Do you at least see where I see the difference?
To me, the Church has the right to say that a woman can't be a priest. But they do NOT have the right to say a woman can't be head of pediatric medicine at a hospital.
The Church has chosen (wisely, IMO) not to try and enforce THOSE tenets of their faith. They don't try to give alcohol to minors. They don't demand that all their patients be Catholic or that Catholics receive better care in their hospitals (whereas in the Mass Ritual, non-Catholics can attend but only Catholics in Good Standing may receive the eucharist).
The Church maintains that they don't have to employ women as priests and there's really nothing the government can do about it, despite protests from certain citizen groups.
Operating a hospital is a different matter. I seem to notice that there's no such 'push' for contraceptive coverage for Church employees *inside* the church (like a secretary in a rectory or something like that).
Inside the Church, they have the inherent right to discriminate. Outside, they don't. That's where the argument is going to eventually land.
I went looking for some other cases that might show an example of my inside/outside argument. I found something I didn't expect - here's an article from last December - long before the latest round of arguments started up:
Catholic Groups Fight Contraceptive Rule, But Many Already Offer Coverage : Shots - Health Blog : NPR
Some surprising quotes from the article:
- Catholic Healthcare West offered contraceptive coverage before it was legally required.
- Georgetown University (of Ms. Fluke fame) offers contraceptive coverage to it's EMPLOYEES but not it's students!
Quote:
Sarah Lipton-Lubet of the American Civil Liberties Union:
"Institutions like hospitals and universities ... you're required to include contraception coverage in your insurance plan where you include coverage for other prescription drugs, as a matter of basic gender equality," she says.
That's the result of a ruling in 2000 by the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. It found that employers whose health plans offer prescription drugs and other preventive services but not contraceptives violated the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, 1978 civil rights law that amended the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
And what does contraception have to do with pregnancy discrimination? "Prescription contraception is a form of health care that is unique to women, and the consequences of the inability to be able to access contraception, those fall primarily on women," Lipton-Lubet says.
The EEOC ruling isn't technically binding unless people who are being discriminated against take action. That happened recently when some faculty members at a small Catholic college in North Carolina filed a complaint. The EEOC ruled in their favor.
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