Legal Expert: Contraception Regulation is no “War on Religion”
Republicans’ witnesses at yesterday’s House Oversight Committee hearing on the HHS religious exemption on contraception coverage unanimously condemned the accommodation released by the White House last week in response to initial concerns from religious employers.
The accommodation, which was commended by numerous religious organizations (including the Catholic Health Association and the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities) that expressed opposition to the initial regulation, ensures that religious employers neither have to pay for contraceptive services to which they morally object nor facilitate their employees’ access to them.
But critics of the policy, most prominently the Catholic Bishops who had a representative testify at yesterday’s hearing, are dismissing the accommodation as not solving their financial fungibility concerns; some are describing it as a mere “accounting gimmick.”
An analysis released today from prominent health law expert Timothy Jost (who dispelled the false claim that the Affordable Care Act included federal funding of abortions), takes issue with this characterization and validates the accommodation’s legal protections:
This rule is not a “war on religion,” but is rather an attempt to accommodate a serious public health need and a sincerely held religious and moral conviction. The regulation does not require anyone to use contraception nor does it require any religious organization that objects to contraception to pay for it. It neither prohibits nor requires a religious belief or practice.
In a related theological argument, David Gibson explored Catholic Moral Theology’s nuanced proscriptions about various levels of “cooperation with evil” in USA Today this week:
Under traditional Catholic thinking, Catholic employers whose insurance companies provide contraceptive coverage to employees at no cost to the employee or the institution, and without the institution’s involvement, are engaged in what is called “remote material cooperation” — a perfectly legitimate way for a Catholic individual or organization to function in a sinful world.
“In fact, unless you live in a monastery that doesn’t have investments, it’s unlikely you are innocent of remote material cooperation with something the church condemns,” Matthew Boudway, an editor at Commonweal, a lay-run Catholic periodical, wrote on the magazine’s blog.