HHS delays, but does not change, rule on contraceptive coverage

AND THANK GOD HE DID.

Well, the Republicans may be organized as a circular firing squad, but today the Democrats have shot themselves in the head.

The Church will survive this. The Church's ministries and missions will survive this. We will figure out how to live with the status quo or how to change it. But the completely unnecessary and unhelpful enmity this brings on will endure a LONG time.

Not that the GOP or Tea Party or Conservatives are correct or better or more successful or more practically perfect in any possible way.

But on this point, this train wreck will loose all kinds of toxins into political, civic, humanitarian, and religious partnerships. Toxins which endure.

AND NONE OF IT WAS NECESSARY!

I had 4 children in less than 6 years in the late sixtties/early seventies. Each of the first three were premature deliveries. The 3rd was only 3 lbs 12oz and that was cinsidered very small in thiose days. Luckily she was strong and came home in just one month but then I dealt with 3 kids in diapers, 2 who didnt walk for one long snowy Midwester Winter. Needless to say, even though I considrered myself a good Catholic ( and still do) i went on the new miracle -- birth control pills. This gave me the respite I needed to keep sane and regain health stability to care for those God had entrusted me with. After 2 years I went off them and promptly had my 4th, after which my husband had a vasectomy..

When these bishops start getting pregnant and bearing children one after another, caring for them in sickness and health and just plain spend time loving them, then they might have the right to tell good women what they should and shouldn't do, but certainly not now!

01/20/12

Before the cannon balls fly (although some have already flown), I hope the issue
is further clarified, as to, if this ruling applies to prevented measures only, namely, contraception, or does it also included post measures,namely, abortive?

John P. Lynch

Having jumped into bed with Obama advocating his nationalized health care plan, why would the USCCB, CHA, CCUSA and others be surprised with this ruling? Sheep to the slaughter. Are they really that naive? Just one more reason to repeal Obamacare!

"Catholic groups, including the USCCB, the Catholic Health Association and Catholic Charities USA, called that exemption too narrow, saying it would require Catholic groups to stop all services to those who were not Catholic and would inappropriately involve the government in decisions about whether an organization is "religious enough" to be exempted."

This is a ridiculous argument. No one has to use contraceptives. It is something provided but in no way is it pushed. Unless there is something I do not understand here, the argument is that Catholics want contraceptives restricted for Catholics. That suggests that the Catholic laity do not have strong personal convictions and need to be supervised or channeled into the church's teaching. If the Obama government reaches this decision after much introspection then it is the best decision for the healthcare system which will bring care to many who do not have heathcare insurance.

The other point is that many Catholics use contrceptives and sterilizion because they do not agree with the churches' teaching, and that may be the real problem for the Catholic hierarchy.

Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, announced Jan. 20 that nonprofit groups that do not provide contraceptive coverage because of their religious beliefs will get an additional year "to adapt to this new rule."

Is this so unreasonable, given the fact that there are constitutional rules separating church and state? If a Catholic institution wants Federal funding, than they must rethink their stance, because they can not have it both ways!

Just because an insurance will cover these things does not mean that you need to make use of them. A person who believes in certain moral teachings of the church is not being forced to use anything that will contradict those beliefs. It seems to me that the church needs to be doing more educating about what is and what is not considered moral and allow individuals to make these personal decisions on their own using their own conscience and prayer as a guide.

When did Jesus ever walk around dictating to people how to family plan?...Was that really the message Christ sent us?...

Mandating that health providers offer various forms of birth control does not mean people MUST take it or accept it...but if someone wants it, that's none of the Church's business...

I'm a Christian, and as a christian, I'm free as free can be under Christ...As long as I follow His commandments, I'm obeying HIM...I don't need to obey NO MAN who claims to speak for God if in fact it goes against the good of the public...

You deny contraceptives to people, they will resort to MURDER/Abortion...

Fact is, there is great deal of wealth for the catholic Church in Births and Deaths as people scramble to them for baptisms which are unbiblical and Masses, which literally rake in MILLIONS for the Vatican...

At this point in time, with all the lawsuits, it stands to reason they would want to secure their income.

This issue of the primacy of conscience is a serious and difficult problem for goverment authorities. But when shall the authorities of the Roman Church recognize the primacy of conscience for its own members? The Church authorities must recognize that many, perhaps a plurality, of us not only believe artificial contraception to be morally acceptable under certain circumstances but even morally necessary to counteract the threatened overpopulation of the earth. The Church will eventually reverse its ban on artificial contraception but probably too late. This is just one way that the hierarchy is an embarrassment to many of its members. How many have left the Church because of such indefensible dictates? Let's ALL of us practice this "primacy of conscience."
Joe Wessling
Cincinnati

President Obama cast his lot with the 98% of Catholic women who ignore the church's "teaching" on birth control-sounds right to me.

This is what happens when the Catholic bishops squander their moral authority by hiding pedophile priests. They were never going to have it both ways, and there's no turning back the clock. Their opinions are no longer respected or heeded in the marketplace of public opinion.
I imagine the Obama administration are aware the overwhelming majority of married Catholics and other married Christians use artificial methods of contraception without regard to anything the Catholic bishops have to say on the subject, and I imagine also they weighed this when arriving at their decision.

The Catholic Church hierarchy needs to wake up to the reality that most studies have shown that 99% of couples have used contraceptives during their active sexual lives and that 89% of couples use contraceptives to prevent conception during their active years of conception capability. It's really unrealistic and illogical for the church to teach, what one local "expert" presented as, The Natural Family Planning Method of "birth control" to a Junior and Senior HS SRE class I was teaching about their Catholic church in preparation for confirmation. I firmly believe that early church fathers had it correct, when they taught that the "breath of life" was ONLY infused by God into a fetus, when that fetus can viably live outside the womb. Otherwise, due to about 50% of natural human pregnancies resulting in spontaneous and other natural abortions, God would become the universe's most prolific abortionist!

Quotes from article:
Franciscan Sister Jane Marie Klein, who chairs the board at Franciscan Alliance, a system of 13 Catholic hospitals, characterized the decision as "nothing else than a direct attack on religion and First Amendment rights."

Sister Carol Keehan, a Daughter of Charity who is president and CEO of the Catholic Health Association, said the announcement was a "missed opportunity to be clear on appropriate conscience protection."
______________

The regulations protect a core group in every faith from having to provide birth control and contraceptives. But the regulations do not protect the Church from having to offer birth control and sterilization coverage in health insurance for the tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of lay people, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, who work in Catholic hospitals, schools, universities, and charities.

The regulations protect the right of those individuals to make their own choices regarding birth control and sterilization. No one is forced to do anything. All the regulations do is allow people to make choices.

It seems to me that the conscience of the individual is better protected this way than it would be if the Church got a greater exemption. If the Church could exempt this health insurance coverage, the individuals have less of a choice, the religious beliefs of the Catholic Church are imposed on them. In a way, there is an "establishment of religion" because it is a recognition that a faith has the right to impose religiously held beliefs on both members of their faith and members of other faiths.

I have written my political representatives, again, to let them know I support the decision of the administration. The rules as written protect the conscience rights of individuals to make their own choices. What the Church seeks is to take away the individual's ability to make a choice. The First Amendment denies the government the ability to "establish" a religion, which is what would happen if the government allows the Catholic Church to impose its religious beliefs on all the doctors, nurses, secretaries, custodians, accountants, teachers, professors, and everyone else, Catholic or not, who work for them.

The Obama administration overstepped its bounds on this one. If the "religion" clause of the First Amendment means anything, it means that it is not the government's prerogative the decide which religous beliefs are true and which are not. The enlightened intellectuals of the administration might deem the offical Catholic teaching on contraception and abortion to be silly and benighted, but under the First Amendment the Church has the right to proclaim its teachings and it also has the right not to be forced to violate them. Of course, the matter will be litigated and given the present compositon of the Supreme Court, the administration decision will in all likelihood be overturned.

And if HHS--Obama or Sibelius--give in, they should be ashamed of themselves and deserve to lose this year's election. No one is forced to accept any of the services the church opposes. The church has to get over the notion that they can join with other, non-church hospitals for any reasons, economic or otherwise, then dictate the rules of Vatican morals to everyone else. It is interesting that this all comes out at the same time Benedict is crying false crocodile tears about the loss of freedom of religion and conscience in the United States to some of the visiting bishop--led, no less, by the Cardinal Archbishop of Washington, DC. Talk about interfering with civic business. The church screams anytime they think someone is interfering with religious business. If you don't approve of abortion, don't have one. If you don't approve of contraceptives, don't use them. And let the church get off its sex hang-up that is led by the popes and the Vatican--all those "celibates" telling everyone else what to do about sex! If the separation of church and state weren't so such serious business for this country, this would all be laughable.

Alas, poor country! Becoming more pagan by the minute. Where are the champions of freedom? Perhaps this is an opportunity to start a Catholic Medical Help Scheme a bit like the Stokvel system that the black population have here in South Africa. I have heard that it serves about two million people in this country.

Catholic hospitals are major employers in areas where they are located. The freedom of conscience issue is really belongs to the employer and not the employer. Bishops are totally off base on this issue. If they don't like the ruling, sell the hospitals.

When I was a kid at mass you saw many families with 5 to 12 children present with their parents in the pews. Now it is rare to see 3 children. Why can the Bishops not face facts that the People of God have not and will not receive or accept the "supposed " celibate Episcopal decision that birth control is sinful? It was not accepted in the 60's and 70's and it is not accepted in 2012. This is an authoritarian decision by a few members of the church that would effect 99% of the people. The People of God said NO that they cannot, nor will not live as Papal baby factories. They have chosen to support the findings of Pope Paul's 2 Vatican commissions composed of Catholic scholars of theology, science and philosophy that called, in all good faith, for the church to change this ridiculous unnatural rule. The People of God have chosen to believe the 100 plus theologians that put a full page add in the front section of the New York time after Humanae Vitae was written telling Catholics that they could be good and faithful Catholics and practice birth control, Now statistics show that 90% of mass attending catholics practice BC during much of their fertility.

The authoritarian US Catholic Bishops now want to tell their own people that it should be illegal for insurance companies in their institutions to pay for contraception. It doesn't matter that there are many who are not Catholic who work in those institutions, nor does it matter to these cultish old men that most of their own Catholic people have rejected this very poor teaching for what it is: a power play by the clergy to not admit that they once made incorrect decisions. Thank you, President Obama, for responding sensibly to these men who should be spending money on an independent investigation of Episcopal and Papal behavior in the financial and sexual scandels of the RCC that seem to be perpetrated by the Bishops. Instead the Bishops decided to try to take the pressure off themselves and investigated the very nuns who built the RCC in the United States.

These men (Bishops) were selected by a very narrow litmus test of belief by two authoritarian Popes who have proven by their own statements that the definition of infallibility of Vatican 1 was certainly incorrect when JP II and Benedict stated that it was infallible doctrine that women could not be priests and that homosexuals are morally disordered, and that the deprivation of celibacy makes them somehow in a higher cast of life than the laity. These same popes that have hidden and protected sexual deviant rapists inside the clergy and have protected Bishops that knew that their own priests were committing the rawest of sinful felonies are who we are talking about. We are also noticing that these two Popes that followed John Paul 1, who the preponderance of evidence shows was murdered and this likely crime was covered up but none other than the Curial Cardinals in Rome, these two men are responsible for covering up some horrible sexual deviance and financial money laundering by the word mafia. Why would anyone especially the Catholic People of God pay any attention to any statements of morality made by an AMORAL Episcopate?

When the Bishops show such a lack of integrity it is time for all to turn them off the radio, TV and out of their minds.