In Birth Control Debate, Religious Beliefs Don’t Trump Rights

by WENDY KAMINER
The Atlantic

You might expect the Catholic Bishops to recognize an Inquisition when they see one. But listening to their laments about the administration’s “unprecedented assaults” on religious liberty, you’d think Barack Obama was the second coming of Torquemada. Reasonable people will differ about the justice or wisdom of requiring church-affiliated employers to include contraceptive coverage in employee health insurance plans, but only unreasonable ones will regard this requirement as the coup de grace of religious liberty. Churches are exempt from the obligation to provide reproductive health care coverage; the requirement applies instead to affiliated hospitals, schools, and other institutions that generally receive public support to employ and serve religiously diverse members of the general public.

What accounts for the rhetorical excesses of the Catholic Church and its advocates on the campaign trail and in the media? They reflect some genuine outrage, no doubt. But, in part, the rhetoric is an organizing tool (which may succeed in wresting new concessions from the administration). And in part, it reflects larger rhetorical trends: We inhabit a culture of hyperbole, especially during election years. Every argument is a gunfight (to which someone mistakenly brings a knife), every gunfight is a war, and every war a potential apocalypse.

Still, while the fate of American civilization doesn’t depend on this debate about the obligations of church-affiliated institutions to abide by secular law, the stakes are relatively high. As government workers are laid off and government programs shrink, the public role of private, tax-exempt non-profits expands. The stronger their right to dispense public funds and deliver public services according to sectarian religious dictates, the weaker our rights to a non-sectarian public sphere. It’s a zero-sum game.
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