Q. How does the new federal rule and religious exemption compare with contraceptive coverage laws currently on the books in states?Here's more on this battle that has drawn out the true republican desire to take us back to the 1950s. One only needs to look at the size of the Santorum family and the Romney family. Clearly, they practice abstinence and/or the rhythm method of birth control or they don't have sex at all. We never hear the republicans discuss condoms either. It's always about controlling women.
A. The big difference is that under the federal rule birth control will be available without the employee being responsible for a copayment. That is currently true in just a handful of states. Some 28 states have mandated coverage of birth control, and 20 of those have some sort of exemption for religious employers. According to a report by the Guttmacher Institute, the state exemptions range from very narrow definitions, such as only for churches, to broader exemptions, including religious elementary and secondary schools. The most expansive state exemptions allow religiously-affiliated colleges and hospitals not to provide birth control coverage.
The federal compromise announced Friday cleaves closely to laws on the books in Hawaii, Connecticut and West Virginia. In all of those states, insurers must cover contraceptives for employees of institutions who choose not to do so for religious reasons. The federal rule, though, is unlike state laws that require the religious employers to tell workers where contraception coverage is available.
This republican party is so extreme, so lacking in substance that it should stop trying and try harder in 2016. Bring us some moderate republicans who can govern in a modern world.
The fringe control the GOP now. They're the ones who are messing with our schools, denying evolution and bringing us creationism, denying humankind's role in climate change and otherwise forcing their superstitious beliefs upon everyone else.
Not only that, they want to deny other religious people -- namely Muslims -- the right to practice their protected religious freedom, so when I hear republicans calling contraception a religious liberty issue, it strikes me as hypocritical at best.
But the conflict-driven headlines and predictions of disaster for Obama are, in my view, deeply misleading. Right now, they are driven both by cable news’s love of a good fight and high ratings and by the Republican primary campaign, in which the candidates, especially Newt Gingrich and Santorum, are desperately battling to unify the evangelical base, which is convinced its faith is somehow under attack. In the longer run, however, I suspect this sudden confluence of kerfuffles will be seen as one of the last gasps of the culture war, not its reignition. That’s especially possible since Obama’s swift walk-back last Friday, when he proposed an utterly sensible compromise, which exempts both churches and other religious institutions that cater to the general public from directly covering or paying for birth control, shifting the coverage requirement to insurance companies. So Catholic organizations will be able to stay out of the contraception question entirely, while contraception for all women will be kept free of charge. Instead of being lose-lose for the president, it became win-win. Most Catholics will be fine with this compromise, as are the Catholic Health Association and Planned Parenthood. But the bishops? They’ve gone out on a very long limb. This could be the moment when the culture-war tide finally turns and the social wedge issues long deployed so effectively by the Republican right begin to come back and bite them.
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It could finally unite the Christian fundamentalist right behind him—especially since Romneycare contained exactly the same provisions on contraception that Obamacare did before last week’s compromise was announced. That’s right: Romneycare can now accurately be portrayed as falling to the left of Obamacare on the contraception issue. Read the whole thing at The Daily Beast
