Be Careful What You Wish For

Assuming I labeled my posts properly, I went the entire calendar year of 2012 without an entry on religion.  Hard to believe, because it isn't as if there weren't religious controversies worth blogging about.

Regardless, that streak is over.  Some news today pushed me over the edge, that being a new proposal from the Obama administration that would allow religious groups to opt-out (sort of) of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) mandatory contraceptive coverage.

Religiously affiliated groups, especially the Catholic Church, have been going nuts over this mandate.  When this topic was at its hottest this past summer, and preachers were crusading against the mandate during church services, an acquaintance of mine had a letter published in the Des Moines Register that complained about those tactics.  After all, she wasn't going to church to hear those white men telling her what she should believe about her reproductive health care.  The next thing you know she was getting letters from strangers, telling her how wrong she was to feel that way.

Here's the problem with all of this.  The outrage of those religious leaders and their followers over the contraceptive coverage mandate, while somewhat understandable, would have a lot more credibility it it weren't for at least two really big things:

1) Religiously affiliated groups, and here again especially the Catholic Church, completely supported the passage of Obamacare.  I'm sure much of that support was at least indirectly financial, via PAC contributions.  Then once the rules were written, and they realized the rules apply to them, snap! they suddenly wanted to be excepted from a major part of Obamacare.

2) It's laughable to see the outrage of so-called religious leaders over this issue, when it is a fact that many of the organizations they oversee have been including contraceptive coverage in their health care plans for many years.  Apparently, they think all of the young female teachers in their schools are using abstinence as their birth control method.  Classic old white men group-think.

Who knows if this new 'opt-out' rule will pacify the mandate-haters.  It probably won't.  But that has more to do with the out-of-touch religious hierarchy, and its culture of thinking they can and should govern themselves.  (Ask any former church pedophile victim how well they think that self-governance thing has worked out.)