Whether or not the recent unanimous decision of the Supreme Court in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was just (I do not think it was), it’s clear that Cheryl Perich was not fired for religious reasons or indeed for any secularly legitimate reason.¹ Her firing would have been illegal had it been carried out by a secular organization. Shortly after the verdict was announced, The New York Times spoke out against it in a fairly sharp editorial. After reviewing the facts of the case and the court’s reasoning, the Times argued as follows:

The court’s conception of the ministerial role is more encompassing than it has been defined by state and federal appellate courts. Its sweeping deference to churches does not serve them or society wisely.

Recent legal decisions have so enlarged the scope of clerical benefit where it can be argued to pertain to religious establishjments and not to individuals as to constitute an establishment of religion (or so it seems to me) in clear violation of both the spirit and the letter of the first amendment. We’re now seeing this establishment flex its new muscles in ongoing disputes regarding the availability of health insurance coverage for contraception and abortion under the new federal health care law, in which Catholics and Evangelicals seem to be forming a political alliance that is going so far as to claim that its opposition to contraceptive coverage is based upon respect for the individual conscience and to demand a broad conscientious exemption that would include “employers with religious people running them or other people of conviction who are running them.”

If we follow the reasoning of the Supreme Court and the allied Bishops and Evangelicals we are not permitted to judge the morality of their position on the basis of it’s social consequences or it’s consequences to individuals who will be denied access to legal redress and necessary health protective services. This is a position that I believe can only be maintained by trivialization of the persons affected and the importance of the health care issues involved, more or less on the order of Foster Friess’s comments about birth control this past week; or as Melissa Moschella writes in the National Review Online:

Forcing employers or insurers to fund an activity that they believe to be gravely wrong is a denial of individual conscience rights. Is free access to contraceptives an equally fundamental moral right to be protected even at the cost of others’ conscience rights? Is it a prerequisite for a free and ordered society? Anyone inclined to say yes should consider the following question: Would it be worth risking one’s life or livelihood, emigrating to an unknown land, or fighting a revolution to secure all-expenses-paid access to contraceptive services? Only for those who have made sexual expression their religion.

It is in the nature of the sort of casuistry being used by the “religious” with respect to this issue to set up and attack straw persons and to pretend that wolves are sheep. The Catholic bishops’ design to impose Catholic teaching upon Catholics and non-Catholics alike is patently obvious.² It is laughable for Timothy Dolan to present himself and his fellow princes of the church as victims of presidential overreach. Indeed, according to a recent article in the National Catholic Reporter,

Perhaps Obama saw, as many of us do, the bishops’ actions as an attempt to legislate beliefs that they cannot get their own people to obey. . . . The sad truth is, if the numbers of Catholics leaving the church are any indication, most Catholics in the United States probably see the hierarchy more as victimizers than victimized.

Here’s some more casuistry. I’ve just received an email from Senator Roy Blunt in answer to a call I made last week to Senator McCaskill’s office urging her to oppose Blunt’s amendment to a transportation bill that would have attempted to repeal the contraception mandate. It reads in part:

In August 2011, the Administration announced its decision to mandate that all insurance companies and employers cover contraception and sterilizations with no copay. This unprecedented decision is an affront to the deeply held convictions of millions of Americans, which is why I introduced legislation to repeal the mandate. . . . The government should not force doctors to perform procedures or employers to provide coverage for services they view as immoral any more than the government should force treatments on Americans. The federal government has no business in a doctor’s examining room and the Administration’s actions have put our nation’s deep commitment to religious freedom in jeopardy.

But the controversy isn’t about anybody’s conscience.³ It’s about power, or more precisely it’s about the ability of the Catholic hierarchy and allied Evangelical groups to to command the power of the state to manage the lives and welfare of those millions of Americans Mr. Blunt pretends to represent. And of course Mr. Blunt and the Republicans don’t want to keep the government out of doctors’ examing rooms in states requiring that women seeking abortions undergo ultrasound examination. In Texas and Oklahoma the government requires doctors to force women to view the procedure, and in some other states the government forces doctors to perform invasive vaginal ultrasound examinations when that is required in order to perform the procedure during the first trimester of pregnancy.

Catholic and other religious organizations receive huge infusions of public monies from federal, state, and local sources, and for these purposes claim to be secular institutions, as I have pointed out in a previous post. One would think that such institutions would not then be able to claim (or be so mendacious as to claim) benefit of clergy. But consistency and common sense don’t matter in contests like this one. And now the legislature of my enlightened state is taking up the issue. As Planned Parenthood reports today:

SB749 sponsored by Senator John Lamping of St. Louis and HCR 41 from Representative Paul Curtman of Pacific seek to undo the new federal rule and allow any employer to deny birth control coverage to their employees simply because they have a “moral” objection to birth control.

Of course, using public money to fund access to contraception has been part of federal law since 1970, when the idea was introduced by a Representative from Texas, George Herbert Walker Bush.⁴ The enabling legislation passed the house by a majority of 298 to 32 and passed the Senate unanimously. It was signed into law by Richard Nixon. But the religious right aren’t going after Nixon or Bush the first. Their target is the current president.

More later—

Notes

¹Reviews of the case may be found here and here.
²As is the fact that Catholic teaching forbids most forms of contraception. In a related matter, Reed Abelson reports in today’s New York Times that Catholic hospitals are expanding by buying other hospitals and changing their character. See “Catholic Hospitals Expand, Religious Strings Attached.” In both cases the church’s practice is not persuasive but coercive.
³Ellis West, a constitutional scholar, has reviewed the issue of conscientious objection in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Among many enlightened things he writes is this: “At the time of the ratification of the Constitution, both its proponents and opponents agreed that the national government should have no jurisdiction over religion, i.e., should pass no laws dealing primarily or directly with religious beliefs and practices, and the religion clauses were added to the Constitution to make that clear. No one suggested then that they were also intended to prevent laws that the government could pass from being applied to persons or groups who did not want to obey them for reasons of conscience.” See “Catholic claims stretch the first amendment.”
⁴See Ann Gerhart’s piece in yesterday’s Washington Post, “Birth control as election issue? Why?“