I look forward to reading up on your previous posts!

http://theliarsden.wordpress.com

My maiden name is Stephens, so that might help place me.

Yes, Poul is my brother. That explains why I remember your name.

I do appreciate the consistency of your view. I hope that you will never have to choose between feeding your family and vaccinating them against serious illness. I also hope that you never lose an ovary like a Georgetown student described in a January 30 NY Times article that I read earlier today. She had polycystic ovary syndrome, for which she was prescribed birth control by her doctor. Georgetown denied her coverage for the treatment in the name of Catholic teaching against contraception. Because she couldn’t afford the prescription otherwise, she developed a cyst and lost her ovary. This is a prime example of the real life cost of this debate. (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/30/health/policy/law-fuels-contraception-controversy-on-catholic-campuses.html?pagewanted=2&_r=2&ref=todayspaper)

No, Christian Scientists should not have to pay for vaccinations if they deem them immoral. Vaccinations are nevertheless available to their employees and they can purchase them with their own money. If it is such a hindrance for said employees, they are free to find work somewhere else or perhaps purchase their own insurance rider that covers it.

But you are changing your argument. The reason why, for the sake of analogy, legality doesn’t matter is because your previous argument posited that there was no difference between insurance and salary (hence you wrote in response to Leila: “the employer is no more culpable for how the employee uses the resource of her health insurance than for how she uses the resource of her salary”) You spoke of culpability, which is why using a hit man scenario might clarify the responsibility of the employer when they are footing the bill for something.

In our real life controversy, what matters is whose money is paying for the contraception: with insurance, it’s the employer’s, with salary, it’s the employees. That is the meaningful distinction. What is happening here, whether you agree or not, is that employers are being forced to directly fund contraceptives for the employee. Regarding the employer’s moral culpability, it doesn’t matter whether or not the employee decides to use the contraceptive coverage. Hence my question: If I give my friend $500 for an abortion, and she decides not to go through with it, have I sinned? Twice I have asked and you still haven’t answered, so I’ll tell you the answer: Yes, in virtue of funding an abortion, I have sinned. So it is with the Church: in virtue of funding contraception, she has sinned.

It is outside the bounds of the government to mandate that a person or entity violate their beliefs by purchasing a particular product. Essentially, the government is mandating that we sin. It truly is a religious liberty argument. I hope you begin to see that because it’s very serious when our liberty is threatened. Take heed that (last I heard) all but 5 bishops issued statements agains this mandate, as well as many lay Catholic leaders in this nation, including several who publicly endorsed Obama in 2008.

Your brother is Pole, right? He and I did prison ministry together, but I’m not sure if I’m remembering correctly if you two were siblings… Well, thanks for the dialogue. Blessings!

Thanks for your reply. I remember your name from college, too. This is not in fact a personal issue for me, however, although the Catholic Church does indeed have a demonstrably murky history with regard to women. (I think few female FUS theology majors realize that women were not even allowed to study Catholic theology until the second half of the 20th century, for example.)

The reason I say that your hit man example is irrelevant is that this is a policy discussion, not a moral discussion. That means it deals with existing law. Of course we all want policies to reflect moral values, but the path to that is by changing laws – not by blocking policies that take into account already existing laws.

Here’s a hypothetical situation that is more relevant to the case at hand. Suppose I am a Catholic working for a Christian Scientist. The Church of Christ, Science, opposes vaccination. Say that, to avoid a nationwide H1N1 pandemic, the U.S. government required that employer-provided health insurance must cover flu shots. This would encourage people to get vaccinated, but no one would be required to be vaccinated. Vaccination, like contraception, is legal, but employers would naturally not be asked to provide the flu shots themselves; they would simply be required to provide insurance coverage should employees choose to take advantage of it. Christian Science employees would probably not choose to use that coverage, but other employees probably would. Should my Christian Science employer be permitted, on religious grounds, to refuse to provide such coverage, thereby making it more difficult for my family to receive vaccinations? Is the government, by trying to prevent a flu pandemic that would affect citizens of all faiths, violating the religious liberty of employers who consider vaccination a sin?

The only difference between this vaccination example and the current situation, from the standpoint of crafting national policy that takes into account citizens of all different faiths, is that those opposing the HHS mandate are louder and better funded than the Christian Scientists who oppose vaccination.

It’s fine to oppose vaccination, or contraception, but unless these things are made illegal, national policies must be crafted with both current law and accepted medical views in mind – namely, that contraception and vaccinations are legal and have medical value. Those who disagree with such views and want to stop the use of contraception and vaccinations should by all means try to change the accepted medical view and/or the laws. However, they should not be given religious exemptions from national policies that are in accord with both current law and medicine.

With insurance, an employer is directly funding certain goods and services to be offered to an employee. A wage is a monetary compensation for services rendered; use of wages is to the discretion of the employee. The end might be the same (employee obtains and uses contraception), but that doesn’t mean there is no meaningful distinction when it comes to moral culpability. Indeed there is.

I suggested you use an alternative scenario to help you determine moral culpability (so for this end, legality is actually what is irrelevant). I’m sure we both would agree that hiring a hit man to murder someone is immoral. So what if someone else foots the bill for your hit man, and then you go on to arrange the kill. Is the “someone else” who directly funded the hit man morally culpable?

To your point addressed to Leila, regarding the employee having to choose to take advantage of the contraceptive coverage: morally, for the employer, it doesn’t matter whether or not she chooses it. If I pay for a friend’s abortion, even though she ends up not going through with it, have I or have I not sinned in my direct monetary funding and cooperation for something evil?

I remember you from college, and I hope you’re well. It seems, though, that you feel victimized or condescended to, perhaps specifically as a woman, by the Church in some way. Is that so?

Please respond to my actual point about the distinction between salary and insurance.

Also, hiring a hit man is illegal; contraception is legal. Thus your alternative scenario is irrelevant here.

I am not sure why you think the Church is so paternalistic (I think you should actually say maternalistic, since the Church is traditionally referred to as “she”). Do you think she does not know that many of her employees use contraception? That it is easily available to them? She is not naive. Nevertheless, it violates her conscience and causes her to sin to subsidize her employee’s sexual sin. The government has no right to do so. I won’t presume to know your personal views on contraception, but perhaps to see this more clearly, you should run through the scenario with another action, one that is easily understood as sinful (as Leila mentioned, perhaps hiring a hit man).

Opponents of the mandate – like you – like to frame this issue as employers being forced to buy contraceptives and thereby violating their own consciences, religious liberty, etc. This misses the point. The employee has to choose to use birth control, just as if she buys it with her salary. The employer is not pre-emptively buying it for the employee. The employer is simply providing a resource – health insurance – and the employee is choosing how to use it, just like she may choose how to use the resource of her salary. Treating employees as adults means allowing them to use their resources as they choose, within the bounds of the law.

In other words, the employer is no more culpable for how the employee uses the resource of her health insurance than for how she uses the resource of her salary. Theoretically, no employees may choose to use contraception, despite it being included in their insurance coverage. And of course, as many have pointed out elsewhere, contraception is prescribed for many other reasons apart from family planning. Catholic employers can fulfill the mandate of the CCC you cited, Leila, by doing their best to persuade their employees that the Church’s prohibition on birth control is right and just; after all, as you pointed out, “sin is a personal act” – after they’ve done their best to explain the Church’s teaching, the moral decision is ultimately up to the employee.

It is that moral decision-making that opponents of the mandate want to take away in the name of “religious liberty.” That is why I have called their and your opposition fundamentally paternalistic, because it treats employees as children incapable of making moral decisions for themselves.

I do think you make an interesting point, and I wonder if there may be some cases where there can be legitimate moral reason to withhold some tax dollars in civil disobedience to things that the government does that go against our beliefs. I don’t really want to delve into it, because I’m honestly not sure, and for this discussion, it’s irrelevant because there is a significant difference between your tax scenario and the HHS mandate.

I came upon this quote that someone put over at http://littlecatholicbubble.blogspot.com/ that explains it better than I could:

From http://www.bookwormroom.com/2012/01/30/obamacare-the-catholic-church-and-mandatory-abortion-payments/:

I assume that those who are celebrating this mandate will contend that, throughout the Bush years, they were forced to see their tax dollars go to fund a war they did not support, one that saw thousands of people die. Likewise, those who oppose the death penalty must nevertheless pay taxes that fund the judicial and prison system. That argument is a red herring. The Constitution explicitly authorizes both war and capital punishment, which are legitimate government powers. Those who don’t like that reality are welcome to try a Constitutional amendment to wipe out the government’s war powers and do away with capital punishment. I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

There is nothing in the Constitution, however, that authorizes the Federal government (and, by extension through the 14th Amendment, any state government) to mandate that a religious institution be complicit in an act it believes constitutes murder. More to the point, the Constitutional grant of religious freedom, by which the government agrees to stay out of managing a religious institutions affairs, either practical or doctrinal, should prohibit such conduct entirely. This is one more example, as if we needed it, of the Obama administration’s fundamental lawlessness.

That came from the blog of a Jewish lawyer; as such he likely doesn’t even agree with the Church’s stance on contraception, but it doesn’t really matter since this is truly a matter of religious liberty. In fact, there are groups of all different faiths coming out of the woodwork that oppose this mandate. Seeing as how the Catholic Church stands alone in her opposition to contraception, we can assume that those other organizations and faiths recognize that birth control really isn’t what this is about. In fact, it’s interesting to me that the only people I have really come across that support this are either entirely secular or Catholics who do not adhere to the Church’s infallible teaching in this matter.

And never mind the idea that contraception is something that works towards the “common good.” That is highly debatable. Even categorizing contraception as “health care” let alone “preventative” is another stretch. But that is all tangential; this is a defense of religious liberty.