“I think most of us would agree that if we want to cover all Americans, we can’t make the mistake of trying to fix what isn’t broken. So if somebody has insurance they like, they should be able to keep that insurance.”
— President Barack Obama, 2009
Those words simply were not true. If you worked at a religious institution in 2009 and were satisfied with your insurance coverage, you would not be allowed to keep it after passage of Obamacare.
Your employer would be required, in fact, to cover additional services that might offend your deepest moral beliefs. And that remains the case today, despite last Friday’s much ballyhooed but hollow “compromise” by the president.
Most media coverage of the rule requiring religious institutions to offer contraception coverage has focused exclusively on objections of the Catholic Church. To some extent this is natural, given the church’s size. But it’s also convenient, since the church’s far-reaching opposition to artificial contraception is considered puzzling and impractical by most Americans — including, it seems, by the many Catholics who ignore it.
Yet this selective focus overlooks the fact that the administration’s rule also offends religious outfits that have no problem with contraception per se. In late December, for example, Colorado Christian University in Lakewood became the second institution in the nation to file suit over the rule, not because the school objects to artificial birth control but because it objects to abortion.
As the university notes in a lawsuit prepared by The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, it has barred similar coverage in the past. Indeed, “when Colorado Christian was earlier informed that its insurance carrier had unilaterally included coverage for abortion in its insurance plan, it immediately required the insurance carrier to terminate that coverage.”
And yet the Obamacare mandate requires the school to cover Plan B and Ella (the “morning-after” and “week-after” pills), which prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg. “The university has a sincere religious objection to providing coverage for Plan B and Ella since it believes … the prevention by artificial means of the implantation of a human embryo to be an abortion,” the suit says.
The administration argues these drugs do not induce abortions, but as the Becket Fund observes, “The White House’s beliefs about when abortion can occur are irrelevant — most Christian denominations … believe that taking drugs to prevent implantation is an immoral abortion.”
No doubt that’s why the National Association of Evangelicals, the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities and other groups also oppose the mandate as a violation of religious freedom. So does the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, for that matter.
Last week’s “compromise” supposedly exempts religious organizations from having to pay for such coverage (it will be provided “free” by the insurer, you see) or from informing employees of the coverage. That will be the insurer’s duty.
But as a multidenominational group of scholars led by law professors at Harvard, Princeton and Notre Dame retorted in a statement Tuesday, “It does not matter who explains the terms of the policy … What matters is what services the policy covers. … It is an insult to the intelligence of Catholics, Protestants, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Jews, Muslims, and other people of faith and conscience to imagine that they will accept an assault on their religious liberty if only it is covered up by a cheap accounting trick.”
So is Colorado Christian placated by Obama’s move? Hardly. “It’s a distinction without a difference,” CCU President Bill Armstrong told me, insisting the mandate should offend all Americans who believe in freedom of conscience, from church-goer to agnostic.
“Anyone who is a freedom-lover has a stake in the outcome.”
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com. Follow him on Twitter @vcarrollDP.