Unequal Conscience
by David Atkins
I know readers are probably sick of this story by now, but I want to reiterate that I'm with Digby: I just don't understand why we're supposed to be celebrating the Administration's decision to assuage the feelings of the Bishops, even if women do get guaranteed contraception regardless.
I guess a lot of people feel it's a win-win-win: the Bishops get their precious fee-fees respected, women get their contraception, and the President gets to look gracious and reasonable. Fine insofar as all that goes. Except the problem is that as Digby pointed out, the Bishops have now staked out a precedent that being against contraception is a legitimate moral "concern" that the Leader of the Free World has to assuage. That's a big problem. Being against contraception should be as bizarre, antediluvian and worthy of mockery as being against women's suffrage.
You can believe that women should be subservient to their husbands and not play a role in democracy. But that doesn't mean that the President of the United States should care about your retrograde views. And yet this deal has given the Bishops just that sort of legitimacy.
John Cole said it well:
When did the 1st Amendment change from basically saying that you can practice whatever religion you want and you won’t be burned at the stake as a heretic and we’re not going to form or recognize a national religion like the Church of England? When did it change to “everyone everywhere has to do what a bunch of old catholics in funny hats wants, because otherwise it hurts their feelings?” And why does it only apply to certain religions?
I seriously wish other religions would get in on the act. I wish Keith Ellison would start sponsoring bills that allow insurers to cut people’s benefits if they don’t pray to Mecca a certain number of times a day. Or someone Jewish proposing a bill requiring circumcisions or you can’t get health insurance. Just flood the zone with bullshit so people can see how out of control our concept of religious liberty has become.
And who gets to decide what religions are real? I’m going to form my own religion, and the central tenets of my religion will be pizza every Friday, the only thing you are allowed to do on Sundays is watch sports, and I am forbidden by my deity to pay taxes. I’ll call it Norquistism. How would the feds react to that? How is my religion any less real than burning bushes, virgin birth, transubstantiation, and the like?
This needs to happen. Various religious minority groups need to start voicing all sorts of religious objections to all manner of unobjectionable things, just as a matter of precedent. There's no way that Jewish hospitals would be allowed to serve only the circumsized, or to prevent treatment for trichinosis on the grounds that no one should have been eating pork in the first place.
I want to know why the Bishops receive this special "moral" dispensation. Remember that the Catholic laity doesn't share the views of their Bishops. What is it about the Bishops that makes their strange brand of conscience so much more equal than that of anyone else?
.