kenny...Isn't Kirsten Powers the Ex girlfriend of anthony weiner,? any way she is a liberal and disagrees with you and your idol. Is it possible that a lot more of the more intelligent liberals are waking up..of course I don't mean yourself so no insult intended.
Obama’s Baffling Catholic Decision: Birth Control Trumps Religious Freedom
Feb 7, 2012
Kirsten Powers
thedailybeast.com
The administration claims its decision to force Catholic institutions to pay for insurance covering contraceptives is ‘balanced”—so why, when religious liberty was weighed against access to birth control, did freedom lose
It’s hard to escape the feeling that the Obama administration is trying to run America’s Catholic charities and institutions out of business.
How else to explain the mean-spirited decision mandating that Catholic institutions be required to pay for health insurance that covers sterilization, contraceptives, and the “morning-after pill,” which violates their fundamental religious beliefs?
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius even had the gumption to claim Sunday that the “contraception rule respects religion.” On Jan. 20, she insisted she had reached an agreeable compromise, saying the decision “strikes a balance between respecting religious freedom and increasing access to important preventive services.”
What balance? What respect for religious freedom? The administration took religious liberty, a principle on which our country was founded, weighed it against access to contraception, and somehow in its bizarro math, religious freedom lost.
“The government knows that [most] employer-based insurance plans already cover these services,” Hannah Smith, senior counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, tells me. “So it’s not about expanding contraceptive access. It’s about forcing religious-based organizations to provide this against their beliefs.”
Indeed, the Guttmacher Institute found that in 2010, “nine in 10 employer-based insurance plans cover[ed] a full range of prescription contraceptives.”
I"m not Catholic. I support contraception. But this is madness.
The administration wants to remind us of their benevolence: they are giving institutions with religious objections a whole year to implement a government rule that violates the core tenets of their faith. Gee, thanks!
“In effect, the president is saying we have a year to figure out how to violate our consciences,” Cardinal-designate Timothy M. Dolan, archbishop of New York and president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops told The Washington Post.
If religious institutions choose to ignore the mandate by dropping their insurance plans, they will face exorbitant fines under the Affordable Care Act that could force them to close their doors. Smith tells me that for one of the Becket Fund’s clients, the fine for the first year would be more than $300,000, and for the second year, more than $500,000.
One thing we can be sure of: the Catholic Church will shut down before it violates its faith. We saw that recently when Catholic adoption and foster-care services closed in Massachusetts and Illinois rather than comply with state mandates that they place children with gay parents. Who lost? Parentless children. |
