MyQuest | my thoughts on life's journey

Pre-natal health care for immigrants

Nebraska's governor opposes the Parable of the Good Samaritan, or at least doesn't understand it, it seems to me.  The legislature overwhelmingly approved (including many Republicans who said the vote was pro-life) a bill to reinstate prenatal medical care for undocumented immigrants.  The governor says he won't spend tax-payer money on "illegals."  He says,

“I have a very good sense where Nebraskans are at on this issue,” he said.  “They tell me over and over, I play by the rules, I pay taxes, and you're going to use my tax dollars for illegals? That's the issue.”

That's NOT the issue.  It's completely irrelevant from a moral perspective.  We care for each other.  That's true to our Midwestern values.  That's what Jesus taught us, and that's who we are as human beings. 

How can someone so fundamentally misunderstand basically human morality?

UPDATE:
The Nebraska Senate overrode the governor's veto!!!

ACA case is about freedom . . . but in a dark way

Dahlia Lithwick of Slate writes about the questioning over the individual mandate and finally comes to understand why the right has kept talking about this being an issue of freedom.  They want to be free of of covenant, our social contract, our commitment to the common good.  Lithwick writes:

This morning in America’s highest court, freedom seems to be less about the absence of constraint than about the absence of shared responsibility, community, or real concern for those who don’t want anything so much as healthy children, or to be cared for when they are old. Until today, I couldn’t really understand why this case was framed as a discussion of “liberty.” This case isn’t so much about freedom from government-mandated broccoli or gyms. It’s about freedom from our obligations to one another, freedom from the modern world in which we live. It’s about the freedom to ignore the injured, walk away from those in peril, to never pick up the phone or eat food that’s been inspected. It’s about the freedom to be left alone. And now we know the court is worried about freedom: the freedom to live like it’s 1804.

E. J. Dionne criticizes the hearings on the Affordable Care Act

Dionne points out how the justices acted more like legislators discussing the merit of various portions of the law rather than discussing the constitutional points at issue.  He further discusses the individual mandate and its origin in conservative political policy, rooted in our social contract with one another.

I found this paragraph important as well:

Liberals should learn from this display that there is no point in catering to today’s hard-line conservatives. The individual mandate was a conservative idea that President Obama adopted to preserve the private market in health insurance rather than move toward a government-financed, single-payer system. What he got back from conservatives was not gratitude but charges of socialism — for adopting their own proposal.

Andrew Sullivan on social wedge issues now working FOR the Democrats

In the wake of the Komen episode, contraception, and new rulings on gay marriage, Andrew Sullivan writes convincingly that the traditional culture war wedge issues are now playing to Democrat advantage.  Read the entire essay, but here are some of my favourite excerpts, particularly on the Catholic church and contraception:

And on the issue of contraception itself, studies have shown that a staggering 98 percent of Catholic women not only believe in birth control but have used it. How is it possible to describe this issue as a violation of individual conscience, when no one is forced to use contraception against their will, and most Catholics have already consulted their conscience, are fine with the pill, and want it covered? 

And the truth is, there is no real debate among most actual living, breathing American Catholics on the issue, who tend to be more liberal than most Americans. They long ago dismissed the Vatican’s position on this. And after the sex-abuse scandal, they are even less likely to take the bishops’ moral authority on sexual matters seriously.

Before the compromise, the spokesman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops went even further, arguing that entirely secular corporations, if owned or run by faithful Catholics, should be able to exclude contraception from their employees’ health-insurance coverage.

This kind of rhetoric is not about protecting religious freedom. It is about imposing a particular religious doctrine on those who don’t share it as a condition for general employment utterly unrelated to religion at all. And if that is the hill the Catholic hierarchy and evangelical right want to fight and die on, they will lose—and lose badly. 

To make the Republican rhetoric even more absurd, the precompromise version of the Obama insurance rule is already the law in two of the biggest states, New York and California, as Linda Greenhouse has noted in The New York Times. Moreover, as Nick Baumann has documented in Mother Jones, contraception has already been legally required in all health-insurance plans since the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled in 2000 that omitting it was unconstitutional sex discrimination. (The Bush administration did nothing to oppose the ruling.) And yet Pastor Rick Warren said last week that he would be prepared to go to jail over the Obama rule (making one wonder why, as a resident of California, he isn’t sitting in a cell already). So with this new compromise, Obama has actually increased religious freedom, not restricted it. All of which makes one wonder exactly how genuine the current outrage is—or whether it is part and parcel of a political campaign against Obama rather than a defense of religious freedom.

Romneycare contained exactly the same provisions on contraception that Obamacare did before last week’s compromise was announced. That’s right: Romneycare can now accurately be portrayed as falling to the left of Obamacare on the contraception issue.

Why do employers have power over women's bodies?

That the question which is raised by this absurd squabble over contraception this week.  Dana Goldstein writes:

There’s nothing more predictable in American politics than hard-core religious conservative opposition to common-sense policies on women’s sexual health. In the past, the Obama administration buckled on insurance coverage of abortion in order to save the overall goals of health-care reform; it’s a relief to see that on the far-less controversial issue of birth control, they won’t be doing the same.

It's worth remembering, however, that today's compromise is necessitated by the unfortunate fact that in the United States, employers are the intermediaries between citizens and their medical care. In a rational world, a woman’s boss would have no influence whatsoever over how she conducts her sex life. But since single-payer health care is nowhere on the horizon, we aren't likely to get relief from the reproductive health care culture wars any time soon.

 

Birth control change

At first I was annoyed by the change in policy announced today, as I felt the previous ruling defended personal liberty (including religious liberty) -- my denomination took a similar stance.  But, then, I read Ruth Marcus' column on the change in policy and felt okay with it.  Here's an excerpt:

The compromise — in the Obama administration’s assessment, non-compromise — announced by the White House is, in essence, a huge regulatory fig leaf.

Women who work for religiously affiliated institutions that morally object to contraception will nonetheless have access to contraceptive coverage free of charge, just as women who work for other employers. They won’t have to sign up for any different coverage or pay any additional money.

The employers, for their part, won’t have to pay for the coverage, say they offer it or even direct employees to places where they can obtain it. The extra cost, and here is where the fig leaf comes in, will be born by the insurance companies themselves.

This is, of course, a dodge — a quite clever and positive one. Everyone gets to say that the religious institutions aren’t “paying for” contraception. But if covering contraception ends up costing them money, you can be sure those costs will be passed along, as costs always are, to customers.

 

Denominations support birth control rule

A number of denominations and religious groups, including the UCC, today issued a statement supporting the Dept. of Health and Human Services ruling on contraception being provided by insurance companies.  It reads, in part:

"We respect individuals' moral agency to make decisions about their sexuality and reproductive health without governmental interference or legal restrictions. We do not believe that specific religious doctrine belongs in health-care reform – as we value our nation's commitment to church-state separation. We believe that women and men have the right to decide whether or not to apply the principles of their faith to family planning decisions, and to do so they must have access to services. 

"The Administration was correct in requiring institutions that do not have purely sectarian goals to offer comprehensive preventive health care. Our leaders have the responsibility to safeguard individual religious liberty and to help improve the health of women, their children and families. Hospitals and universities across the religious spectrum have an obligation to assure that individuals' conscience and decisions are respected and that their students and employees have access to this basic health care service. 

Poll: Majority of Catholics support employers providing birth control

Once again the hierarchy is out-of-step with their congregations (itself not a bad thing, as sometimes you must lead, but in this case it seems to be more a case of being obstinate).  A poll reveals that a majority of Roman Catholics support employers providing birth control.

On a separate, but related, note, my friend Mike Piazza tweeted this morning about the "Komen question," can we work with people we disagree with.  That seems to be the question facing the church with the birth control question as well.  And it is relevant here in Omaha as we debate an ordinance to ban employment discrimination.  I hope in America that we answer that question yes.

Pink Ribbons Inc.

Bishop wrong on religious liberty

Lincoln's Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz has declared about the new HHS ruling that "Our American religious liberty is in grave jeopardy."  Read the full article here.  

What he has gotten wrong is that the ruling actually protects the religious liberty of employees.

The new rule requires all employers to provide health insurance that pays for birth control, female sterilization procedures and "the morning after" pill.   It does not include abortion (unfortunately).  It exempts churches and other institutions whose primary purpose is to foster religious belief and that mainly employ people who hold those beliefs.  It does not exempt religious hospitals, universities and church-affiliated social services agencies because these businesses and institutions often employ people of different faiths and no faith.

And here is where the ruling actually protects religious liberty and the pluralism of America.  It protects the religious liberty of the employee without in any way coercing the church or church members to change their position or doctrine.  It follows from already existing law which says that an employer cannot discriminate against an employee on the basis of religion.

The bishop's remarks are so over-heated as to be ridiculous and absurd.

If they want to participate in American life, they cannot impose their religious beliefs upon others who believe differently.