The Easter Sunday morning political talk shows featured several religious leaders. In discussions over the intersection of church and state, the controversy over the Obama administration’s birth control mandate became a hot topic. Several of the leaders said the issue was about religious freedom, not women’s health.

“You’ve got a dramatic, radical intrusion of a government bureaucracy into the internal life of the Church,” Cardinal Timothy Dolan said Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation.

The birth control mandate by the Department of Health and Human Services will require employers to provide health insurance that covers free birth control, including contraceptives, sterilisation and some abortion-inducing drugs. There is a religious exemption, but the exemption is narrowly written and many religious groups would not qualify. In a February speech, President Obama announced that religious organisations would not have to provide the coverage, but the insurance companies must provide it for free to any employee of a religious organisation that does not provide the coverage. This change, though, has not been codified in the law and many religious organisations, including the Catholic bishops, have said it does not satisfy their concerns.

Cardinal Dolan repeated this message in the interview. He said most Catholic institutions self-insured, so they would still have to pay for it. “We still find ourselves in a very tough spot. We’re still going to continue to express what we believe is not just a religious point of view but a constitutional point of view that America is at her best when the Government doesn’t force her citizens or a group of citizens in a religious creed to violate their deepest-held moral convictions.”

Bishop William Lori expressed similar concerns in a panel discussion about the role of faith in American politics on NBC’s Meet the Press. He said we would not characterise the president’s actions as a ‘war on religion,’ as many Republican presidential candidates have done, but there is ‘an erosion of religious liberty’ from the administration.

The mandate, according to Lori, is not the only issue where religious liberty has been eroded, but it is the most urgent. Additionally, Lori argued that the narrowly written religious exemption is imposing a government definition of what religion is going to be. If you’re only serving your own, hiring your own, inculcating your own doctrine, you’re exempt. But the minute you serve the common good, which is what all of our organisations do, then you’re not exempt. Then you’re subject to having to provide, fund or facilitate services which are contrary to the church’s teaching. I don’t think we should have to do that,” Lori said.

Evangelical pastor Rick Warren expressed solidarity with Catholic leaders when asked about the same issue on ABC’s This Week.

The issue here is not about women’s health,” Warren said. “There is a greater principle and that is, do you have a right to decide what your faith practices?

“Now, I don’t have a problem with contraception. I’m a Protestant, I’m an evangelical. But, I do support my Catholic brothers and sisters to believe what they want to believe.”

—      The Christian Post

By Napp Nazworth