What About My Religion? By, Garnett Losak

What About My Religion?

Garnett Losak

July 13, 2014

 

 

Thank you all for being here on this summer morning.  I know you all have plenty of other places you could be.  I couldn’t be happier that you decided to be here.  I also want to thank the father/daughter team of Bob and Julie Bero – Julie as my able worship partner and Bob as our guest musician.  Our worship committee does a really spectacular job assisting summer worship leaders.  I encourage any of you who have been tempted to lead a service to give it a whirl.   You’ve got a year to think about it.

 

As a white woman who came of age in the late 1970’s and 80’s I admit to rarely feeling institutional sexual discrimination.  Sure, I have occasionally suspected that I was not paid as much as my male counterparts and I’m fairly sure that at least once I was not promoted by my male boss because he felt hiring a man would be better for business (not that these are small things) but generally speaking my life has progressed relatively uninhibited.  But in the last several years I have been horrified by the backlash against women by right wing politicians, fundamentalist Christians and most recently, The Supreme Court of the United States. 

 

Last month the Supreme Court issued its opinion on the case of Sibelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc.  Most of us are aware of this case and its outcome, but by way of a refresher, the gist of the case was that the owners of Hobby Lobby and the owners of a Pennsylvania furniture and cabinet making company called Conestoga Wood Specialties along with 49 other – quote – closely held companies – unquote – claimed that providing contraception through their companys’ health insurance plans violated their religious freedom.  In what has been labeled a narrow ruling, the court sided with Hobby Lobby and exempted them from providing birth control under the affordable care act which requires that all companies with over 50 employees provide health insurance that includes prescribed birth control coverage. 

 

The political right has heralded this decision as a win for religious freedom.  Hobby Lobby will only restrict certain kinds of IUDs and morning after pills which they claim are arbortifacients – drugs that induce abortion.  It does not, they claim, impact birth control pills, patches or implants.  Furthermore, the plaintiffs argue, these forms of birth control are readily available by other means, so it is not encumbant upon companies to provide them through their health insurance policies. Neither of these claims is true of course.  Medical doctors agree that neither IUD’s nor morning after pills cause abortions and for many women, birth control is not available through other means.  Also, left out of most news reports is that some of the 49 other co-litigants do not believe in the use of birth control in any form.

 

This decision affects 90% of American companies and 52% of American employees who work for these companies.  Although it does not necessarily mean that all or even the majority will act upon their new religious freedoms.  By the way, Koch Industries is, by the definition of the Court, a closely held company.

 

But here’s the thing: Reports are now coming out that Hobby Lobby’s 401(k) plan has investments in pharmaceutical and medical companies that produce birth control medications and devices as well as abortion drugs.  Also, the crippling penalties that Hobby Lobby claims would be imposed if they dropped health insurance all together would actually be less per employee than what they pay for health insurance. According to some reports, Hobby Lobby could drop health insurance, pay the penalties to the federal government and give subsidies to their employees to buy their own health insurance and still come out ahead.  All of which leads me to believe that this was never a suit about religious freedom. It was a suit that’s very intention was to further dismantle the affordable care act and discredit its primary architect, President Barack Obama, with the added bonus of promoting conservative Christian principles that restrict a woman’s right to control her own reproductive future.  Chief Justice Roberts, who is known to be a brilliant, albeit conservative, legal mind and a conservative Catholic must have understood this when he agreed to hear the case.

 

Of course this so-called narrow ruling has opened up the can of worms that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg predicated it would.  As many as 15 small Christian colleges have applied and received exemptions from even the paperwork involved –  and it seems as though hundreds of companies large and small – including the organic food company Eden Foods, for you foodies out there – are vying for the same treatment.  Some want to be exempted from insuring women from any prescribed birth control.  And now, using the same precedent, so-called Christian companies are requesting exemption from President Obama’s executive order disallowing companies that are bidding on federal contracts from discriminating based on sexual orientation.

 

 

The law on this case is fascinating and I’m sure that many have you who are as horrified by this development have dug into it as much as I have.  But I am not a lawyer and far be it from me to analyze the legal constructs that led 5 members of the Supreme Court – all men and all conservative Christians –  to side with Hobby lobby and its co-plaintiffs. 

 

I am much more interested in the moral obligations of people of faith and Unitarian Universalists in particular, to work as diligently to right this wrong as we have on issues of Gay rights and marriage equality.

 

The issue of birth control and equal rights is a challenging one.  There is no commonly used equivalent to prescribed birth control for men.  Men’s and women’s bodies are not the same and their healthcare needs are not the same.  We know now that for decades drug research was conducted exclusively on men because their bodies were considered to be the norm.  Women’s bodies with their hormonal fluctuations – men, of course, having no hormonal fluctuations – made getting reliable results challenging.  And so medical decisions were made for women based on research conducted on men with devastating consequences that are still being worked out.

 

Furthermore, contraceptive use is tangled up with behavior.  Just read the comments on any article that is published on-line and you’ll find that for many people, birth control is not so much medication as it is a license for having consequence free sex.  “This is about choices”, read one comment, “not about a medical condition”.  In other words, If you’re worried about getting pregnant don’t have sex.  Why should everyone’s insurance costs rise because women want to have sex without getting pregnant? That argument, in my mind is similar to insurance companies saying they won’t cover accidents that occur as a result of climbing a ladder.  If you’re worried about falling off a ladder, don’t climb one.  By the way, women get pregnant, but not by themselves.  Men, it seems to me, have at least as much at stake here.

 

These and many more sensible arguments are made beautifully in Ayesha Khan’s amicus brief that was filed on behalf of 26 faith organizations including the Unitarian Universalist Association and the Unitarian Universalist Women’s Federation.  I have provided the web address in your order of service.

 

But what about the religious argument?  If theological arguments can require a woman to carry an unwanted child to term, than why can’t theological arguments require us to do everything we can to prevent that pregnancy in the first place?  According to the Guttmacher Institute, 40% of the 3 million unwanted pregnancies in the United States each year end in abortion.  If theological arguments can be made to require all fertilized eggs to be carried to term, why can’t theological arguments be made to insure that all pregnant women receive quality pre-natal care and all children receive good food, safe housing and a quality education.  And how about that old first amendment of the United States Constitution, the one that says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof?  The very first thing in the very first of the bill of rights guarantees the freedom of all people to exercise their religious conscience.

 

Charles P. Pierce writing for the Politics Blog points out that the current Supreme Court treads dangerously close to favoring one religious viewpoint – namely conservative Protestantism and Catholicism over all others.  This is evidenced by the writings of Justice Alito himself who in the case of Al Smith, a member of the Native American Church, who in 1990 was fired from his job for using Peyote as part of a religious ritual.   The Supreme Court sided with the state of Oregon and Justice Alito, writing for the majority wrote:

 

To permit this, would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself. The rule respondents favor would open the prospect of constitutionally required religious exemptions from civic obligations of almost every conceivable kind, ranging from compulsory military service, to the payment of taxes, to health and safety regulation such as manslaughter and child neglect laws, compulsory vaccination laws, drug laws, and traffic laws; to social welfare legislation such as minimum wage laws, child labor laws, animal cruelty laws, environmental protection laws, and laws providing for equality of opportunity of the races.”

 

Notice that in his laundry list of concerns, Justice Alito left out a woman’s legal right to obtain contraception and choose to have an abortion.

 

It shouldn’t come as a surprise then when two decades later Justice Alito, again writing for the majority in the Hobby Lobby case says,

 

“This decision concerns only the contraceptive mandate and should not be understood to mean that all insurance mandates, that is for blood transfusions or vaccinations, necessarily fail if they conflict with an employer’s religious beliefs.

 

In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg directly attacked the court for what she recognized as religious intolerance in the decision.  She wrote  “Approving some religious claims while deeming others unworthy of accommodation could be ‘perceived as favoring one religion over another…”

 

The readings we heard earlier from religion blogger Charles P. Pierce and from Ayesha Kahn, Legal Director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State  echo Justice Ginsburg’s concern.

Even some religious conservatives have voiced serious concerns about this ruling, focusing on the efficacy of assigning religion to corporations. Jonathan Merritt, an evangelical Christian writer and blogger for the Religion News Service, argues that conservative evangelicals shouldn’t call businesses “Christian” in the first place.

He says, “The New Testament never—not one time—applies the ‘Christian’ label to a business or even a government.  The tag is applied only to individuals. If the Bible is your ultimate guide, the only organization one might rightly term ‘Christian’ is a church. And this is only because a church in the New Testament is not a building or a business, but a collection of Christian individuals who have repented, believed in Christ, and are pursuing a life of holiness.”

And Serene Jones, President of Union Theological Seminary was quoted in one report as saying, “I am horrified by the thought that the owners of Hobby Lobby as Christians think their corporation has a soul, and I’m even more appalled that the Supreme Court agrees.”

So I say, let’s fight fire with fire.  Let’s use our Unitarian Universalist Religion – Capital R Religion –  as a tool for combating this and other injustices and let us not be coy about it.  Our religion respects science and personal experience as valuable considerations in each person’s faith development.  Our religion requires us to uphold use of democratic process, so let’s work against laws that suppress the vote.  Our religion requires us to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person – so let’s continue our work supporting marriage equality and the rights of LGBTQ people.  Our religion demands that we respect the interdependent web of all existence, so we must work for a healthy planet. Our religion calls upon us to respect the right of conscience, so women everywhere should be provided every opportunity to manage their own reproductive systems.  For the courts to allow for any laws or policies that contradict these tenets is a direct condemnation of our religion.

Rev. Peter Morales, President of the Unitarian Universalists Association, issued the following statement following the Supreme Court Decision, “Unitarian Universalists affirm that parenthood and sexuality are sacred gifts. Women’s access to key preventative contraceptive services is essential not only to their health, but also to other rights including religious liberty, equality, and economic security.

Though I am exceedingly disappointed in this ruling, I reaffirm the commitment of the UUA to work for reproductive justice in accordance with our first principle, [affirming the inherent worth and dignity of every person] because ‘justice is what love looks like in public.’”

We may not have a uniform understanding of God, but I say we have a common belief in the divinity of the human experience and a religious fervor for the arc of justice and of each individual’s responsibility to one another and to the planet that we will leave behind for the future whatever that may hold.