Many of us stayed up to midnight last night and watched the ball come down in Times Square. If you were still sober enough to notice, the person triggering the dissent was none other than Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor. It turns out that that was not the only thing that she was doing on New Year’s Eve. Late Tuesday with only hours to go before January 1st — and the activation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) — Sotomayor granted a stay requested by Catholic-affiliated groups to prevent the implementation of part of the ACA to require them to supply contraceptive services to employees in violation of their religious beliefs. The decision follows a refusal of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit to issue a stay. The stay order by Sotomayor was requested from Catholic nuns running the Little Sisters of the Poor Home for the Aged in Denver and now joins a stay issued earlier by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
The decision guarantees that no one will have morning after regrets today in allowing the law to be implemented without a final resolution of the religious freedom claims. Sotomayor could still lift the stay since she gave the Obama Administration until 10 am EST on Friday to respond to the order. Until then, the government is “temporarily enjoined from enforcing against applicants the contraceptive coverage requirements imposed by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.”
The decision is a victory for the Becket Fund, which argued that “the ‘accommodation’ still forces the Little Sisters to find an insurer who will cover sterilization, contraceptive and abortion-inducing drugs and devices.”
The stay makes sense given the Court’s decision to hear similar arguments in the Hobby Lobby case discussed earlier. The case involves objections from businesses and individuals like David Green, founder and CEO of Hobby Lobby, who insist that the Act’s required support for contraceptive services violates religious rights. Two cases were accepted: Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. (13-354); and Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. v. Sebelius (13-356).
Under the ACA, non-for-profit religious corporation have an exemption. However, Hobby Lobby is a for-profit company that is run according to the family’s religious beliefs. These new Catholic-affliated groups are not parts of the Church but educational institutions like Catholic University and other types of enterprises.
While the Obama Administration arranged for insurers to pay for such services for religious objectors, that compromise would still require the businesses to sign off on the payment for services in contradiction to their beliefs. Such stays are significant legally because they are granted on a view that the party is likely to prevail on the merits. Earlier a D.C. Circuit panel split 2-1 in granting a similar stay. Judge David S. Tatel dissented in the case, concluding “[b]ecause I believe that appellants are unlikely to prevail on their claim that the challenged provision imposes a ‘substantial burden’ under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, I would deny their application for an injunction pending appeal.”
Putting aside that standard, the decision could reflect an accommodation for those members who granted cert in Hobby Lobby. The decision freezes the status quo and, if not reversed after Friday, would allow the Court to proceed to the merits in the Hobby Lobby case without having chaos over whether and how the provision can be enforced. That case is expected to be argued in March and decided by summer.
Ah, who needs documentation when you have the word of the most experienced well traveled, all around expert on all things’ word? I asks ya.;)
Nick, you are ,,,,ahem…mistaken. They did protect their gold. Do you suppose they had no attorneys advising them thirty – forty years ago? Do you suppose that no bishops called their attorneys for advice when the first Mom called to complain about Father Mike putting his hands on her son?
Fukc! Aren’t you the guy who always says follow the money? Are you the guy that always told us government can’t be trusted? All bureaucrats are corrupt? And isn’t the Church just one great big rich “government” run big great big rich privileged corporation men? Or do you believe they were pious, loving, caring men whose first thought was to “suffer the little children to come unto Him”? And gave not one thought about their liability should they be sued but ran to consult the Bible?
How about a “Nick” argument? I’ve had many a beer with a RC priest. And they have all admitted that the Church’s first concern their wealth. Should I further support my unassailable “Nick” argument that my cousin was a priest and that’s what he told me? Or how about I once worked in a parish office so I know all about this. Or maybe the fact that I once lived down the street from a RC church? Or that my dear old dad always said to me “the nuns are wonderful but watch out for the priests”. Or that my sister’s first grade teacher’s boyfriend went into the priesthood and he was an a**hole, so there’s that. Or once when I was having tea with the Queen she said that the Tudors had the right idea. That was after I had just come back from interviewing Mother Teresa and I wasn’t too impressed with her. Or maybe you would be more convinced if I told you that Valerie Jarrett worked for the Chicago (natch) cardinal and she got him to hire the Black Panthers as security guards for the piles of gold stored under the cardinal’s mansion. I could provide you with all sorts of documentation, but I know you’re not into that stuff that the elites call “research”. I trust you’ll be content with those delicious kumquats and pitted prunes.
It is an abuse for allow any employer to exempt themselves from the law that also impacts non believers of that employers religious beliefs.
rafflaw wrote: “It is an abuse for allow any employer to exempt themselves from the law that also impacts non believers of that employers religious beliefs.”
Or you might consider that if people have to lay aside their constitutionally protected rights in order to employ others, or to buy and sell products, then maybe something is wrong with the law and not with the people yelling ouch!
If the abusive law were not in place to being with, nobody would have to be exempted from anything. This is the problem with all laws that start with exemptions. Exemptions are created within the law from the very beginning to hide their abusive nature and garner enough votes to get them to pass. If one thinks about it, exemptions imply that the law is a law of INEQUALITY.
Once these class based laws are passed, that does not mean they are good law. From the perspective of Natural Law Theory, they would be no law at all if they violate a fundamental right of someone. From the perspective of the evil politicians passing these laws, the law is a stepping stone to their nefarious objectives.
I remember him being a good reporter. I’ve dealt w/ my share of print and broadcast journalists and most are less than impressive and a-holes.
I had phone contact w/ Rezendes and email contact w/ another reporter. I don’t feel like researching it. It’s still apples and grapefruit. Thanks for the informative links!!!
The Boston Globe
Spotlight Investigation: Abuse in the Catholic Church
http://www.boston.com/globe/spotlight/abuse/
The Boston Globe had a team of investigative reporters investigating and reporting on clergy sexual abuse in Massachusetts. It wasn’t just one reporter. There were hundreds of stories on the subject printed in the Boston Globe. I was very close to someone who worked in the mental health field who helped uncover what was going on. Some of the clergy involved in the scandal lived in “my back yard.”
*****
How the Boston Globe exposed the abuse scandal that rocked the Catholic church
The tenacity of Boston Globe journalists in uncovering the scandal of widespread sexual abuse by priests led to the current crisis in the Catholic church. And there’s more to come, as Jon Henley reports
Jon Henley
The Guardian, Wednesday 21 April 2010
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/apr/21/boston-globe-abuse-scandal-catholic
Excerpt:
In June 2001, Cardinal Bernard Law, archbishop of Boston, perhaps the most staunchly Catholic of all America’s big cities, filed a routine court submission in response to a number of allegations contained in lawsuits brought against one of his former priests, Father John Geoghan.
At the time, sexual abuse of minors by Roman Catholic clerics was not a widespread topic of discussion, in the US or anywhere else. Cases would surface, and sometimes be quite extensively reported: in 1981, Father Donald Roemer pleaded guilty to child molestation in Los Angeles; in 1985, a Louisiana priest, Gilbert Gauthe, was convicted of similar offences against 11 boys. But they were seen, for the most part, as isolated incidents. There was no convincing evidence of any consistent pattern of clerical abuse, still less of a sustained attempt by the church to cover up such behaviour – by simply moving priests on without informing the authorities.
Cardinal Law’s seemingly innocent court filing, though, was about to change that. Buried somewhere in it was the admission that when, in 1984, he had assigned Geoghan to St Julia’s church in the Boston suburb of Weston, he had done so knowing that the priest had, in his previous parish, been accused of molesting seven boys from the same family.
With fresh allegations of abuse and cover-ups now surfacing almost daily, and calls in the UK for Pope Benedict to be arrested, something resembling the worldwide crisis facing the Catholic church would surely have happened sooner or later. But it is possible it would not be happening now, on such a large scale and with such potentially disastrous consequences for the church, had it not been for the work of a small group of journalists – the majority of them Catholic – from the Boston Globe newspaper, who were the first to spot Cardinal Law’s startling admission.
“I think we all had a sense, even before our first story came out, that this was an explosive subject with huge potential impact,” says Michael Paulson, the paper’s former religious affairs correspondent, who helped the paper to win the 2003 Pulitzer prize for exposing both the full extent of sexual abuse by Boston Catholic clergy, and the shameful response to it of Cardinal Law and his bishops. “But I think we were still all taken aback by how quickly and dramatically it exploded – first here, then across the country and around the world.”
For Michael Rezendes, a member of the Globe’s Spotlight investigative team and lead writer on the first story in the paper’s prize-winning series, “There’s no question in my mind that our work was the spark. We were the forerunners. Given that Boston is the largest Catholic city in America, it was quite courageous of the editors – we could have alienated a lot of readers. But the court cases we won, the church documents we got released, became precedent; they encouraged other papers and other lawyers in other cities to follow suit.”
Walter Robinson, then Spotlight editor, says the paper’s reporting “put the match to some very, very dry tinder”. That’s certainly true: within two years of the first of the Globe’s 800 articles on the scandal appearing in January 2002, Rezendes notes, Cardinal Law had resigned, 150 priests in Boston stood accused of sexual abuse, more than 500 victims had filed abuse claims, and church-goers’ donations to the archdiocese had slumped by 50%.
In Sin against the Innocents, a 2004 book on clerical sex abuse by a range of experts, Rezendes also notes that over the same period, across America as a whole, more than 450 priests and four bishops resigned, and several states, including Massachusetts, introduced new laws obliging clergy to report any knowledge of child sex abuse to the civil authorities. And yet, he adds today, “We’re still far from knowing the full story.”
Law’s initial argument was that when he transferred Geoghan to his new parish, neither he, the Catholic church, nor indeed society as a whole, understood how difficult it was to change the behaviour of child sex abusers. But, Rezendes writes, “We found, within a matter of days, that Geoghan was only one of a large number of priests who had sexually molested children and been given new assignments.”
The Globe reporters were also quietly told of many dozens of cases over the previous decade or so, in which the church had settled claims against molesting priests privately, often including a clause that barred the victims or their families from ever talking about it. Concrete evidence of those settlements, however, would be harder to find.
The government shouldn’t force people to…… Man that list is endless unless you’re in the insurance racket…. Then….. You’re home free…. Kinda like the golden kid …. They write their own meal ticket….
pdm, Protecting child rapists didn’t “protect their gold.” It caused them to forfeit MORE of their gold. But again, apples and peaches.
I fervently hope the SC puts this issue to rest – that someone’s personal beliefs does not trump other’s beliefs. Horrible enough that the religionists want to interfere with contraception, but what the hell is going to happen when they own all the hospitals and some woman bleeds to death because she cannot get proper treatment or a rape victim is unable to obtain morning-after protection.
Further, I question the motives of the Church and believe that much of this is political. Church employers had been covering contraception in the past – what has caused this sudden “crisis”? Additionally, the government has offered work-arounds, but the Church refuses. Disgusting hypocrisy. But why should we be surprised? They protected child rapists (to protect their gold) and forbid the use of condoms in AIDS ravaged Africa.
pdm wrote: “I fervently hope the SC puts this issue to rest – that someone’s personal beliefs does not trump other’s beliefs”
I agree with this statement, but probably in the opposite way to how you mean it.
A person’s personal belief that contraception is fine should not trump the beliefs of the people who hired that person to work for them.
David,
There once was a pope that resigned …. That allowed some of its priests to continue in the same roles or reassigned to other missions… When it came out about role as cardinal in ordering the cover up…. His tenure turned into manure…. But what can one say about a pope that held positions in the good ole boy origination named youths for hitler….
NO ONE has been tougher on the Catholic Church than I. I worked pedophile cases. I was a source for the Boston Globe reporter who broke the Cardinal Law story. You are comparing apples and oranges. The priests, bishops, cardinals, parishes and the Church have been paying civil damages for decades. FINALLY, there are now criminal charges flooding the priests and hierarchy. They are not immune to criminal law. And yeah, those Little Sisters of the Poor are evil!!!
The Catholic Church allowed pedophile priests to rape children. The church covered it up and moved the guilty priests to other parishes–where many continued their fiendish acts. But…allowing Catholics and other people who work for Catholic organizations to get contraceptive benefits from their healthcare providers? That’s a violation of the church’s religious beliefs!
Elaine M – to be fair, SOME Catholic priests were involved in the cover-up. Others were rooting it out like a bad cancer. Pedophilia is contrary to the church’s religious beliefs just like contraception is. They don’t force everyone to comply with these beliefs. They teach them, and some embrace the beliefs and others do not.
I was raised a Roman Catholic and remember when catholics were forbidden to eat meat on Friday. I also remember when the Mass was celebrated in Latin. Times change. The church almost lifted its ban on contraception in the 1960s. Unfortunately, three bishops prevented that from happening
*****
How the Vatican Almost Embraced Birth Control
A secret history of the papal commission that endorsed the pill
hat endorsed the pill
—By Frances Kissling
| May/June 2010 Issue
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2010/05/catholic-church-vatican-bishops-birth-control
Excerpt:
SINCE 1870, WHEN the Roman Catholic Church formally pronounced popes infallible, a lot of Vatican energy has gone into claiming that doctrine never changes—that the church has been maintaining the same positions since the time of Jesus. Of course, historians know better: Dozens of church conferences, synods, and councils have regularly revised the teachings, all the while claiming utter consistency. Thus, when the advent of the birth control pill in the early ’60s coincided with a major push for church modernization, there was widespread hope among Catholics that the reform-minded Pope John XXIII would lift the church’s ban on contraception. After all, the Second Vatican Council had explicitly called for greater integration of scientific knowledge into church teaching.
John did establish a small commission for the Study of Problems of Population, Family, and Birth, which his successor, Paul VI, expanded to 58 members. Its job was to study whether the pill and issues such as population growth should lead to a change in the church’s prohibition on all forms of contraception (other than abstinence during periods of fertility—the “rhythm method”). The commission was led by bishops and cardinals, including a Polish bishop named Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II. (The Polish government did not allow Wojtyla to attend meetings.) They were assisted by scientists, theologians—including Protestants, whose church had ended its own opposition to contraception three decades earlier—and even several lay couples. One of them, Patty and Patrick Crowley from Chicago, carried letters and stories from Catholic women worn out by multiple pregnancies, medical problems, and the financial burdens of raising large families. The commission deliberated for two years, amid much anticipation from the faithful.
The Vatican’s position on birth control has long held something of a paradox: Catholics are encouraged to plan their families, to bear only the number of children they can afford, and to consider the impact of family size on a community and the planet. In recent years, under Pope Benedict XVI, the church has also made a major push to embrace environmental stewardship. Yet Catholicism has also been the most intransigent of the world’s religions on the subject of contraception, alone in denying its use even to married couples.
This may have made some theological sense in the first century of Christianity, when Jesus’ followers believed he would return in their lifetime: Their mission was to prepare for the Second Coming by devoting themselves to the worship of God. Sex, they believed, was a distraction. The good life was best lived in celibacy—even in marriage. When the wait for the Second Coming evaporated, the belief that sex for its own sake was sinful did not, and abstinence remained the ideal.
Yet by the first half of the 20th century, change seemed to be in the air. In 1930, Pius XII issued the encyclical (papal letter) Casti Connubii (“on chaste wedlock”), which acknowledged that couples could seek pleasure in their sexual relations, so long as the act was still linked to procreation. Then, in 1966, Paul VI’s birth control commission presented its preliminary report to the pope. It held big news: The body had overwhelmingly voted to recommend lifting the prohibition on contraceptives. (The former Archbishop of Brussels, Cardinal Leo Suenens, went so far as to say the church needed to confront reality and avoid another “Galileo case.”)
Catholics rejoiced, and many began using the pill at once. But their hopes were dashed when, in July 1968, Paul VI released an encyclical titled Humanae Vitae (“on human life”), reaffirming the contraceptive ban. It turned out that three dissenting bishops on the commission had privately gone to plead with the pope: If the position on contraceptives was changed, they said, the teaching authority of the church would be questioned—the faithful could no longer trust the hierarchy.
Ironically, it was the prohibition on contraception that would help erode the church’s power with European and American Catholics. Laypeople overwhelmingly disregarded it, and bishops throughout Europe undermined it with statements reassuring couples to “follow their consciences.” American bishops were more circumspect, but a survey of Catholic priests in the early ’70s showed that about 60 percent of them believed the prohibition was wrong. Father Andrew Greeley, a noted sociologist, traces the decline in church membership and even vocations to the priesthood in the mid-1970s to Catholics’ disillusionment with the church’s integrity on birth control.
I am not Catholic, but I agree with the Catholic church’s logical position concerning contraception. I think contraception is a personal choice people have to decide about for themselves. I do not believe that government should prohibit contraception. On the other hand, it is outrageous to me that the government thinks they can force people to facilitate contraception in opposition to their personal convictions. The government should be neutral and let people make up their own minds about it.
If the Catholic Church has a position against contraception, we should respect that position enough not to force them to violate their conscience. Government should find ways to act respectfully, without force, so everyone can be free to explore these questions for themselves without coercion.
The government should not be forcing people or corporations to buy a product that they don’t want. If the majority of people think that everyone should have a one size fits all healthcare system, then they should vote that way and have government provide it themselves directly to the people. Personally, I think local government at the county level can provide this service just fine on their own without the need for State or Federal government being involved.
Tony C,
That is why single payer as the funding mechanism is inevitable.
Is there an English translation available for the utter gibberish of traveling limey’s nonsensical post? Being an atheist has nothing whatever to do with the subject. Atheists do not hold any writings above or more important than our secular Constitution. That fiction is exclusively the failing of religious groups and individuals. Those putting their Bible or Quran or whatever before our secular laws and thereby demanding special treatment deserve all the ill will and contempt Americans heap upon them.
I think this case pleads the wrong idea, the insurance is not being voluntarily paid for by Hobby Lobby (or the Nuns), it is no different than a tax. Nobody gets to claim they are exempt from taxes because they do not agree with some of the things the taxes are used to pay, like war, or social security, even if their religion allows that.
And how about the rights of the employees? Why are they denied an entitlement most everybody else in the country gets, just because their employer is morally opposed? What if their employer is morally opposed to paying Social Security, unemployment, Medicare and Medicaid? What if their employer is morally opposed to OSHA?
Providing health insurance that meets certain criteria has become a condition of doing business in the USA. The money to do that is no different than other taxes, how taxes are to be used is determined by Congress, not by individuals. Signing off on such benefits does not convey approval of the benefits, it only certifies the claim was legitimately made and paid.
A simple solution, in this case, is to let the person receiving the benefit sign under their own authority for the benefit, and demand insurance companies provide that option to employers. We sign our own tax returns, we can certainly sign our own insurance forms.
The antireligionists need to remember that atheism is a belief too. I know the government has thrown the constitution out the window but I kind of like it and so should you. Of course its hard to adhere to Karl Marx and the Constitution so I guess they chose Karl Marx, even though his policies never work.
Zari, I thought Sotomayor was a “Wise Latina woman.” I know she’s logical and sane as well as Blouise.