Anesthetizing America’s Conscience

Matthew J. Franck

As readers may know, the Obama administration’s Department of Health and Human Services is proposing to require every health insurer in the land to pay for, and thus to be complicit in, the provision of contraceptives, including some that would be more accurately described as abortifacients. The rule offers a potential exception on religious grounds, but this “exemption,” as previously discussed by Christopher T. Haley, Ryan Anderson, and others on this website, is exceedingly narrow and inadequate. It extends only to the most narrowly defined “religious employers,” to include only those primarily devoted to inculcating religion, primarily hiring their own co-religionists and serving the same, and fitting other narrow legal criteria under the tax code.

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2011/10/anesthetizing-americarsquos-conscience