I am writing in response to Matt Greenemeier’s “Deciphering state’s proposed Religious Liberty Act of 2013.” Mr. Greenemeier is disappointed in the Alabama House of Representative’s advancement of The Religious Liberty Act of 2013, which would prevent religious employers from being forced to fund services that violate basic principles of their faith.
Regardless of Mr. Greenemeier’s opinions about the supposed unconstitutionality of this Act, it is worth noting that 10 out of 14 companies who have sued the Obama administration for pushing its contraception and abortion-pill mandate on them have won, according to Alliance Defending Freedom.
Mr. Greenemeier’s lamentation that “an employer’s religion magically dictates the medical decisions and health of employees – even if those employees practice different faiths entirely” fails to note that not only are the mentioned employees voluntarily working for a religious employer, but they also have no right under the First Amendment to force anyone to act against his or her religion in order to fund services like contraception and abortion.
The issue is not Christians imposing their morality on others; the question is whether it is okay for people like Mr. Greenemeier to impose their morality on Christians, forcing them to violate their religion’s basic teachings for the sake of funding someone else’s contraception and abortions.
Taxpayer-funded abortions and the federal government doling out more than half a billion dollars a year to Planned Parenthood are simply not enough for opponents of religious liberty; they must have their cake and eat it too by forcing religious employers to foot the bill for services that their religion explicitly opposes. This is the kind of tyranny that could force Catholic hospitals – and one in six patients in America is treated in a Catholic hospital, by the way – to shut their doors completely, thus affecting the people of all faiths whom they serve.
Just as demanding that a Muslim or Jew act against his or her religion to accommodate someone else’s will is abhorrent, twisting the arms of Christian employers to compel them to act against their religion to pay for already-accessible services is preposterous. Just because Mr. Greenemeier thinks that stopping a beating heart and severing a human’s lifeline before birth is “health care” doesn’t mean that the rest of us should have to pay for this abhorrent procedure, which is in complete opposition to medicine’s promise to “first, do no harm.”
Claire Chretien is a sophomore majoring in American studies.
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