Public policy and religious freedom

"They defied the bishops to support President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul. Now (some Catholic health care institutions that did so) are dismayed the law may force them to cover birth control free of charge for their employees.”

Thus did the Associated Press report on the current quandary of the Washington, D.C.-based Catholic Health Association, which did indeed embrace the president’s health care reform legislation last year, openly dissenting from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) opposition to a bill the bishops warned would promote abortions and undermine the conscience rights of Catholic health care personnel and institutions.

The bishops were right on both counts, as the new U.S. Department of Health and Human Services “preventive services” mandate makes clear. It requires private health plans — including, according to the U.S. bishops, “most Catholic social service agencies and healthcare providers” — to cover sterilization procedures and contraceptives, in violation of Catholic teaching; AND, among those so-called “contraceptives” are some that also act as abortifacients, destroying newly conceived human lives.

This is not, however, just a written “I-told-you-so” vindicating a past argument. It is an effort to highlight a long-simmering issue that is becoming more urgent by the day — the misuse of public policy, ostensibly in the service of individual “rights” and social “benefits,” to attack religious freedom.

For example, a purported religious exemption in the “preventive services” mandate “is so narrow as to exclude most Catholic social service agencies and healthcare providers” if they hire or serve people outside the Catholic faith, notes Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, archbishop of Galveston-Houston and chairman of the USCCB Committee on Pro-Life Activities.

We have been down this road before here in New York. Nine years ago, the state enacted a “Women’s Wellness Bill” with similar contraceptive and abortifacient mandates — and a similarly narrow “conscience clause” that arbitrarily excluded many Church ministries.

And we are now headed down that road again in New York with the similarly weak and hastily attached “religious exemption” to the same sex “marriage” law. As former Bronx State Assemblyman Michael Benjamin wrote recently in the New York Post, “Passage of the same-sex-marriage bill won’t end this debate, it will just begin it,” spawning “years of costly litigation, not only for religious groups and individuals, but for small businesses owned by conscientious objectors across the state.”

This critical point must be re-emphasized: even an effective exemption (which these are not) for religious institutions does nothing for lay Catholic professionals (i.e. marriage counselors) who find it morally problematic to assist and support same sex “marriage”; or Catholic business owners who cannot in conscience include coverage of sterilization and abortion in the health care insurance they provide for their employees.

So what is really at work here? “Could the federal government,” as Cardinal DiNardo asks, “possibly intend to pressure Catholic institutions to cease providing health care, education and charitable services to the general public?” Or to pressure Catholic employers to stop providing health insurance for their employees? Did the state of Illinois (as reported in TLIC June 8) intend to force Catholic Charities out of foster care and adoption services, by requiring that they place children with unmarried, cohabiting same sex or opposite sex couples?

No, what actually seems to be at work here is an effort to use these public goods — the Church’s myriad human services, private sector employee health insurance — as weapons of a sort, to eliminate all dissent to the public policies in question.

Having achieved their policy goals — same sex “marriage,” abortion-funding mandates — advocates now want to force religious institutions and people of faith into active participation in these policies, thereby effectively discrediting any moral opposition we may voice. Alternately, if we discontinue our charitable works rather than violate our moral teaching, this too can be used to discredit the Church’s voice, by portraying us as abandoning people in need in service to a “doctrinal rigidity.”

While advocates on these issues have long portrayed themselves as defenders of “freedom of choice” — while accusing opponents of “imposing” our “religious beliefs” on them — their movements have never been simply about freedom of choice. They have also involved efforts to use the coercive powers of government to impose their beliefs; to stifle any (especially faith-based) voices of dissent; and to challenge the religious freedom of those of us who wish to guide our lives by differing moral precepts.

As Catholic citizens, we need to keep this in mind when we consider various public policy proposals — carefully weighing not only their practical value and moral implications, but also their potential impact on our religious freedom.

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