Dan Nejfelt, Faith in Public Life’s Senior Editor and Training Coordinator, worked at Sojourners magazine as part of his graduate study of journalism at the University of Missouri before coming to FPL. Prior to that, he taught remedial reading and writing to 7th and 8th graders in rural Arkansas as a Teach For America corps member. Dan blogs about health care, the Religious Right and budget issues.
February 10, 2012, 2:12 pm | By Dan Nejfelt
This morning the Obama administration announced an important solution to the intense controversy regarding religious exemptions to the Affordable Care Act’s mandate that contraceptive services be covered without copayment in health insurance plans. The policy will ensures that religious institutions won’t have to provide coverage of or referrals for contraception, but also guarantees that women employed by these institutions will have access to contraception without a co-pay. If a woman’s employer is an objecting university, hospital or other religious institution, her insurer will be required to initiate contact and offer her coverage at no cost.
A broad range of leaders and stakeholders have welcomed the new exemption policy, showing that it’s a true common-ground solution.
The Catholic Health Association, which runs hundreds of hospitals across the country, supported the Affordable Care Act, and strongly criticized of the administration’s originally crafted religious exemption, lauded the decision:
We are pleased and grateful that the religious liberty and conscience protection needs of so many ministries that serve our country were appreciated enough that an early resolution of this issue was accomplished. The unity of Catholic organizations in addressing this concern was a sign of its importance.
Read the whole statement here.
Planned Parenthood Federation of America commended the administration for preserving women’s access to preventive health services:
In the face of a misleading and outrageous assault on women’s health, the Obama administration has reaffirmed its commitment to ensuring all women will have access to birth control coverage, with no costly co-pays, no additional hurdles, and no matter where they work.
We believe the compliance mechanism does not compromise a woman’s ability to access these critical birth control benefits.
Read the whole statement here.
Religious liberty expert Melissa Rogers, former chair of President Obama’s inaugural Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, who criticized the original religious exemption as too narrow, said:
Given the White House description of the revised rule, it both resolves the religious liberty concerns and respects the interests of Americans who would like to have these important health benefits. President Obama and his administration deserve great credit for implementing a solution that honors free exercise rights and fairness. I deeply appreciate the fact that the White House has taken the religious community’s concerns so seriously.
Read the whole statement here.
Catholic United executive director James Salt said:
Catholics United has been calling on both sides of this heated debate to work towards today’s win-win solution. President Obama has shown us that he is willing to rise above the partisan fray to deliver an actual policy solution that both meets the health care needs of all employees and respects the religious liberty of Catholic institutions.
…
I am eager to see the response of the Catholic bishops, and I hope and pray in their wisdom they see the value of finding a solution. If the bishops are unwilling to recognize the value of compromise, I suspect their opposition is more about playing politics than serving the needs of the people.
Read the whole statement here.
Such a broad range of support demonstrates real common ground, shows that preventive health care and religious liberty are reconcilable priorities, and shows just how ridiculous are the accusations that President Obama is waging a “war on religion.”
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February 9, 2012, 3:07 pm | By Dan Nejfelt
In a rambling post including swipes at Jim Wallis, Barry Lynn, the Social Gospel, the liberal media and Jeremiah Wright, Erick Erickson accused President Obama of “perverting the words of Christ to pursue his tax plan” at the National Prayer Breakfast last week. Here are the President’s remarks that so offended Erickson:
And when I talk about shared responsibility, it’s because I genuinely believe that in a time when many folks are struggling, at a time when we have enormous deficits, it’s hard for me to ask seniors on a fixed income, or young people with student loans, or middle-class families who can barely pay the bills to shoulder the burden alone. And I think to myself, if I’m willing to give something up as somebody who’s been extraordinarily blessed, and give up some of the tax breaks that I enjoy, I actually think that’s going to make economic sense.
But for me as a Christian, it also coincides with Jesus’s teaching that “for unto whom much is given, much shall be required.”
Erickson claims that the President’s allusion to this passage (Luke 12:48) distorts its meaning. Here’s the heart of his complaint:
Christ was not talking about money. The President, in making the case for his tax plan using that passage of scripture, perverts Christ’s meaning. Christ was talking explicitly about the blessings flowing from God to the apostles and us through the Word and the need to proclaim Christ as the Living God.
I’ll leave aside the fact that Erickson fails to explain why Christ would deem it a “perversion” to draw lessons about material stewardship from a parable about spiritual stewardship. It’s not exactly a leap – the parable of the rich fool is in the same chapter of Luke. And rather than proclaiming that the parable definitively means Jesus would support his tax plan, President Obama is simply applying its lesson to his own beliefs on the matter.
What struck me most was Erickson’s self-contradiction. By the standard he lays out, the lessons of Scripture are relevant strictly within the literal confines of their immediate context. Applying a passage’s lesson to other contexts and situations “perverts” it. However, Erickson commits this very act elsewhere in his post by invoking God’s command that Adam and Eve to “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28) as a justification for opposing contraception.
He thus contends it’s perfectly legitimate to argue that God’s specific command for the first humans to populate an empty world should dictate that millennia later, in a world that is thoroughly populated, women should not use specific methods to control the timing and number of their pregnancies. If it’s permissible for Erickson to apply the lessons of Genesis to 21st-century medicine, why is it impermissible for the President to apply a parable about spiritual stewardship to his personal beliefs about material stewardship? Erickson’s trying to have it both ways — extrapolation by me, but not by thee.
Furthermore, Erickson would do well to dial down the self-righteous lectures. A Christian who finds the electrocution of his fellow children of God spectacularly entertaining ought to reexamine his own understanding of the faith before accusing others of “perverting” it.
I sympathize with Erickson a little bit. I too take umbrage when I believe leaders inappropriately use Scripture to advance their political beliefs. But that doesn’t make it right for Erickson to subject a fellow Christian to half-baked accusations of “perversion” and hypocritical condemnations.
Also: what Tim King said.
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February 2, 2012, 4:30 pm | By Dan Nejfelt
As Nick highlighted, President Obama’s remarks at today’s National Prayer Breakfast included, among many important points, a thoughtful explanation of how his faith informs his political beliefs about budget and tax policy. Unfortunately, these remarks have already been misinterpreted in the media. Ed Kilgore has the scoop:
So President Obama spoke at this morning’s National Prayer Breakfast, and it’s not just conservative gabbers who are mocking him for allegedly claiming direct divine sanction for his policy proposals. Here’s Politico’s stupid headline: “Obama: Jesus Would Tax the Rich.”
…But matter of fact, Obama did not claim Jesus as co-author of his policies: He merely suggested that they are influenced by the values taught by Jesus, as he understands them. He went far out of his way to try to make that clear, saying: “Our goal should not be to declare our policies as biblical. It is God who is infallible, not us.”
Connecting authentic faith to contentious political issues is an inherently difficult but worthy endeavor. Perhaps more political leaders would try to do so if their words wouldn’t be so grossly taken out of context.
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February 2, 2012, 12:54 pm | By Dan Nejfelt
The results of this week’s Florida primary raise serious questions about the political influence of Religious Right leaders. As Amy Sullivan has pointed out, conservative Christian elites – men like James Dobson, Tony Perkins, the late Jerry Falwell – have rarely seen their favorite candidate win the GOP presidential nomination. I’m sure they’re used to settling for second best by now, but this year’s contest must be particularly frustrating.
As we’ve noted before a who’s-who of the religious right had an emergency summit in Texas just two weeks ago for the expressed purpose of coalescing around a conservative candidate, and the implicit purpose of stopping Mitt Romney. Nonetheless, Romney cruised to a crushing victory in Florida. Rick Santorum, the group’s favorite, finished a distant third, and Newt Gingrich, their second choice, finished 14 points behind Romney and outperformed him among white evangelicals by a mere two percentage points.
In other words, it would be tough to argue that these religious right leaders had any effect in Florida. But before we go declaring them dead, it’s important to note that while their influence over the outcome of the primary was negligible, the fact that every candidate espouses social conservative positions indicates that they’re still agenda setters in the GOP.
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January 25, 2012, 1:15 pm | By Dan Nejfelt
State of the Union addresses err toward the formulaic. The laundry lists of policy proposals, the obligatory proclamations that we’re the greatest nation ever, the media gossip about who sits next to whom, and the endless applause always strike me as rather trite. But once in a while a speech includes simple yet substantive moral arguments about the ideas driving our political debates. Among several important points last night, President Obama’s unapologetic rebuke of “class warfare” rhetoric stood out as one of those moments:
Now, you can call this class warfare all you want. But asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes? Most Americans would call that common sense.
We don’t begrudge financial success in this country. We admire it. When Americans talk about folks like me paying my fair share of taxes, it’s not because they envy the rich. It’s because they understand that when I get tax breaks I don’t need and the country can’t afford, it either adds to the deficit, or somebody else has to make up the difference – like a senior on a fixed income; or a student trying to get through school; or a family trying to make ends meet. That’s not right. Americans know it’s not right. They know that this generation’s success is only possible because past generations felt a responsibility to each other, and to their country’s future, and they know our way of life will only endure if we feel that same sense of shared responsibility.
For years, conservative cries of “class warfare” have shut down the crucial debate about building a just, moral economy that ensures opportunity and basic security for all. As long as I’ve been paying attention to politics, faith leaders have never been deterred by this, but too many politicians have. The President’s direct confrontation of those who stifle the debate with cheap (but effective) rhetorical tools marks a turning point that has been years in the making.
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