Obamacare rules violate religious liberty

Editorial

Bishop Robert Lynch had a point to make last week about religious liberty and government's intrusion into matters of faith, and he chose a special venue — his homily before judges and lawyers during the Red Mass at Sacred Heart Church in downtown Tampa.

Employees of the Diocese of St. Petersburg, which includes five West-Central Florida counties, could lose their health care coverage if the president's health care reforms are fully implemented, he said, because the diocese he leads will not adhere to federal mandates that conflict with strongly held Catholic beliefs.

Specifically, Lynch addressed new rules formulated by the Department of Health and Human Services as part of the health care plan that would require the diocese's self-insured health plan to cover contraceptives, the morning-after pill and medicines such as Viagra. Currently, the insurance plan is exempt from offering these medications, but the interim rules announced in August would force the diocese to make these medicines available to covered employees.

Lynch won't have any part of it. Instead, the diocese would offer its employees a sum of money to use to buy health care coverage, he said. The unfortunate part for the employees is that the coverage may cost far more than they pay now.

Lynch is right to protest. There is no reason the rules couldn't be modified to exempt church-affiliated hospitals, universities and health care plans from having to provide medications they consider wrong or immoral. It doesn't matter that many Catholics use birth control or that many Catholic hospitals provide contraceptives as part of an overall health benefits package. The church, not the government, should be the arbiter of conscience in these matters.

Lynch is not alone in his thoughts. "If we comply, as the law requires," wrote Catholic University President John Garvey in The Washington Post, "we will be helping our students do things that we teach them, in our classes and in our sacraments, are sinful — sometimes gravely so. It seems to us that a proper respect for religious liberty would warrant an exemption for our university and other institutions like it."

And from Archbishop Thomas Winski of Miami: The "administration is running roughshod over conscience-protection provisions long part of the law of our land that find their justification in the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of religion, a foundational human right. It is one thing for an administration to support and promote an agenda; it is quite another to force those who disagree with it to violate their moral and religious principles.

And so Catholic leaders have asked President Obama for a broader exemption from the rules. Making the change would come with some political risk (reproductive rights organizations want the rules to stick), but the president also has friends in the church, and he should not put them in the position of having to act against their faith.

As Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne pointed out, "a broader exemption would be a modest concession, honoring the rights of religious institutions that liberals and Obama have long respected." And Obama could still boast "of having achieved the largest expansion of contraception coverage in the nation's history."

Of course, all this shows the troublesome consequences that usually occur when federal government expands its reach.

We think the health care plan is a disaster, but even those who support its efforts should see the administration stumbled here. It should retreat from its unreasonable demands.