President Barack Obama has recently declared a compromise on the HHS mandate requiring religious institutions to purchase abortions, sterilizations, and other birth prevention measures. His compromise is simple: while religious institutions are not required to pay for these birth prevention measures, insurance companies will be requires to provide what the President called "free birth control."
First of all, is this an improvement? The money health insurance companies use to pay for medical procedures comes from their clients. They collect premiums and co-pays from the insured group or risk pool. If every health insurance company will now be mandated to pay for birth control, does that not mean that every client will pay for birth prevention? And if every client will pay for it, how can religious institutions not be one of those clients? No matter what the Obama administration says, the money to cover those contraception costs will come from the religious organizations that must now, by law, purhacse that insurance and pay those premiums.
Second, is this a compromise? That would require that President Obama were able to mandate churches to do anything in the first place. Senator Rand Paul says he has no power, and equated it to tyranny. Chris Matthews said much the same, comparing the HHS mandate to biblical despots forcing Jews to eat pork. Even most of the major news outlets and commentators on the subject says that the President has no authority to tell the churches what to do in this matter.
It would seem that nothing has changed. The source of the money going into contraception has not changed. As a client of these insurance companies, the employers, in this case Catholic institutions, would still be paying for things they do not believe in, but the money would be going through the insurance company. It is still the money of the religious institutions financing contraception, abortion, and sterilization.
Four years ago, contraception was a matter of conscience. Now, "free" contraception has somehow become a right?
This morning on MSNBC's Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski pointed out to Cardinal Donal Wuerl of Washington DC that "many" Catholic use contraceptives.
Wuerl replied
I don't want to shock you, but there are even Catholics in jail.... there are Catholics who do bad things. And there are Catholics that do things they know their church is opposed to ... that doesn't mean they're going to say "Because I don't live up to all the rules of the Church, the government should be able to silence my church."
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