IGF CultureWatch

Alas, David and I are never going to agree on the matter of forcing Catholic insitutions to provide contraceptive services to their employees, but I will respond to David, below, that I don’t consider Notre Dame University or Holy Cross Hospital (for instance) to be secular businesses – they are Church affiliated and view themselves as fulfilling a religious mission in the world (same for various Catholic charities).

Defending “contraception” is pretty easy – even if the issue is a government dictate that Catholic institutions buy condoms and IUDs for their employees. David avoids the uglier issue of abortion-inducing drugs. I would, too, if I were defending his position.

What next, forcing Jewish hospitals to serve their employees ham? Because we think ham is good for you and the kosher prohibition strikes us as superstition (and after all, we’re liberals and we know best)?

As for David’s contention “Insurance is a product, and people buy it.” Many employers self-insure – creating a set of benefits for their workforce with an insurance provider. Only very small businesses these days tend to buy insurance off the shelf for their workers. And it’s the employer who almost always still pays most (and sometimes all) of the premium.

Stephen Miller makes a good enough point, as far as it goes.  But it doesn’t go very far.

He’s one of the last people I’d expect to use squishy liberal rhetoric, but there’s just no kinder way to describe that “free.”  Only Pelosi-philes really think that insurance benefits are free just because you don’t pay for them at the point of service.  Insurance is a product, and people buy it.  The question is what and how much you’re paying for.

And that gets me to the main point.  Steve is willing to accept the church’s position that any corporate structure they choose to devise is religion if they say so.

The government not only has no business interfering with the exercise of religion, I think that’s one of the most consequential and revolutionary aspects of our constitution.  And that fully includes religious discrimination against lesbians and gay men.

But is the government required to be a sap about it?  Like all other bureaucratic organizations, churches have been known to abuse power and privilege — and laws.  And that is nowhere more true than when it comes to rules about sex.  Catholics are free to accept their church leadership’s hypocrisy and cluelessness about sexual matters.  But when the church selectively wishes to exempt itself from some laws (about contraception, say) while following others (about tax advantages) in its business operations in the private — not religious — sector, then I think it’s fair to question their lawfulness, and even their seriousness.

Their non-Catholic employees need health insurance as much as anyone else does.  And those insurance policies are government regulated, whether any of us around here like it or not.  Within the limits of its authority over actual believers, the church is free to be as extravagant in its hypocrisy as it wishes.  But when it operates a business that is not limited to believers (and doesn’t even pretend to be), something different is at stake — the rule of law.  This is a case where the Catholic hierarchy is simply using its power over its own believers (which they freely ignore) to make life more complicated for non-believers who work for them.  And that is not any matter of conscience, it is a matter of naked power.

If any significant number of believing Catholics actually followed the church’s rules against contraception, this would be a somewhat harder case, I suppose.  But it would still come down to the fact that the church has chosen to establish a secular corporation in the private sector to provide an inarguably valuable public good.  Having chosen to do so, it is not free to pick and choose the laws that apply to it based on some flexible corporate notion of “conscience.”  If churches have the power to make even non-believers subject to their rules, in ways that are entirely convenient to the church, then we have recreated the problem of religious establishment under an infinitely expandable version of religious exercise.

That cannot be right.  It certainly isn’t what any of the founders would have imagined.   This is not just the religious exemption that Steve has in mind.  Church rules are appropriate for believers of that religion.  But there is and should be no constitutional right for religions to bully nonbelievers.  That principle is at the heart of this nation’s DNA, and it looks like the bishops want us to live through that battle again.

I must respectfully disagree with David, below. In my view of things, using the blunt power of the state to force Catholic universities and hospitals to buy and provide their employees with free contraceptives, including morning-after abortion-inducing drugs, makes a mockery of religious liberty. And that’s regardless of the fact that most Catholics use and approval of birth control (many of whom may find contraceptives acceptable but don’t extend that view to the morning-after pill).

These institutions are Catholic, not secular, by their charters and in their running. And the church, rightly or wrongly, considers contraception and abortion to be sins. If the state can forced religious institutions to violate the tenets of their faith, then what can’t it do?

The road to the total state may be pleasing to those of the leftist persuasion (at least as long as they’re in charge), but it’s the antithesis of what America should stand for. A religious exemption is not too much to expect of a government that respects religious liberty and freedom of conscience.

Whose rights, exactly, is the Catholic Church asserting in challenging the Obama administration on contraception?  It certainly isn’t the rights of Catholic women, and it’s hard to see who else’s rights the bishops are invoking — except their own.

The church is up in arms that the administration is requiring insurance plans to include contraception coverage.  The rule has a conscience clause that protects the free exercise of religious organizations, but the church complains there isn’t a similar exemption for organizations associated with religions whose employees do not need to be religious adherents.  The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is apoplectic, threatening to use every means at its disposal to stop what they argue is a trashing of their beliefs.

The Catholic Church has long been at odds with its own members on same-sex marriage, where one poll showed 71% of Catholics believe civil same-sex marriage should be allowed.  But that is nothing compared to the complete divide between church hierarchy and its members when it comes to contraception.  Ninety-eight percent of Catholic women defy the church’s ban on “artificial” contraception, which is within the margin of error of complete disobedience.

And that’s not Catholics who just hold a belief, as they do with same-sex marriage.  That is Catholics who actually use birth control.

So the bishops, who do not need contraception, are demanding a rule for their non-religious employees that even their religious employees don’t seem to particularly want.

I believe in the importance of conscience clauses, as does Jon Rauch.  I even think there is some value in using them to appease unreasonable fanatics if it will achieve some significant political goal.

Here, there is nothing at stake but the power of the bishops to demand in the civil world a rule they cannot enforce in their own domain.

A Washington Examiner column notes the following tidbit about one of Mitt Romeny’s biggest donors:

Hedge fund millionaire Paul Singer also gave Romney’s super-PAC $1 million in November. . . . But Singer’s biggest cause in 2011 was not partisan — he spent $1 million lobbying to legalize gay marriage in New York state. That puts Singer not only far to the left of the GOP base and Romney, but also to the left of President Obama, who publicly opposes gay marriage. Singer’s son married a man in Massachusetts. . . .Singer’s million-dollar check doesn’t suggest Mitt is pro-gay-marriage. . . . But it’s revealing that these are Romney’s biggest donors. At the very least, it highlights the difference between the GOP’s electoral base and its money base.

I guess it does.

Also worth noting briefly, this interesting profile in the Washington Blade of formerly closeted former GOP congressman Bob Bauman, whose view today is conservative-libertarian and a pox on both parties.

After more than fifty years of the formal struggle for equality, we are at a stage where we can exercise some of the privileges of success.  One of those is a more open discussion about homosexuality as a choice.

Cynthia Nixon, who had a 15-year relationship with a man, is now engaged to a woman.  She rejects being categorized as bisexual.  Frank Bruni takes advantage of that to explore some of the biological terra incognita of sexual orientation.

This has long been a touchy subject because homosexual activity has historically been viewed as illness, sin and crime.  The first is objectionable (at best) because it deprives us entirely of the ability to be perceived as healthy human beings.  The last two are both reasonably described as voluntary (unless you’re on the very far left, which few around this site are), but amount to the “choice” of activities that are inherently wrong.   Those of us who are homosexual don’t view love, affection, or even consensual sex as wrong, so this view of choice is unacceptable, and at the very heart of the argument we have been making to be treated equally under the law.

Bruni argues that sexual orientation can be viewed as another sort of choice, the constitutionally protected ones of religion and gun ownership.  Neither possesses any biological prerequisite; they are both freely chosen and fully recognized parts of American citizenship.

Bruni uses a well crafted phrase to capture the decision point more appropriately: “the right to love whom you’re moved to love.”

This is something heterosexuals have always understood for themselves.  Long before the sexual revolution in the 1960s, young people rebelled against parental choices and even preferences about their marriage partners.  Not all of those children were able to act on their choices, but they certainly had them.  They needed no help, and were subject to no steering in recognizing whom they were moved to love.

Some of us know for a fact that that private, purely internal movement is only toward members of our own sex.  That is as resistant to change as was Romeo’s love for his Juliet.  Heterosexual adults, too, like Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, know about the imperatives of the heart.

It is true that those four heterosexuals had a choice about whether to act on their love.  Romeo was quite the dog in Verona; Juliet knew the parentally sanctioned Paris was ready to go; Mrs. Simpson had already made a marriage choice (two, actually); and no one can plausibly claim that the King of England would have lacked other options.

But the conversation changes and narrows dramatically when it turns to homosexuality.  People mean something very different and much smaller when they talk about whether homosexuality is a choice.  They’re not talking about whom, in particular, we are moved to love; they are talking only about the gender of people we are moved to love.

That is the discussion we have had for a couple of generations now.  Bruni helps move the debate forward, and that is worth taking advantage of.  We are not likely ever to understand the origins of something as complicated, — as human — as the impulse toward love.  It’s time lesbians and gay men (and bisexuals, too) stopped being required to answer that unanswerable question in order to obtain equality.

From an annual study of how incoming college freshman view things:

Even though the percentage of incoming freshmen who identify as conservative has stayed relatively stable, those students and the rest of their peers are shifting away from hard-line conservative stances on issues such as same-sex marriage, abortion, marijuana legalization and affirmative action. … The rise in the number of students who support same-sex marriage is the biggest shift in this year’s survey. At 71.3 percent, the percentage of incoming freshmen who agree either “somewhat” or “strongly” that same-sex couples should have the right to legal marital status is up “a remarkable” 6.4 percentage points from two years ago, the report says. While support is more common among women (77.3 percent), it’s increasing faster among men (64.1 percent).

They are the future.

(Hat tip: Walter Olson)

The National Organization for Marriage is complaining that lesbians and gay men in Maine have qualified an initiative to make same-sex marriage legal there.  Their concern is that we, ourselves, say civil rights shouldn’t be voted on.  What hypocrites we are!

But Maine’s legislature passed a same-sex marriage bill in 2009, and NOM and its allies pushed for an ultimately successful referendum to have the law annulled.  If they’re willing to go to the people to deny us our rights, why wouldn’t we carry the fight to the same battle ground?

So yes, civil rights shouldn’t be put to a vote, but if that’s the only option we have, then that’s the one we’ll exercise.  Voters are allowed to change their minds, and it sounds like Maine’s voters are doing just that.  NOM may want us to ignore that, but we’re not going away.

For years gay-marriage opponents have said that the same principles that lead to SSM (free love, etc) lead straight to polygamy. For years I’ve pointed out (for example, here) that the core principle of SSM, namely that everyone should have the opportunity to marry and that society is better off when this is the case, leads straight away from polygamy. From a social policy point of view, SSM and polygamy are opposites, not equivalents.

Here’s some new evidence. “Monogamy reduces major social problems of polygamist cultures,” finds a new study. “In cultures that permit men to take multiple wives, the intra-sexual competition that occurs causes greater levels of crime, violence, poverty and gender inequality than in societies that institutionalize and practice monogamous marriage.”

Why? Monogamy helps ensure there are enough spouses to go around. “By shifting male efforts from seeking wives to paternal investment, institutionalized monogamy increases long-term planning, economic productivity, savings and child investment.”

The case for SSM arises from exactly the same insight. It extends the opportunity to marry to people who lack it and is thus socially stabilizing; polygamy withdraws that opportunity from people who have it and is thus socially destabilizing.

Note to lawyers: this study should be cited in at least one amicus brief in every gay-marriage case in the country.

Something new and interesting in Utah…a bipartisan bill outlawing workplace discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation, but with a twist. Salt Lake City outlawed employment discrimination against gays a couple of years ago, with LDS church support, and other Utah cities have followed. But a statewide bill failed last session.

This one is different because (1) it has a Republican co-sponsor and (2) it also outlaws workplace discrimination on grounds of political speech or activity outside the workplace (and unrelated to the job). The idea is that you don’t get fired for being gay, and you don’t get fired for supporting (or opposing) Prop 8.

The bill has support from business (the Chamber of Commerce, no less), and Equality Utah, the main gay group. The LDS church may not actively support it but will almost certainly not oppose it. An interesting question: what will conservatives do? So far, one state conservative group, something called the Sutherland Institute, which looks like a state version of the Family Research Council, has come out against. Other conservative groups/leaders have not yet been heard from, even though the bill would actually do something about complaints that gay-marriage opponents and other advocates of religious-inspired causes are scared for their jobs  because they gave $100 for Prop 8 or whatever.

I’m not naive enough to expect that anti-discrimination coverage for gays will get broad Republican support in Utah, with or without protections for anti-gay activism, religious liberty, or motherhood and apple pie. But this bill might win enough Republican support to pass. Derek Brown, the Republican co-sponsor, is a bright, attractive young guy who looks to me like the future of the party, if the party has the sense to grasp it. Hope springs eternal.