Catholics File Flood of Birth-Control Lawsuits

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We're in trouble when employers/decision makers can be selective about what their healthcare can or cannot cover. It's also ridiculous to think that the cost of something as minor as birth control can be winnowed out of the rest of the coverage. This is not even remotely like ordering extra toppings on a pizza. Perhaps most importantly, this is a religious issue: devout Catholics covered by the plan need to decide on their own whether or not to use birth control (covered or otherwise). The bishops should focus on making it clear to their congregations why birth control is wrong. What ultimately matters most is each individual's decisions. Having birth control as part of a healthcare plan is not the problem.

What irony.  Conservatives hate trial lawyers and excessive lawsuits until it gives them an advantage.

The HHS Mandate IS an affront to religious freedom.  First: "The president's supposed "compromise" of having insurance companies pay for these services is an accounting trick, a distinction without a difference. The cost to the insurance companies will be built into the premiums, paid by the religious organization or the individual." "The "free exercise of religion" goes well beyond the "freedom of worship" concept so often used today by those who fail to understand, or reject, the Constitution's religious freedom protections. For them freedom of worship is restricted to church and home, to the space between your ears and the space between your shoulders. Free exercise of religion is far more robust and includes the rights to share one's faith and to live out its implications in the social and economic spheres – in other words, the freedom to exercise or act and the right not to be coerced. We must not stand by and allow our God-given rights to religious freedom, guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, to be atrophied, neutered, confined and restricted into mere freedom of worship." "Given this secularist mindset one could argue that the HHS mandate violates not only the First Amendment's free exercise clause, but the establishment clause as well. When the federal government asserts the right to universally mandate actions, trample religious convictions, and then grant exemptions to those it chooses, the government is behaving perilously like a secular theocracy granting ecclesiastical indulgences to a chosen few." "Thomas Jefferson, chief drafter of the Declaration of Independence and our nation's third president, argued in 1779 during the campaign for the Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, that "to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical." Jefferson, in the last year of his presidency (1809), looking back on the accomplishments of the American Revolution, declared, "No provision of our Constitution ought to be dearer to man than that which protects the rights of conscience against the enterprise of the civil authority."" "This controversy is about freedom, not fertility. As Cardinal Dolan asks in his letter, "If the government can, for example, tell Catholics that they cannot be in the insurance business today without violating their religious convictions, where does it end?"" "Indeed! Let's all understand what is at stake here. Unless you are a priest or a minister working for a church or you work for a firm with less than 50 employees, here is the dilemma you will face. If the U.S. Supreme Court does not strike down Obamacare's mandate that all people purchase health insurance upon penalty of a substantial fine, and if Obamacare, unimpeded, takes effect as scheduled January 1, 2014, millions of Americans will be faced with a tortuous choice. If you have religious conscience objections to subsidizing contraception, or abortifacients, or sterilization in your health insurance program, you will face a stark choice. Under Obamacare, all health insurance programs will be required to offer free reproductive services (i.e. contraception, abortifacients, sterilization), which means that many Americans will face the choice of violating their deeply held religious convictions and purchasing health insurance which forces them to financially subsidize that which they find unconscionable (i.e. reproductive services) or pay a substantial fine for declining to purchase health insurance and not having health insurance for their families." "A government imposed fine for following your religious convictions? In America? Say it isn't so! Our Founding Fathers would be aghast." All of the quotes above come from here: http://www.christianpost.com/news/religious-freedom-threatened-by-obamacares-hhs-mandate-70590/ Second: "Religious institutions are not trying to control what their employees buy, use, or do in private; they are trying to avoid being conscripted by the government into paying for what they teach are immoral acts. It is the administration, and not the Catholic Church, that is imposing its values on the vulnerable and unpopular." "At the same time, a free society like ours will regard it as often both wise and just to accommodate religious believers and institutions by exempting them from requirements that would require them to compromise their integrity. This is such a case." "The mandate's religious-employer exemption is limited only to inward-looking entities that hire and engage only their own. It embodies the view that religious institutions may be distinctive only insofar as they stay in their place — in the pews, in the pulpit, at the altar. It reflects a troubling tendency to impose ideological sameness and conformity in the public sphere, to insist that all groups and associations act like the government, in the service of the government's goals." All of the quotes above come from here: http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/story/2012-02-15/obama-contraceptive-mandate-compromise-bishops/53103138/1