The President of the United States of America, Barack Obama, has recently taken the bully pulpit route in his desire to assure that all women in the United States have health care insurance coverage for birth control.
Generally speaking, and I emphasize generally speaking, Roman Catholics have not been pleased with the President's perspective that all women in America should be treated equally in having contraception services as a proviso of health care insurance. While the President has attempted to honor religious belief systems and assure the religion protection guarantees of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, some Catholics have been very vocal in attacking the President, postulating that he is violating the First Amendment and some attacks even go to the point of making the accusation of "the Obama Administration’s efforts at forcing contraception on Catholics."
Leaders within the Catholic Church in the United States vow that they will continue to actively oppose President Barack Obama's proposal concerning health care insurance contraception coverage. Click on the embedded link to go on over to read:
U.S. Catholic bishops oppose Obama birth-control plan
In trying to better understand the issue from the official Catholic perspective, I did a search on the internet and found quite a few web sites, web pages, and specific comments that I found interesting.
The comment "... sexual pleasure within marriage becomes unnatural, and even harmful to the spouses, when it is used in a way that deliberately excludes the basic purpose of sex, which is procreation. God’s gift of the sex act, along with its pleasure and intimacy, must not be abused by deliberately frustrating its natural end—procreation ..." may be found on the web page Birth Control from the web site of Catholic Answers.
The comment "... we are enormously grateful to the Church for her constant teaching that sexuality must be open to the transmission of life ..." may be found on the web page Contraception Misconceptions of the web site of catholic-pages.com.
I also have placed embedded links on the titles to some other web pages I suggest you read. The web pages are:
Catholicism and Family Planning
Catholicism and sexuality
Christian views on contraception
Religious views on birth control
2 comments:
Roland,
Regardless of the links, I think that there is a great deal of mischaracterization of this issue out there. The Catholic church has had ecumenical policy out there for many years regarding acceptable forms of contraception and Church beliefs on Right to Life. These new regulations forced the Catholic Church to pay for things which violate its own precepts. This issue goes beyond that however.
The original HHS regulations demanded that employees of Church-owned companies be provided services that the Church believes are against its doctrines "without co-pay" or in other words, free of charge. This stance was later modified in 'compromise' to say that the employer would no longer have to provide this free coverage, but their insurance company would (which seems a rather ludicrous form of compromise at best).
This has since been characterized by opponents as restricting access for medical care to female employees. There is no restriction to such care now, in spite of existing doctrine. There is however a restriction as to who will pay for it, the employer or the employee.
The larger question therefore is how much power we are to grant HHS in who pays for what in terms of future medical care, regardless of the reasoning behind such opposition.
Spot on, Tim. Whatever you think of religions, this is a government intrusion issue- as we always knew Obamacare would end up being.
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