Blunt Amendment DefeatedFollow

Except that you're still paying for it, whether you personally use it or not. No one should be forced to buy something they don't want to buy, and no one should be forced to sell something they don't want to sell. Saying "you have to pay for it, but you don't have to take it home and use it" isn't really a solution.

Churches have been in the education and medical business since long before Obama care was passed, and long before the US even existed. The issue is with the government intruding into these areas and creating mandates which never existed before. There is no need for it. There's a whole huge freaking range between making it illegal to buy or sell birth control and making it illegal to *not* buy or sell birth control.

Shouldn't the government stay in that middle range and let the people make their own purchase choices?




Except the whole "free exercise of religion" is violated if the only place you can exercise it is in said cloister. And let's not forget that said cloister would still be required to provide health care for those in it according to Obamacare, and that insurance must include birth control. So even your analogy fails. This is the government reaching into every part of America, cloisters included and mandating that they buy birth control.


You really don't have a problem with that? I do. I think most people do, once they understand the scope of the problem. And the religious angle is only part of it. Our rights are not limited just to those enumerated in the constitution. I should have just as much right to not buy something whether I'm in a religion or not. The very idea that the government can force every (or even any) citizen to buy something is in complete opposition to the ideals of liberty.


Put more directly: It violates my rights to be required to pay for someone's birth control. It does not violate anyone's rights if the government does *not* pay for someone's birth control. The decision really ought to be simple. Let people buy their own damn health care. Let them decide how much they want. That's freedom.

So would taking Teen Mom and 16 And Pregnant off the air.

That'd be a rather impractical solution, don't you think?

My question is, if I work for the Catholic church, and I get into some sort of freak ************ accident, will the insurance company deny my claim? What about if I get an STI before being married, will my religious physician deny me treatment? Or are we gonna foster an environment where people lie even more to their doctors?

What if she's ************ freaks? Like at the circus or something as Christian charity work.

A point of clarification. Is the law that every insurance policy has to cover contraception, or is it the law that the insurance companies have to offer the option to have contraception covered?

The first doesn't really make sense to me, the second does. Gbaji is indicating that it's the first.

Edited, Mar 1st 2012 7:23pm by Xsarus

If a religious organization objects to covering contraception on the basis that it violates their religion, then they will not be billed for having contraception on their list of services offered; the insurance company will, however, honor requests for it anyway.

Honestly, the amendment was ******** insane. The reason it was being put forth was clearly due to birth control, but it was phrased in a way they hoped would draw in support--that being by asserting that the current policies were a massive affront to religion.

The horrible problem is that the nondescript language of the bill literally gave leave for ANY medical practice to be denied by the employer on religious grounds. And since there is no cutoff for what justifies a religious belief, that holds true. Your employer thinks vaccines are against his religion? Your insurance doesn't need to pay for it. Employer thinks mammograms are a violation of decency mandates on women? Doesn't need to pay for them.

Literally any procedure.

Furthermore, one of the reasons it was so stupid in the first place is because health insurance is almost always offered as part of your deal to take the job. It's essentially a way for companies to save money--they offer to pay health insurance, but take out a plan that covers a ton of people, giving them a great discount. Instead of paying 3k in addition per salary, they pay (say) $1500 a year.

That is not your employer paying for your birth control. That's them choosing to pay for your health insurance directly, instead of giving you a larger wage instead. It's a JOKE to consider that a violation of their religious freedoms, because they OPT to use this system to get out of having to pay higher salaries for the same quality of employee.

You know, it's all kind of amusing watching the conservatives/Christians strive to hang on to the only tradition they can grasp being white Americans. The sad thing is, as we exit the age of Pisces (fish, Jesus) and enter into the age of Aquarius (humanitarianism, radical liberalism) it is inevitable that we will soon have "socialized" everything. The human race will evolve beyond its tribal, secular tendencies of misanthropic anti-socialism and embrace the ideals of unity as people, creatures who require a social order and society to function.

Now, this is a change in motion that won't come to its full fruition for a few more centuries (if we last that long), as each "age" lasts 2700 years, but it's inevitable. It's amusing as gbaji and others struggle against the current of change hoping that for the few short years they have left, they can cling to their moral, white, male superiority and systems created to uphold such.

You knew this was coming.

It means that arguing this like it's the religious organizations which are intruding into those areas is dishonest. It's the government that is intruding, not the other way around.



Um... Except they aren't. The White House doesn't write the laws Joph. Congress does. And the Congress just failed to pass an amendment which would have exempted churches. If they had passed this amendment, then what you say would be true. But they didn't.




There you go with the big gaping excluded middle again though. So because we can't allow religious people to ignore any law they want, it's perfectly ok to pass any law we want no matter how offensive it might be to a religious person? There should be some reasonable range in between that we can find here.


And as I've stated before, the religious angle is just the canary in the coalmine of this issue. It's a violation of all our rights to impose the sorts of mandates that are in Obamacare. It's just that the ones directly violating various religious institutions 1st amendment rights makes the issue that much more obvious. It isn't really about religion though. It's about the government requiring people to buy things they don't want to buy, and to sell things they don't want to sell. That should not be allowed regardless of whether there's a violation of someone's religious beliefs involved.



What I was saying earlier, is that by failing to pass this amendment they make the argument that much more stark. Had they actually excluded religious institutions from this, they might have been able to play the whole thing as "necessary intrusion via commerce clause". Maybe. Now? That's pretty much down the drain.