“Never before”, says Timothy Dolan, president of the Conference of Catholic Bishops, “has the federal government forced individuals and organizations to go out into the marketplace and buy a product that violates their conscience.”
The whole premise of this argument is that it’s the Church’s money that is buying contraception. Totally false.
The bishops are merely making themselves the willing tools of anti-ObamaCare forces. They are degrading religion for partisan purposes, joining folks like Texas governor Rick Perry, who made a campaign slogan out of “Obama’s war on Religion” and Newt Gingrich, who has been denouncing the president’s “secular-socialist machine” for more than a year.
Nothing could be simpler than the concept that when employees receive compensation for their labor, that money becomes their money. It is no longer the employer's money. Now, employee compensation includes much more than just their basic take-home pay. Employees’ compensation consists of several parts. Their take-home pay is just the largest portion of THEIR money. Another obvious portion of their compensation is THEIR Social Security. This is a deferred compensation that accrues to the employee until his/her retirement. Thus, employers (in this case the Bishops) also pay a portion of what becomes the employees’ Social Security. The employee pays 4.2% of his income into the fund while the employer/bishop pays 6.2%. The self-employed pay the sum of these two figures: 10.4%. It would be absurd to claim that because the employer/bishops paid 60% of your Social Security it’s their money and they should determine how it is spent.
Also, the employer often offers a retirement/pension matching benefit. For example, my employer paid 5%, matching my 5% contribution. Nobody would have the audacity to say my pension monies belonged to the employer/bishops. Often employers and employees make matching contributions to purchase a life insurance benefit. Nobody argues that should the employee die, the employer (because he funded part of that insurance premium) still has a claim on that money. That would be too absurd! The exact same mechanism operates regarding health insurance. There is an employer/employee contribution in some proportion. Just because the employer contributed some proportion of the premium, that does not make it the employers' money. The Social Security, Pension, health insurance premiums, death insurance premiums, and take-home pay ALL are part of the employees’ compensation. To the employer these are expense of purchasing labor, just like they purchase other goods and services. They’ve exchanged their money for your labor.
If the bishops were to claim, for example, after paying their electricity bill that they objected to the electricity company purchasing the services of a prostitute for their CEO with that money because it was their money, they’d be laughed out of court. They have no moral responsibility for the philandering CEO and the electric company’s idea of CEO compensation.
If the monies that the employers/bishops paid to the employee in the form of health insurance premiums remained the bishops money, the bishops could chose at any moment to withhold that money from their employees. Should they continue to pay it, it would merely be a sign of their largess in providing a voluntary donation to the employee, not a legal obligation. Not even the bishops would argue that.
Thus, I have demonstrated that the insurance premium monies do not remain the employers/bishops monies. That being the case, they are obviously not being forced to "buy a product that violates their conscience,” like Timothy Dolan claims.
Thus, the bishops have violated several of the 10 Commandments. First, they have, intellectually at least, stolen the monies belonging to the employee. Second, they have provided false witness in claiming that the monies were theirs. Third, they have provided false witness in claiming that their religious freedoms were being violated. The fact that they would make such false claims a nation-wide TV campaign repeated for weeks is astounding. I call on them to retract such malicious slander.
Rather, it is the inverse. They are attempting to coerce their employees and control their moral decisions. Their dogma is that use of birth control is anti-life and a sin. They feel so strongly that their employees should not use birth-control that they are willing to invent fallacious pretexts to prevent their employees from having access to birth-control and to slander policy-makers with the charge of making a "war on religion" in an attempt to intimidate them with the threat of a Catholic backlash in the 2012 elections.
Historically, our citizens have instituted a system whereby the bulk of them purchase group plans, rather than individual plans, at their place of employment. By receiving part of their money, their compensation, in the form of insurance premiums both the employer and employee received a tax advantage. The employee's taxable income was reduced; the employer could deduct payments as an expense. This was and is merely an accounting/tax maneuver. The fact remains that the monies were the employee's monies/compensation. They were not alms or charity that the bishops could give or withhold. Can you imagine the employee uproar that would result if the bishops announced that they had decided not to make a “charitable donation” (in the form of the employer portion of the healthcare insurance premium) to the employees?
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