Greetings all!
This post comes in the middle of harsh winter
conditions for portions of the country amid several tough political debates. In
this piece of commentary, I intend to address a topic not so covered by current
media. Namely, I will write my opinion on the provision of Obamacare which
requires that all employers provide birth control in their employee health
plans. This is not to say the issue has not resurfaced; many religious groups
have lobbed legal
battles against the provision. I have planned to write something
specifically about this for some time, and I feel now is as good a time as any.
This week’s quote comes from Carl Sagan, a man who contributed more to the popularization
of science and intelligent skepticism than most people on the planet, and for
that I am forever grateful to him.
Moving on, the Affordable Care Act does provide an
exemption from the birth control provision for religious institutions. However,
in order for any employer to be considered a religious institution, it must
meet four qualifying standards. These employers’ purposes must be to instill
religious values in people, they must employ and serve people whom share said
religious values, and they must be nonprofit groups. Unfortunately for them,
most of the institutions challenging Obamacare in court do not meet these four
standards, and therefore cannot opt out of the controversial coverage. While I
respect that the owners and leaders of these institutions feel their freedoms
are being infringed upon, there are a few things which prevent them from opting
out without meeting the legal requirements already established by Obamacare.
First, I shall argue why these employers cannot deny
birth control to their employees without meeting legal requirements. The first
requirement in the Affordable Care Act states that the employer must be one
which exists to instill religion. Therefore, a Pizza Hut cannot deny birth
control because the owner is Catholic (I do not know if this is true; this is
only an example). However, business owners have argued that providing said
birth control infringes upon their freedom of religion, so they should not have
to provide it under the freedoms guaranteed to them by the first amendment. The
problem with this argument is that their religious freedoms are not the
freedoms at stake here; the owners of these businesses do not have to use birth
control themselves. And because they are not a religious institution, they
cannot claim that the law infringes on the rights of said institution. The
rights at stake here are the employees’ rights to healthcare as provided by
their employers as guaranteed by Obamacare. To challenge that right given by
this law is to challenge the law itself, which has already been ruled
constitutional by the Supreme Court. Essentially, the argument becomes moot
because it circles to no useful end in the legal system; because there are no
reasonable legal objections that can be made, the fight to remove the provision
for birth control in this case cannot happen anyway.
The second and third provisions are typically tied
together: the institution must employ and serve people of similar religious
beliefs. To serve my points here, I’ll be using a Catholic church as my
example. Let’s say you are the priest at a Catholic church; you own that
church, you employ its workers, and you give sermons to your Catholic
congregants. For now, we’re going to ignore all the other people a Catholic
church may serve, i.e. by giving to the poor. The new law requires you to
provide birth control to your employees, but you reject this. However, you
cannot do this without confirming that every person you employ is a Catholic. If
even one employee is not a Catholic, you cannot withhold birth control because
you do not meet the legal requirements to be considered a religious
institution. You may say that it infringes on your personal religious beliefs,
but in truth withholding that birth control infringes on the healthcare rights
of any employee of yours that is not Catholic. In fact, denying that birth
control may infringe on the personal religious beliefs of your employees, in
which case you cannot say that your higher position in the church means you can
swing your religious weight around. The rights of your employees are equal to
your rights, and the more there are of them the more ridiculous your case is.
And now comes the final requirement under the law,
which states that the religious institution in question must be a nonprofit
group as is codified under federal tax law. This one rarely comes under much
scrutiny in America; most religious institutions like churches do fit the legal
requirements to be considered a nonprofit, mostly because churches do not
typically conduct commercial activities for profit. For the ones that do (say,
selling candied almonds from within the building to people whether they are
church members or not), they should not be considered wholly nonprofit
institutions, and therefore should not be able to opt out of birth control
coverage as a result. This is simpler to understand and argue for; if a
religious institution is making profits off of its work, it should be able to
handle providing birth control as a caveat even if the personal beliefs of the
leaders at that institution conflict with providing such coverage.
My last point is one which is especially more
contentious to make, in that I believe that no religious institution should be
able to opt out of the birth control coverage even if it meets all four legal
requirements under Obamacare. While at first glance this is because I oppose
the continuous gifting of loopholes to religion in American law, there is a
deeper piece to it. By giving an option to opt out to the leaders of religious
institutions instead of the employees, we place greater power towards religious
freedoms than we do to healthcare rights. And while the United States does not
have a tradition of universal healthcare, I still hold this as a right all
Americans deserve. By giving the ability to refuse this healthcare, we only
obstruct the process towards providing this long overdue right to the American
public. And while some may disagree on whether healthcare is a right or not, it
is my firm belief that everyone has the right to a life once they've got it.
Healthcare is necessary to that life, in my eyes.
That is the end of my argument, and I hope I’ve
provided sound reasoning for my cause. As always, I encourage constructive
criticism in the comments section. I am also open for my contact at my email of
zerospintop@live.com, my Facebook,
Twitter, Google+, Steam, Tumblr, and DeviantArt. Good night, and this is
KnoFear signing off.
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