Recently, 43 Catholic organizations filed about a dozen lawsuits against the federal government. The groups feel that the federal requirement that all health insurance plans must cover birth control violates their religious freedom. This argument has no legal merit.
There has been an ongoing battle regarding birth control. The federal government defines birth control as part of women’s preventative care. All preventative care must be covered by a health insurance plan without cost to the policyholder. Not long after this requirement was made, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops led several Catholic organizations in a series of complaints about the requirement.
To make a long story short, the Catholic groups who have filed the most recent lawsuits feel that the requirement violates their religious freedom. They repeatedly insist that if a Catholic, or Christian, organization, business, hospital, or university has to offer an employee (or student) health plan that covers the cost of birth control that this is forcing the business to go against it’s religious beliefs. I’m not sure when, exactly, a business, hospital, or university gained the sentience required to personally form a religious belief of any kind, but here we are.
The Obama administration has allowed churches, mosques, and synagogues to be exempt from the birth control coverage requirement. However, the USCCB wants all businesses to have the same exemption, religious or not.
It isn’t hard to see that the true purpose of all this complaining is to prevent women from having access to birth control. After all, faithful, devout, Catholic women who have been taught that the use of birth control is against their religion’s beliefs would never use it, right? The Catholic church is trying to gain that type of control over women who don’t happen to be Catholic. It is attempting to force its religious beliefs upon all Americans, by filing lawsuit after lawsuit, hoping that one will be decided it it’s favor.
Fortunately, it turns out that the argument that birth control coverage violates the religious beliefs of a business has no legal merit. Sarah Lipton-Lubet is the policy council for the American Civil Liberties Union. She wrote a really informative blog about this subject. She points out that the rule about birth control coverage is constitutional, it violates no federal law, and that it is vitally important for women.
Here is quote from her blog:
“First principles of First Amendment law, as currently interpreted by the courts, are as follows: the Free Exercise Clause does not require any exemptions from a neutral law of general applicability. As the Supreme Court held two decades ago, in an opinion authored by Justice Antonin Scalia, to do otherwise would be to create a system “in which each conscience is a law unto itself.” Translation? If it applies equally and doesn’t target any faith, it’s not a First Amendment violation. The contraceptive coverage rule applies to everybody and doesn’t target anybody; end of story.”
Image by Mike Licht on Flickr