By Mary Susan Gast

MY ELDERLY MOTHER WAS TREATED during her final illness at Berrien General Hospital, run by the Seventh Day Adventist Church. The Seventh Day Adventists, based on their reading of Scripture, advocate a vegetarian diet. Yet my mother’s meals at the hospital included meat. The church’s website notes, “It is not our intent to impose our dietary habits on those we care for. Instead, we do everything we can to create a comfortable, healing environment for those we serve.”

Earlham College is “shaped by the distinctive perspectives of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers),” including faith-based rejection of war; as such, the college does not allow military recruiting on its campus. Yet it must fulfill its obligations under the Uniformed Services Employment and Re-employment Act to members of its staff who serve in the military, active or reserve. The college’s personnel handbook calls attention to that fact.

Guaranteed within the sweep of the First Amendment is a profound protection of our freedom to worship and live out our faith. Communities of faith are free to set their own standards for authorizing and regulating their spiritual leaders, and for the practice of their religion within their community, so long as no vulnerable persons are endangered.

Thus, priests, rabbis, imams and ministers cannot be required by law to solemnize marriages at all, much less do so in violation of their religious community’s understanding of marriage. I could not claim a violation of my civil rights if I, with a call from God and all the appropriate theological education, were refused ordination by a denomination because it has determined that women are not ordainable. And, when it comes to contraception, communities of faith are free to require of their members whatever is consistent with that community’s theology.

When religious bodies set up social service agencies, health care facilities and colleges to serve the public, however, they step into the public sphere. Quakers hire Army reservists. Catholics do not fire nurses who get divorced, nor turn away clients who are in gay or lesbian relationships. In their public institutions, religious bodies do not hold their employees or those they serve accountable to that religious body’s particular moral teachings. By law, they cannot — but there’s more to it. It’s as if they have set up public institutions have an understanding of — maybe even an appreciation for — the scope of talents, needs, backgrounds and perspectives that enrich the institution’s service.

Uh … except when it comes to employees’ health coverage for contraception.

“Catholic bishops have rejected the Obama administration’s latest proposal on mandatory contraceptive coverage,” according to Foxnews.com, Feb. 8. “‘Because the stakes are so high, we will not cease from our effort to assure that health care for all does not mean freedom for few,’ New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, president of the bishops’ conference said in a statement. …

“‘The plan for an insurer or third party to arrange birth control coverage leaves the possibility that ministries may yet be forced to fund and facilitate such morally illicit activities,’ Dolan said.”

Let’s be clear here on the moral front. There are millions of religious people in this country — Christian (both Protestant and Catholic), Jewish, Muslim and others — for whom contraception is not perceived as “morally illicit.”
Indeed, there are religious traditions wherein women and men are regarded as capable of, and accountable for, shaping ethical responses to the concerns of personal and family responsibilities within the scripturally mandated context of care for the poor, the oppressed and the Earth itself. They often find that access to contraception is an important aspect of that obligation.

As the Guttmacher Institute reported in April 2011, 99 percent of all U.S. women and 98 percent of Roman Catholic women have used contraception (excluding “natural family planning”) at some time in their lives. So it would seem that coverage of contraception in the Affordable Care Act might be significant to women — even Roman Catholic women — in much higher proportion than implied by Cardinal Dolan’s concern that “health care for all” not mean “freedom for few.”

“Under the (government’s) latest proposal, churches and nonprofit religious groups that object to providing birth control coverage on religious grounds would not have to pay for it,” according to a New York Times article of Feb. 7. “Women who work for such organizations could get free contraceptive coverage through separate individual health insurance policies. … Costs would be paid by an insurance company, with the possibility that it could recoup the costs through lower health care expenses resulting in part from fewer births.”

Cardinal Dolan, however, insists that the “proposal creates an unacceptable second-class status for faith-affiliated hospitals, colleges and charities, ‘rather than accepting the fact that these ministries are integral to our church and worthy of the same exemption as our Catholic churches.’”

Wow. In response, I would refer the Cardinal to my opening paragraphs, and reiterate the difference between what a community of faith is free to do and say when it is acting as a religious body — which I would never infringe upon, no matter how wide and deep the gulf between any of the Cardinal’s faith-based principles and my own — and the accountability to a pluralistic society that a community of faith takes on when it sets up an institution for public service.

The Rev. Dr. Mary Susan Gast is a retired conference minister for the Northern California-Nevada Conference of the United Church of Christ. She lives in Benicia.

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