So-Called “Religious Liberty”–Why Does the GOP Seek to Wage War on Birth Control?

More than a century after President Theodore Roosevelt first proclaimed the need for universal health care in the United States, the dream of one of our nation’s most storied Republican presidents has been come to define the legacy of one of its most historic Democratic ones.

Even without health care reform, President Obama’s first term has been marked by remarkable accomplishments (the economic stimulus, the turnaround of the American auto industry, the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and the apprehension and killing of Osama bin Laden are a few that come to mind). Indeed, conventional wisdom and the experiences of numerous presidents, from TR to Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton, suggested that health care reform was an unwieldy, elusive goal that ought to be de-prioritized in favor of other, more feasible legislative initiatives. Supporters of the President, by this logic, ought not get their hopes up regardless of the promises made on the campaign trail; after all, many previous presidential administrations had attempted to take leadership on the health reform issue, and none had succeeded.

But President Obama pursued health care reform with unwavering commitment. Democratic leadership in the House and Senate expended crucial political capital for the cause, even while their GOP counterparts remained cynically and opportunistically on the sidelines, refusing to participate in the legislative process in order to turn the health and welfare of tens of millions of Americans into a campaign issue in the 2010 midterm elections. The debate surrounding the law’s passage was contentious, vigorous, and comprehensive–as is only appropriate for a law with the breadth and complexity and import of the Affordable Care Act.

And, finally, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the law which will forever be known to history (affectionately for some, derisively for others) by the moniker “Obamacare,” was passed by both houses of Congress and signed into law by President Obama. Disagree we may as to the efficacy of all of the law’s provisions, under Obamacare the United States will finally join the ranks of the rest of the Western world in ensuring that all of its citizens have access to the care they need. No person should ever have to suffer ill health or debilitating sickness because he can’t afford the exponentially rising and all too often prohibitively expensive costs of medical care. No child should ever go without coverage for basic check ups and preventive care because of the economic circumstances of her family. This is the moral imperative of a wealthy nation which seeks to extend equal opportunity to all.

Beginning today, August 1st, 2012, the provision of the Affordable Care Act that requires insurers to cover women’s contraceptive care in their policies go into effect. Going forward, women who pay insurance premiums can expect to have access to the reproductive health products and services they need without having to pay out of pocket. Perhaps in the political climate of, say, 20 or even 10 years ago, such a policy would have been terribly uncontroversial. Birth control and other contraceptive health measures are critically important; in addition to preventing unwanted pregnancies, many women take birth control products to derive numerous other important health benefits. Services such as preventive screenings for cervical cancer and breast cancer are the first line of defense in detection and prevention.

The benefits of increased access to these basic women’s health services are incontrovertible, and yet many Republican lawmakers have taken up the cause of repealing Obamacare, waging a zealous crusade against sensible measures to strengthen women’s health in the name of so-called “religious liberty.” I would like to take a moment to unpack the religious liberty objections of the evermore extreme GOP in the Age of the Tea Party, because a nation that values freedom of conscience and religious liberty should not allow those bedrock principles to be cheapened by politicization. Men and women of faith, take note: nothing in Affordable Care Act does anything whatsoever to influence your personal religious beliefs or interfere in your free exercise of religion. Pre-Obamacare, the government could not establish a religion or prohibit its free exercise; post-Obamacare, this remains the case.

So why, then, one might ask, do we hear the rally cries of religious persecution? How can Obamacare be neutral towards religion when GOP lawmakers repeatedly vilify the law as an affront to religious liberty? Well, apparently requiring employers to provide health insurance plans which, in turn, are required under the new law to cover women’s contraception is the new Republican definition of religious persecution. Even after the Obama Administration carved out an exemption under the ACA for religious employers, the GOP continues to launch its assault on birth control. Apparently, in the Age of the Tea Party, we are no longer interested in reducing the rate of unwanted pregnancies or promoting women’s reproductive health. And apparently, too, the mere assertion that a particular provision of a law which is facially neutral and universally applicable offends one’s religious beliefs is enough to invalidate it.

This is not how “religious liberty” works in a secular democracy. Individuals’ personal policy preferences do not trump the valid enactments of our legislatures. Sadly, religious discrimination and intolerance are a reality for many Americans, and the Tea Party Republicans demean their claims for equal rights and fair treatment by suggesting that women’s health care offends the First Amendment. It surely does not.

To illustrate just how ridiculous the argument is, allow me to posit a hypothetical. What if a man’s sincere, genuine religious beliefs taught that interracial miscegenation and marriage are wrong? Does he have a right to be exempt from federal and state law, which require his business to serve interracial couples? Is that an assault on religious liberty? The fact that there may be an attenuated connection between a neutral law and one’s personal religious beliefs does not a First Amendment problem make.

Health care reform is not by any stretch of the imagination an assault on religious liberty. The REAL assault on our freedom of conscience comes when religious institutions seek to impose their preferences on the rest of the public by declaring their inexorable right to be exempt from the laws of this country. We cannot, and should not, abide this insanity any longer.