Catholic Institutions Ignore Individuals' Rights

[dtotire]

Catholic Institutions Ignore Individuals' Rights



By MAURA CASEY The Hartford Courant

2:10 p.m. EDT, June 2, 2012

Compromise seems unlikely now that Catholic institutions have sued over a federal requirement that employee health insurance must include contraception. Even though insurance companies, not religious institutions, will have to pay for the coverage, many American Catholic bishops echo Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C.: "What is at stake here is a question of human freedom."

Cardinal Wuerl is absolutely right. The core issue is as old as America's founding: The freedom of an individual not to be dominated by the dictates of religion, and certainly not to have her health and her life decided by an all-male, unmarried clergy. Silly me, I never thought it was necessary to argue over whether or not America is a theocracy or a democracy, but apparently, times have changed.

The issue goes beyond providing access to birth control pills, although that's important enough — and often necessary to treat medical conditions from fibroid tumors to painful menstrual cramps. Catholic institutions such as universities and non-profit agencies provide health coverage to as many as 700,000 employees, many of them non-Catholic. Surveys show that coverage is all over the map. Some cover contraception and some refuse. Some won't cover tubal ligations to prevent pregnancies, even when medically necessary, and some do. Patient counseling about using condoms to avoid disease is often a non-starter.

Religious rules are often the rule — unless government intervenes. More than two dozen states require church-run institutions to provide contraceptive coverage. The Obama Administration's compromise is based on regulations that courts have upheld in New York and California. They limit exemptions to purely religious employers such as houses of worship, but require other religious-affiliated institutions to comply. They make for good public policy and improve women's health. Insurance companies, not churches, would have to pay for the coverage.

more:
http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/hc-op-casey-catholic-church-ignores-individuals-co-20120601,0,4866539.story

[dtexdem]

1. It's not true that those institutions ignore individuals' rights:

rather, they have a history, and an ongoing strategy, of attacking those rights. They don't ignore rights, they wish to destroy them.