Only churches themselves are left alone.
Even they aren't. Its not just Catholic charities, hospitals, and schools, that could be required to comply. A parish or a diocese, could as an employer be required to provide such coverage, if it employes non-Catholics, and if a sufficient portion of the activities of those employees was for something other than worship or religious instruction or ceremony. In practice that might be hard to prove in such a way as to get accepted by a court, and the government might be fairly likely to not try to impose the control on the sub units of the Church itself as a matter of proprietorial discretion, and even if it did try to impose such control, and a court did find that the church's activities included too many things that where not directly religion/religious, that court, or an appeals court above it, would be even more likely to toss this out on free exercise grounds than they would with something like Holy Cross Hospital or Catholic Charities. Still the possibility would remain a sword over the Church's head.
Assuming they can't change the executive rules about the law, or judicial rules about the permisiability of the executive ruling, and that congress doesn't directly strike this down, or repeal the individual mandate more generally, and that the courts don't strike down Obamacare (or just the mandate) what could churches and church organizations do about this?
1 - Cave
2 - Civil Disobedience - Refuse to comply (this is made harder by Obama's phony compromise)
3 - Descriminate against employees on the basis of religion (if they can get away with it under anti-descrimination law), reduce non-religious activity. This might not work for say Catholic University, or Catholic Charities, but would work, for parishes if the government did move against them.
4 - Drop all insurance coverage, pay the fine called for by Obamacare.
5 - Go out of business. |
