to others. War/kill/death and profit are the very center of their ideology just as it was for their ancestors. Their ideology and theology goes unabated to this day, and the popes still support them.
E.G, Latin America---Reagan did Iran-Contra. We know that what Reagan did was based on his ideology and the pope still supported him and the GOP. The Reagan GOP ideologies matches the popes.
Soooo, it makes sense that when the next Repub is elected, America and the rest of the world will get more of the same. This entire mess is as much a part of tghe papacy as it is the Republicans.
Just ask yourself: exactly where is the Republican party of Eisenhower, Gerald Ford and even Goldwater, who denounced them before he died. It's gone and it's decline began under the involvement of JPII and the Catholic hierarchy. It has gotten far worse ever since.
The GOP is now the party of far right wing wackos and screwballs. It is now a dangerous group of people. Even BXVI alluded to that ---decline via church involvement--- during his Benin trip speeches. He knows it and admitted it. He always knew it from the beginning, yet supported them anyway, despite their greedy and war/kill/death agenda.
Why did the popes support them? It was either of two reasons. Either because the popes think and do the same. There is ample evidence for that in for example church history. Or, it was because of their simple minded and short sighted Pro-life and Family Values WORDS. WORDS without any actions or TRUE adherence to REAL Pro-life and Family Values.
To wit--- never in the entire existence of the Repub party has it shown even an ounce of Pro-life and Family Values. Even our religion has a lousy history of Pro-life and Family Values. Both are far more about institutions, corporations, money and power than they are about human beings. Republicans and right wing fundie religions like the papal end of the Catholic church are far more concerned with THINGS than human beings, The Family of Man, Gods creation. In fact one can easily argue the point that human beings lives are used to keep them in power.
But if one thinks about it, that makes a lot of sense. The Repub party is a very Protestant group. Protestantism is an off-shoot from Catholicism. IOW, the Protestant Republicans got most of their ideas and ideology from Catholicism. Even now the pope is welcoming right wing fundamentalist religious Protestants into Catholicism.
What I am trying to say in a very round-about way is that the popes and the hierarchs are far more Republican than they will admit to the public. That is both very telling and damning. So my take on your analysis MSW is that if the Repubs put another prez in the WH the American voter will finally see what Republicanism and the Religious Right are REALLY ALL about, namely, POWER and MONEY and RULE over the people and the world.
If the Repubs put another GOP in the WH that will prove disastrous in the short term, but very instructive in the long term and very damning of both the GOP AND the RRS. People need to see and know that. Then the voters can make their decisions about how they want to live life, at the Republican and papal extremes, or, in a more people oriented world.
Also, if the Obama gov't puts us in another Repub Neocon war he will be in as big a problem as are the papacy and the Neocons. Not because he is a dem but because he is following the GOP/papal POV.
Or to put it yet another way, a lot more people are going to have to die for the popes and the Republicans to win their control of America and the world.
To add to the above---
Michael, you seem to forget that Obama has to be the prez of ALL of the people of America not just the pope, hierarchs and the Religious Right.
So if Obama makes the choice that puts him and the Dems out, that just might not be a bad thing, in the long run. WHY? Because Obama and his family will get out of the WH without being assassinated by Republican voters. And hopefully, America and the rest of the world will finally put to rest certain myths about right wing fundie religion and about the GOP, namely Pro-life and Family Values, among others. Europe has already done that.
Finally, part of the solution is for the various Catholic institutions to stop taking government(the peoples tax dollars) money, which the Republican party has been screaming about for a long time anyway. Republicans would be very happy about that. They HATE government, in the strongest terms and to the n'th degree. They only believe in predatory cowboy Reagan--no-regulation deregulation wild west economics where it's survival of the very few and damn the rest of us. Let me make it clear by saying the Republicans DO NOT believe in true Free Market Capitalism!!! Only predatory or crony Capitalism.
Based on my readings of the
Based on my readings of the Hebrew Scriptures, I want the right to own and maintain slaves.
Gimme MY conscience rights, and do it now, dammit!
What would make one think the
What would make one think the President is considering this at all? He's not going to win over any pro-lifers by keeping the status quo, but he will infuriate his own base at a time when he needs them. I'm afraid Sr. Keenan, MSW, NCR etc. are all just being shown to be the useful idiots that those of us who actually THINK about the consequences of getting into bed with a pro-abortion President thought they were all along.
The sad fact is that with
The sad fact is that with this total lack of conscience protections in place, there is no threat from the NCR types to vote for an alternative, therefore there is no reason to change a thing. God himself could run, and if he had an R beside his name MSW and his company would vote for Obama.
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