[...]Notre Dame Faculty Cabal Calls on Bishop Jenky to Step Down from Board « Stand Up for Religious Freedom[...]…

Thank you for the references. I reviewed them.
I gather that the bishops object to any requirement that entails “material cooperation with evil.” The explanation offered suggests that drawing that line depends on particulars, circumstances, and such. In other words, it is open to interpretation depending on the situation.

I suggest that we turn the question around and challenge you (and the bishops) to come up with a solution that accomplishes the following:

1. Assures that all employees can obtain health care plans covering the full choice of services afforded them under the law.

2. Assures that employers have options that enable them to avoid materially cooperating with evil.
I understand that the bishops consider some of the services the law affords to be “evil.” The point here, though, is not to enable the bishops to thwart or limit the law (so any “solution” that would do that is a non-starter), but rather to enable the law to be implemented while, at the same time, avoid requiring any employer to materially cooperate with evil. Any ideas?

President Obama has tried more than once to accommodate the bishops concerns. The bishops have rejected those ideas, but (as far as I have heard) haven’t suggested any of their own–other than to just reiterate that they don’t like the law itself. One begins to suspect that they are not interested in an accommodation that frees employers of a moral bind, but rather prefer to use complaints about religious liberty as part of a political effort to revise the law to render services they dislike unavailable or at least less readily available to anyone.

Bishop Jenky, as a member of the greater university community, should be accorded the same freedom to speak and to advance his perspective that a newly hired junior faculty member.

Or does the new standard of academic freedom at Notre Dame protect liberal ideology but censorage for conservative ideas.

Doug—

You’re comparing apples and oranges.

Under the HHS Mandate, Catholic institutions would be forced to participate in — to use a term from Catholic moral theology — “material cooperation with evil”.

In response to the argument you’re making — essentially, that this is really No Big Deal — several heavy hitters in the American Catholic intellectual world offer insights here on “The HHS Mandate, Cooperation with Evil, and Coercion”.

More importantly, those to whom the teaching of the Church has been trusted — our bishops — have shown no ambiguity on this question.

For decades, our nation has respected the First Amendment guaranteed freedom of religious institutions by not forcing them to provide their employees with insurance coverage for services those institutions believe are immoral.

And now — since, historically speaking, five minutes ago — the Obama Administration has decided that religious institutions should no longer have this freedom. That’s patently absurd.

To upend the status quo as President Obama, Secretary Sebelius, et al. have attempted to do, they would have to make a thoroughly compelling case that it was wrong all along for federal law to allow, from time immemorial, religious institutions to not provide their employees with insurance coverage for services those institutions believe are immoral.

And they’re not making a very compelling case.

I do not speak of the conscientious objector exemption. The law affords every employer the option I describe.

Please show us where “the conscience clause,” resides. There is one very narrow exemption, so narrow in fact that as one freedom fighter put it; “even Jesus and his apostles wouldn’t pass the test for the narrow exemption.”

Please inform us of your conscience clause in this HHS mandate

The health law affords you the option of not doing or paying for anything you find contrary to your conscience. It does not afford you the option of dropping out of society by not paying your taxes, assessments, and such based on choices you made. That the government uses that money to do things not to your liking puts you in no worse position than every other taxpayer who disapproves of one or another thing the government does with “his” or “her” tax dollars.