The regime of Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, and Mike Pence is relentlessly striving to place far right Christian beliefs above the laws that govern the rest of society. Since last week, real or feigned extremist religious belief allow companies to role back contraception coverage in their employee health insurance plans and allows individuals to make a mockery of non-discrimination laws that bar discrimination based on religion or religious belief. Yet, now, if one is LGBT and does not adhere to Christofascist dogma, you can be fired, denied service and refused accommodations and housing by the self-anointed "godly folk." The irony on the war on contraception coverage is that it will increase the number of unwanted pregnancies and increase demand for abortions, something the same "godly Christians" to whom Trump and Pence are prostituting themselves also claim to abhor with even more fervor. As numerous studies have shown, the USA has the highest unwanted pregnancy rate of any advanced industrial nation specifically because of the restrictions on access to contraception and the lunatic abstinence only sex education programs so loved by Christofascists. Everyone who believes in religious freedom and equality under the laws should be concerned. Today it's contraception and gays, but tomorrow it could be those who are Jewish, non-Christian who the Christofascists also dislike and hate. An op-ed in the New York Times attacks this exultation of one religion over the civil rights of citizens and the law. Here are excerpts:
Saudi women are gaining the right to drive. American women are losing the right to employer-provided birth control.
The first development signifies a theocratic kingdom’s bow to the inexorable onslaught of modernity. The second is a cynical bow to the forces of reaction against modernity.
It would be too far a stretch to see in Saudi Arabia even the glimmer of the emergence of civil society. But it’s not much of a stretch to see in the rules issued by the Trump administration last week the fraying of civil society as the United States has known it. Ours is a diverse society in which all are expected, with limited and precisely defined exceptions, to abide by the rules that apply to all. The alternative, as Justice Antonin Scalia observed decades ago, “would be courting anarchy.”
The new rules, which went into immediate effect, create exceptions that are anything but limited. They are, in fact, there for the taking. Any “entities” that claim not only religious but also “moral” objections to birth control are entitled to refuse to comply with the federal contraception mandate that until last Friday was enabling 55 million women to receive birth control without charge as part of their work- or college-related health insurance coverage.
The list of religious objectors includes churches and religious orders (which from the beginning have been completely exempt from the mandate anyway); nonprofit organizations; a “closely held for-profit entity;” a “for-profit entity that is not closely held” (including publicly traded companies); and ”any other nongovernmental employer” along with institutions of higher education.
We are talking, in other words, about the American workplace.
It’s hard to overstate the radical nature of what has just happened. Just three years ago, in the Hobby Lobby case, the Supreme Court ruled that the Obama administration could not impose the mandate on a closely held for-profit business owned by a family with religious objections to birth control.
Now the Trump administration has played the Supreme Court justices for chumps. The accommodation, carefully worked out and fought over, is a thing of the past. In its place is a flat-out exemption, with no requirement that women be offered any alternative route to coverage.
The administration says the average price of a year’s birth control is $584. That’s probably low . . . but that’s not really the point. Others have called attention to the administration’s truly astonishing effort to show that birth control really isn’t all that important and may even be counterproductive. Statements like the one on page 46 of the religious exemption document, “Contraception’s association with positive health effects might also be partially offset by an association with negative health effects,” are hogwash, the result of careful cherry-picking of the literature, some of it quite dubious.
The real point is that the Trump administration has outsourced a crucially important building block of national health care policy, enabling a fanatical fringe of the Republican base to exercise raw political power, clothed in religiosity under cover of the grandiloquently named Religious Freedom Restoration Act. That 1993 law, passed by overwhelming bipartisan majorities and signed by President Bill Clinton, is the object of growing buyer’s remorse on the part of liberal and moderate Americans — and should be.
The Obama administration did as the Supreme Court said and offered the accommodation as Justice Alito described it. But a group of religiously affiliated nonprofits, mainly but not exclusively Catholic-run schools, colleges, nursing homes and other social service organizations, refused to accept it. Not good enough, they said, claiming that they would still be complicit in the sin of contraception, even if the employees’ receipt of the benefit required no action on the employer’s part beyond notifying the government that it was opting out. Only the complete exemption offered to actual churches would suffice.
Extending the rescission to employers with “moral” objections has no statutory basis. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act at least requires a claim that has something to do, however implausibly, with religion.
Conservatives, even the publicly pious ones, don’t seem to have a problem with limiting the size of their families. (Vice President Mike Pence has two children, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions has three. Need I say more?) The problem they have is with what birth control signifies: empowering women — in school, on the job, in the home — to determine their life course. That’s what they don’t want to normalize. It comes as no surprise which side Donald Trump is on. . .
Women in Virginia should be very worried. Republican attorney general candidate John Adams is a religious freedom fanatic and a darling of Christofascists. If elected, he would champion special rights for Christian extremists over the rights of all others. Get out and vote for Mark Herring for attorney general, Ralph Northam for Governor, and Justin Fairfax for Lt. Governor. The extreme Trump/Pence must be stopped.
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