[Vision2020] Tales From the Kitchen Table

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>


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February 8, 2012
Tales From the Kitchen Table By GAIL
COLLINS<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/gailcollins/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

This is a really old story, but let me tell you anyway.

When I was first married, my mother-in-law sat down at her kitchen table
and told me about the day she went to confession and told the priest that
she and her husband were using birth control. She had several young
children, times were difficult — really, she could have produced a list of
reasons longer than your arm.

“You’re no better than a whore on the street,” said the priest.

This was, as I said, a long time ago. It’s just an explanation of why the
bishops are not the only Roman Catholics who are touchy about the issue of
contraception.

These days, parish priests tend to be much less judgmental about
parishioners who are on the pill — the military was not the first
institution in this country to make use of the “don’t ask, don’t tell”
system. “In most parishes in the United States, we don’t find them
preaching about contraception,” said Jon O’Brien of Catholics for Choice.
“And it’s not as though in the Mass you have a question-and-answer period.”

You have heard, I’m sure, that the Catholic bishops are in an uproar over
an Obama administration rule that would require Catholic universities and
hospitals to cover contraceptives in their health care plans. The
Republican presidential candidates are roaring right behind. Mitt Romney
claimed the White House was trying to “impose a secular vision on Americans
who believe that they should not have their religious freedom taken away.”

Let’s try to work this out in a calm, measured manner. (Easy for me to say.
I already got my mother-in-law story off my chest.)

Catholic doctrine prohibits women from using pills, condoms or any other
form of artificial contraception. A much-quoted study by the Guttmacher
Institute found that virtually all sexually active Catholic women of
childbearing age have violated the rule at one point or another, and that
more than two-thirds do so consistently.

Here is the bishops’ response to that factoid: “If a survey found that 98
percent of people had lied, cheated on their taxes, or had sex outside of
marriage, would the government claim it can force everyone to do so?”

O.K. Moving right along.

The church is not a democracy and majority opinion really doesn’t matter.
Catholic dogma holds that artificial contraception is against the law of
God. The bishops have the right — a right guaranteed under the First
Amendment — to preach that doctrine to the faithful. They have a right to
preach it to everybody. Take out ads. Pass out leaflets. Put up billboards
in the front yard.

The problem here is that they’re trying to get the government to do their
work for them. They’ve lost the war at home, and they’re now demanding help
from the outside.

And they don’t seem in the mood to compromise. Church leaders told The
National Catholic Register that they regarded any deal that would allow
them to avoid paying for contraceptives while directing their employees to
other places where they could find the coverage as a nonstarter.

This new rule on contraceptive coverage is part of the health care reform
law, which was designed to finally turn the United States into a country
where everyone has basic health coverage. In a sane world, the government
would be running the whole health care plan, the employers would be off the
hook entirely and we would not be having this fight at all. But members of
Congress — including many of the very same people who are howling and
rending their garments over the bishops’ plight — deemed the current
patchwork system untouchable.

The churches themselves don’t have to provide contraceptive coverage.
Neither do organizations that are closely tied to a religion’s doctrinal
mission. We are talking about places like hospitals and universities that
rely heavily on government money and hire people from outside the faith.

We are arguing about whether women who do not agree with the church
position, or who are often not even Catholic, should be denied health care
coverage that everyone else gets because their employer has a religious
objection to it. If so, what happens if an employer belongs to a religion
that forbids certain types of blood transfusions? Or disapproves of any
medical intervention to interfere with the working of God on the human
body?

Organized religion thrives in this country, so the system we’ve worked out
seems to be serving it pretty well. Religions don’t get to force their
particular dogma on the larger public. The government, in return, protects
the right of every religion to make its case heard.

The bishops should have at it. I wouldn’t try the argument that the priest
used on my mother-in-law, but there’s always a billboard on the front lawn.




-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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