"Middle ground" on HHS mandate

  • Thread starter Thread starter RiverTam51
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
R

RiverTam51

Guest
I have a question for all the Catholics here: if the HHS mandate were changed so that Plan B and other abortifacents were no longer required in insurance policies, but condoms, spermicides and other contraceptives which do not hurt a fetus once concieved remained, would this still be a big issue?
Here’s a metaphor: Suppose that we lived in a rather silly nation in which food was bought by insurance rather than by individuals. Different policies would allow you to eat different kinds of food. Now suppose that you, as a Catholic, worked at an institution run by Muslims. Muslims do not eat pork, because they consider it dirty. So, logically, they would not supply you with insurance that allowed you to buy bacon. Enter Obama. The new Hungry Human Services mandate says that bacon is a fundamental right of all people, and so all employers must provide policies allowing pork to their employees. An Islamic institution would not like this mandate, but a reasonable Muslim would realize that eating pork hurts nobody, or at most hurts the participants, and so people should be allowed pork insurance if they are not Muslim.
Hindus believe that it is immoral to eat beef. But their reasoning is different from Muslims’. From my understanding of Hinduism, a cow is considered to be the highest form of earthly life, above even humans. So, to kill a cow is worse than murder, and to eat it, worse than canniballism. Therefore, it would not be reasonable for a Hindu company’s food insurance to cover beef. No matter what everyone else believes about cows, because a Hindu believes bovine life is sacred, he should not be forced to fund the beef industry in any way.
Similarly, Catholicism believes that contraceptives are wrong, but that their use does not directly hurt anyone. Sinful or no, it is not up to Catholics to prevent others from using them, and it would not be reasonable for a Catholic employer to take steps to prevent a non-Catholic employee from using them by choosing only contraceptive-free policies. But it is of course unreasonable to expect an employer to fund abortions through insurance, because his beliefs tell him that this is murder- by providing this policy, he is letting a child be hurt.
Would it be reasonable for Catholics to give in on the contraceptives, however distasteful, and fight only the abortifacents?
 
Cows aren’t sacred though, and contraception has been proven one to many times to be detrimental to health spiritually, mentally, familialy, etc.
 
I think the mods will move this thread, but anyways…

If the government would be willing to honor the Catholic conscience in one instance, why not honor it in all instances? Either it is worth protecting or it is not; there is no sense in protecting conscience half the time.

About your analogy, I must confess I think that it may use some work. Catholics do not view contraceptive use in the same way that Muslims view pork consumption. In the former situation Catholics believe that contraception is bad for everyone while in the latter situation Muslims would only believe that food prohibitions apply to Muslims.

I think I have a better analogy which might help you understand where we’re coming from.

Let us say you live in a country with very high crime. The government believes that the best way to deter crime is to arm every citizen with a handgun. You have a person conviction (religious or otherwise) that all violence is wrong: you are a pacifist. The government comes out with a new policy: all business owners and institutions must pay for their employee’s hand guns. As a pacifist you find this morally unthinkable: the thought of providing someone with the tools to hurt and kill another human being is unacceptable.

Despite your firm conviction your are forced to do so anyways. But it gets more ridiculous. Your country has an extremely widespread proliferation of guns. If any of your employees wanted to they could go down the street and buy a gun for an hour’s pay. There is not practical reason to force you to do such a hideous thing. How would you feel? Wouldn’t you fight to avoid supplying your employees with guns?

Ah, you say! While the gun example affects other people contraceptives such as condoms only involve the couple and don’t harm a soul. Only, we don’t really think this is true either. For one thing Catholics believe that contraceptives are bad for a marriage. Marriages are the building block of society and therefore contraceptives are bad for society as a whole. Furthermore, we believe that the rise of a contraceptive mentality has lead to the objectification and degradation of women. Thirdly, we believe that the use of contraceptives has lead to a mentality that supports and encourages abortions. Fourthly, if contraceptives fail (and judging by the amount of surprise children they do so more than we are lead to believe) what do you think will happen to the child?
 
RiverTam51 said:
I have a question for all the Catholics here: if the HHS mandate were changed so that Plan B and other abortifacents were no longer required in insurance policies, but condoms, spermicides and other contraceptives which do not hurt a fetus once concieved remained, would this still be a big issue?
Click to expand...
Yes, it would still be a big issue. The objection for Catholics is to the inclusion of contraceptives and sterilizations in the mandated health coverage. This is based on the Catholic religious and moral objection to both contraception and sterilization. The Church teaching that is behind this objection does not hold some contraceptives as “worse” than others. The objection is to forcing Catholic employers to provide contraceptives.

The talk about abortifacients, in my opinion, comes not from the Church herself but from those who are against the Church and want to paint her teaching as all focused on one issue (abortion).
 
MacBP said:
I think the mods will move this thread, but anyways…

If the government would be willing to honor the Catholic conscience in one instance, why not honor it in all instances? Either it is worth protecting or it is not; there is no sense in protecting conscience half the time.

About your analogy, I must confess I think that it may use some work. Catholics do not view contraceptive use in the same way that Muslims view pork consumption. In the former situation Catholics believe that contraception is bad for everyone while in the latter situation Muslims would only believe that food prohibitions apply to Muslims.

I think I have a better analogy which might help you understand where we’re coming from.

Let us say you live in a country with very high crime. The government believes that the best way to deter crime is to arm every citizen with a handgun. You have a person conviction (religious or otherwise) that all violence is wrong: you are a pacifist. The government comes out with a new policy: all business owners and institutions must pay for their employee’s hand guns. As a pacifist you find this morally unthinkable: the thought of providing someone with the tools to hurt and kill another human being is unacceptable.

Despite your firm conviction your are forced to do so anyways. But it gets more ridiculous. Your country has an extremely widespread proliferation of guns. If any of your employees wanted to they could go down the street and buy a gun for an hour’s pay. There is not practical reason to force you to do such a hideous thing. How would you feel? Wouldn’t you fight to avoid supplying your employees with guns?

Ah, you say! While the gun example affects other people contraceptives such as condoms only involve the couple and don’t harm a soul. Only, we don’t really think this is true either. For one thing Catholics believe that contraceptives are bad for a marriage. Marriages are the building block of society and therefore contraceptives are bad for society as a whole. Furthermore, we believe that the rise of a contraceptive mentality has lead to the objectification and degradation of women. Thirdly, we believe that the use of contraceptives has lead to a mentality that supports and encourages abortions. Fourthly, if contraceptives fail (and judging by the amount of surprise children they do so more than we are lead to believe) what do you think will happen to the child?
Click to expand...
**
Thanks for a great analogy!!!**
 
“The talk about abortifacients” in the news is due to the general public’s not identifying with the idea that even barrier contraceptives are sinful. Many Catholics are not even following this teaching. If the objection is about contraception we might well lose the fight in the media and public square, but the administration went too far and may lose the argument in the public’s eyes as well as eventually the courts.
 
RivereTAM is right.

I add to it that the whole thing is unconstitutional. I have to have car insurance if I own a car… If I don’t want to buy auto insurance, it is simple… I don’t own a car…

So, I don’t want to buy health insurance… what is my alternative? I can’t kill myself. It is against the law.

anyway, toi speak to the public at large, not necessarily those on this thread;
I used to work for a state liquor agency when I was in college. My responsibility was to make sure the purchasers were of a legal age to do so and that they were not obviously drunk.
I know some of our customers were alchoholics. By the analogy most folks against the HHS put it (as many have here). It would have been my responsibility that the alchoholic purchased liquor.
This simply does not make sence to me.
If I have to buy health insurance, they all provide some level of care that you all are aginst (and I am too as a personal choice) then I would be directly responsible for someone’s decision to abort a potential fetus from a rape etc.

I think you all should be more alarmed at what the whole think will mean to healthcare. It menas a lack of doctors over the long run. It means that oH, your are 82. You are too old for a bypass surgery or knee replacement. Nevermind that your family typically lives to 92 to 97 year range.

Buggers to it all.
If you want government provided healthcare, Move to Canada, the UK or Austrailia and leave me my country.
 
There is no middle ground. The US government has no right, under any law, to force its citizens to buy or pay for a service or product they don’t want - Catholic and non-Catholic.

Read the FAQs.

stophhs.com/stop-hhs-faq/

Peace,
Ed
 
RiverTam51 said:
I have a question for all the Catholics here: if the HHS mandate were changed so that Plan B and other abortifacents were no longer required in insurance policies, but condoms, spermicides and other contraceptives which do not hurt a fetus once concieved remained, would this still be a big issue?
Click to expand...
Yes.
It would still be a government mandate requiring people to violate teachings of God.
 
👍
edwest2 said:
There is no middle ground. The US government has no right, under any law, to force its citizens to buy or pay for a service or product they don’t want - Catholic and non-Catholic.

Peace,
Ed
Click to expand...
👍👍
 
RiverTam51 said:
… Similarly, Catholicism believes that contraceptives are wrong, but that their use does not directly hurt anyone. Sinful or no, it is not up to Catholics to prevent others from using them, and it would not be reasonable for a Catholic employer to take steps to prevent a non-Catholic employee from using them by choosing only contraceptive-free policies. But it is of course unreasonable to expect an employer to fund abortions through insurance, because his beliefs tell him that this is murder- by providing this policy, he is letting a child be hurt…
Click to expand...
RiverTam,
You have something backwards: our objection is not based on our trying to prevent someone from using abc, but on the fact that because abc is mortally sinful, our paying for it would be sinful for us.

A better analogy might be this one: a friend comes to you and says he wants to murder his neighbor, and asks me to buy a gun for him because he is a felon. So I go down to the gun shop and buy him a gun, (knowing he wants to use it to murder his neighbor).

By buying the gun for him, I am complicit in the crime he commits, right? I am very much *involved *because I *paid for *the instrument of sin.

So Catholics are not trying to keep their employees from committing a sin, altho of course we would like to do that but understand that is not our place after a certain point, Catholics simply do not want to be forced by law to commit a mortal sin.
 
St_Francis said:
RiverTam,
a friend comes to you and says he wants to murder his neighbor, and asks me to buy a gun for him because he is a felon. So I go down to the gun shop and buy him a gun, (knowing he wants to use it to murder his neighbor).

By buying the gun for him, I am complicit in the crime he commits, right? I am very much *involved *because I *paid for *the instrument of sin.
Click to expand...
a very bad analogy… you’d be committing a crime to purchase the gun for him in the first place.

Try again to convince me.
A legal version of this analogy, If he stole a gun from me (or otherwise obtained it without my permission - or - if I did purchase it without my knowledge of his crime history or his verbal threat) and committed the crime, I still hold that His crime is not mine.
 
OP: my background is jurisprudence.

I’m alarmed by this issue. I see it as a simple agency stealing constitutional rights from people.

So “middle ground” really is not worth talking about. This sounds like intransigence, but rights of conscience must be inviolable.

I don’t know if this is a “Catholic” take on it. But for me, I’m very much afraid of American constitutional freedoms being stolen by this HHS agency.
 
I won’t offer analogies. To answer your question, no, the government should not require Muslims or Hindus or Jews or Catholics to violate their own moral precepts as a matter of public policy. It’s a violation of religious freedom.
 
JimG said:
I won’t offer analogies. To answer your question, no, the government should not require Muslims or Hindus or Jews or Catholics to violate their own moral precepts as a matter of public policy. It’s a violation of religious freedom.
Click to expand...
👍👍
 
A TRUE middle ground would be if the Gubmint allowed employers to opt out of providing services and drugs they morally object to. If the employer uses a health care insurer that DOES provide those services in the policies of other clients, the HHS mandate could simply require that those providers offer a supplemental rider directly to the employee paid by the employee out of pocket for the coverage desired. Costs would be subject to agency review, similar to how Medicare sets pricing. If the employer uses an insurance provider that doesn’t provide those services to ANY clients, then those employees are eligible for Medicare coverage of those elements if they purchase a similar rider (cost adjusted annually so that the program is self-funding).

THIS would be a true middle ground. Each person can get the coverage they want, but nobody is compelled to pay for drugs and ‘services’ they find morally repugnant.

Not a perfect solution and heavy on the bureacracy, which probably kills it. But it’s the only path I’ve seen in which Obama gets to satisfy his constituents without violating the rights of the rest of us not to have to pay for morally abhorrent products that overwhelmingly are NOT a medical necessity, but a convenience. Conveniences are things you pay for yourself, not mooch off the rest of us!
 
CatherineOH said:
a very bad analogy… you’d be committing a crime to purchase the gun for him in the first place.

Try again to convince me.
A legal version of this analogy, If he stole a gun from me (or otherwise obtained it without my permission - or - if I did purchase it without my knowledge of his crime history or his verbal threat) and committed the crime, I still hold that His crime is not mine.
Click to expand...
You’re right; it’s a terrible analogy. (Altho *obviously *if I knew nothing of his intention for the gun, I would not in any way be culpable… the whole thing hinged on my knowing that he intended to use it to murder someone.)

Maybe there is no good analogy for this. Basically, I was trying to explain to RiverTam that the problem Catholics have is that they would be paying for instruments of sin, which is sinful in and of itself, because he seemed to think that we did not want to pay for abc because we wanted to stop others from using it (which, as I pointed out) we of course would like to do but realize we are limited in our authority to do).
 
St_Francis said:
…Maybe there is no good analogy for this. Basically, I was trying to explain to RiverTam that the problem Catholics have is that they would be paying for instruments of sin, which is sinful in and of itself, because he seemed to think that we did not want to pay for abc because we wanted to stop others from using it (which, as I pointed out) we of course would like to do but realize we are limited in our authority to do).
Click to expand...
Perhaps, but the Gun does not cause the violence it is the person who chooses to do so.

as for drugs not covered, most against the HHS for this reason are also against the birth control pill.
That is one drug I was on for years due to other reasons not the controlling of birth. I was grateful my insurance paid for them (at that time they cost $20-30/month and I made very little) My previous insurance did not. That same level of the drug still has an actual cost of $8 but many are less.

In my case, the ‘gun’ was being used as a very valuable tool to prolong life and to increase the quality of that life while reducing pain. of course, the side effect was that I have never had children, but by the very nature of my ailment it would be highly unlikely that I would conceive anyway.

I still think the better way to end legal abortions is to remind physicians of their Hippocratic oath.
" I will neither prescribe nor administer a lethal dose of medicine to any patient even if asked nor counsel any such thing nor perform the utmost respect for every human life from fertilization to natural death and reject abortion that deliberately takes a unique human life."
Click to expand...
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top