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For a while it had me quite baffled. I mean, if your organisation was specifically exempted from having to pay for contraception, then your religious freedom has been upheld. Righty-oh, let's all move on with our lives. Except that people on the religious right continue to freak the feth out that they're religious freedom to not have anything to do with contraception is being ignored, despite

It was quite the puzzler, until I came across this quote from Rick Warren, one of the major players in evangelical Christianity;
"I'd go to jail rather than cave in to a govement mandate that violates what God commands us to do."
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/02/13/1064387/-Rick-Warren-please-report-to-jail

It's very odd because there's no mandate for Rick Warren or his ministry to pay under the federal law, they'll get an exemption as a religious organisation. In fact, the federal law is identical to the one that's been in place in Warren's home state of California for 13 years, that he's complied to every single year without ever even going slightly to jail, because it doesn't make him pay for anyone's birth control.

So that was my first clue as to what was really going on, but then this quote from Charles Colson made things more clear;
"We have come to the point—I say this very soberly—when if there isn’t a dramatic change is circumstances, we as Christians may well be called upon to stand in civil disobedience against the actions of our own government."
http://www.anglicansunited.com/?p=12382

So he's calling for civil disobedience to resist a government that isn't making him do anything. Which is very weird, still, but a pattern begins to emerge, made finally clear by Father John Morris, who boldly declared;
“Of course I’m willing to die, of course I’m willing to go to jail, of course I’m willing to pay a fine. That is the most normal, non-radical thing I can think of,”
http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/father-jonathan-morris-doubles-down-willin

It's just as odd, as with all the others, that he's willing to go so far to defend his right to refuse a law that he's been specifically exempted from, but what really stands out is his declaration that he's willing to die over the matter. Despite the fact that no-one is at all interesting in killing him, or has even thought of doing it. Just like no-one has even considered putting Warren in jail.

The pattern becomes clear - they're playing make believe. Exciting games where they are heroic martyrs battling for a noble cause, and the fact that there is no-one martyring them or forcing them to do anything hasn't stopped them for one second from playing such an exciting game. And I can't really blame them, when I was a small child I used to run around the backyard, hacking up orcs and blasting Russians, and the fact that there were no orcs and no Russians in my backyard never bothered me one bit, as long as I got to think of myself as the hero. Indeed, if I ever learnt how scary real orcs and real Russian invasions were, the game would have stopped being fun very quickly.

Warren, Colson and Morris are all running about in their parent's backyards, playing pretend games where they are heroic martyrs battling against horrible oppression. Does it matter that the oppression is entirely in their own heads? Well, it probably should, because they're grown men and there's a country to run.

In the meantime I guess the US as a whole should take pride in the level of religious freedom they maintain, so that clowns like these guys can go their whole lives without ever getting a real taste of oppression.

biccat wrote:Presumably you will now agree that the original, January 20 announcement was a violation of religious freedom?

Yes, I did, and was happy when the amendment came through, and figured the issue was done and dusted with that.

Only to then see a variety of religious figures continue to carry on, in increasingly dramatic language about the desperate measures they're totally willing to take to fight the horrible, horrible oppression that isn't happening to them.

At which point it becomes clear that these people are far less interested in actual oppression, and just in playing make believe games where they pretend they're being brave and noble men fighting against oppression they like to pretend exists.


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Mannahnin wrote:Is it a violation of my religious freedom to choose to use contraception, for my employer's religion to determine that mine will not be covered?

You would still be covered, it's just that insurer would wear the cost, and not be able to charge the company for it.

Seriously, the individual gets coverage, and the employer is not forced to pay. We all do the happy dance, and move on with our lives.

Unless, of course, you like pretending that you're oppressed.


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Easy E wrote:In order to stay relevant, you have to continually up the stakes.

Exactly. They're not saying dramatic things because dramatic things need to be said, but because they want people to pay attention to them.


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sourclams wrote:Again, get out of the minority.

Huh?

Have we actually seen someone claim that the answer to gender imbalance is for women to stop being women? Black people should just stop being black?

Well, that's certainly a thing.


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sourclams wrote:I'm an ethnic minority. I find that race is virtually meaningless as a sole determinent of success.

You can find whatever you want, it doesn't change what is true.

Go look up average incomes per racial groups in the US. If race wasn't a factor, they'd all be the same, and yet black men make 2/3 of what white men do on average.


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Manchu wrote:I'm having difficulty with this: on the one hand, the President says that religiously affiliated universities and hospitals will not have to offer contraceptive coverage BUT on the other hand insurers must offer the coverage free of charge to their employees. The Bishops, meanwhile, seem to understand the compromise as forcing the institution to pay for the coverage if the employee and the insurer agree to the coverage. Can anyone who has been following this more closely speak to this apparent contradiction?

No, the religious bodies do not pay one cent. An insurer cannot charge the body for the provision of contraception to their employees. This law is presently in operation in several states, including California where Rick Warren, who I quoted in my OP, has his church. Rick Warren has not been charged one cent in premiums for contraception under healthcare plans.

But now he pretends he will be, when it moves from California law to Federal law. This is because Rick Warren is playing a roleplaying game of him vs the evil Feds.


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gorgon wrote:Biblical fundamentalism in general is actually a fairly recent phenomenon.

Well, the drive to place the bible first and foremost dates back to 1517, so it isn't that new, but the most recent form of biblical fundamentalism as seen in the US dates back, more or less, to the Scope Monkey trial. And then you look at individual elements of that fundamentalism that are treated as coming from an inerrant, absolute truth, such as life beginning at conception, and those ideas can be as young as the Happy Meal.


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Phototoxin wrote:As another point the more we seem to use contraception the more 'unwanted' pregnancies and abortions there are which is a bit ironic.

That's not even slightly true.


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Easy E wrote:My understanding of the compromise, which is limited; was that Obama said that the religious organizations did not have to provide any funding for the contraceptives. Instead, the funding would come from the Insurance companies. therefore, no religious organization had to pay for the contraceptives, but coverage still had to be provided for by their insurance providers.

Is that a correct summary? What vital piece of information am I missing?

The only thing your missing is that people like to pretend they're oppressed, even when it's really obvious they're not being oppressed in the slightest.

To be fair, it wasn't until I saw the last of the quotes in my OP that I finally got my head around how ridiculous some people can be.


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Grakmar wrote:He held all the cards. And, he folded. That's caving.

Nonsense. He reached a conclusion that ensured everyone has access to contraception, while making sure no religious employer would be forced to pay for something that is against their religion.

That isn't caving, that's solving an otherwise difficult position.


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Manchu wrote:I could be wrong but I think the problem is that all insurance coverage is paid for by all premiums. Under the "compromise," the insurer has to provide the coverage but the employer will not have to pay a higher premium tied specifically to that cost. But obviously the cost still exists and must still be covered by the premium. Therefore the premium goes up and the employer still pays for it, just not specifically. Is that right?

The issue you're missing is that contraception is a fairly trivial amount compared to other insurance costs. As such, it becomes a fairly trivial issue for the insurer to simply wear the cost, write it off against the overall profit made on that individual, or spread it across the cost of provision of contraception cover to all their other clients.

I'l repeat again, this isn't a new piece of law. It's been in place in several states for years. California has had it in place since 1999.


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Scrabb wrote:

sebster wrote:....Except that people on the religious right continue to freak the feth out that they're religious freedom to not have anything to do with contraception is being ignored, despite

It was quite the puzzler, until I came across this quote from Rick Warren.....

Is there something you wanted between "despite" and "It was quite the puzzler?

Yeah, cheers for the pick up. It should have read 'despite being granted a specific exemption for their religious beliefs' or something like that.

Good to see someone actually read my post


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LordofHats wrote:The vast majority of churches never make enough money to pay any taxes so I don't know why people criticize religious tax exemptions. My church back at Fort Bragg (not exactly a poor community) only made about 100-120 every Sunday per service. That's about 500 a week including all services. That double at Christmas and Easter.

The issue is the small number of megachurches that make serious bank. When you've got a Starbucks stand in the foyer you're not really on the same level as a local church bringing in $120 in Sunday morning tithe.

That said, I've never felt there's any sense in taxing overall income anyway, even for the big money churches, because the organisation is not-for-profit - all the money it makes is then spent on infrastructure, good works and the like, so that long term the overall profit will be zero anyway.

The only real 'profit' type element is what is paid to ministers, and that is taxed. So ultimately, I don't see the problem with tax as it is at present.

LordofHats wrote:My point wasn't about their protection but that the vast majority of churches make so little money its not worth taxing them anyway. Mega churches make a lot, but they're an exception. Most churches are small and rarely exceed maybe 100 or 200 in size. You rarely see mega churches or large parishes outside large cities.

Most corporations never make a profit, while Walmart and the like are just exceptions.


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dogma wrote:I think my dad's church has like 60-70 regular attendees, but not entirely sure how much they get in terms of donations; definitely no more than 50,000 but that would still subject them to corporate taxes at a ~22% rate.

That wouldn't kill his church (They have a 500 grand endowment.) but it would kill most of them, if not right away, then slowly over time. Though, really, once a church owns is facilities, membership becomes more important than money.

At the end of the day, given a church operates on a not-for-profit basis, they should be spending everything they bring in anyway, because there's no investors to be distributing profit to.

So they'd have a tax bill of 22% on their $50k, but then they have claims for the pastor's salary and any other assistants, utilities, and then the rest would be services provided to members, and donations to the needy.

The place you'd get hit is with infrastructure investment, as you'd be taxed up front on the income, but only able to claim the deduction in subsequent years as depreciation. And a new cost for bookkeeping - suddenly Mavis working one day a fortnight with Quicken wouldn't really cut it.

The net effect would be almost no new tax revenue, while you'd jerk around a whole lot of smaller churches.

Orlanth wrote:Contraception is normally a Catholic bugbear.

This started as a complaint by senior figures in the Catholic church. It was jumped upon by the greater religious right wing noise machine, because they really like playing the oppression game.


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dogma wrote:If your church is only bringing in 50k per anum, and doesn't have a large endowment, its likely only the pastor is paid, and not very much. Say, 30-40k with no benefits, and 70-80 hours per week when averaged out (hours vary widely from week to week). My old man has been doing this for 22 years, he's got reasonable seniority in the denomination, and he puts in 60-70 hours a week for ~70k at a church with a massive endowment given its size.

Also, services to members is basically the same as having a staff pastor.

Cheers for the info. I've always been kind of curious, but wary of asking people in churches that I know, because it'd be kind of rude. The one church I once helped fix up their accounts was Catholic, and the Father was paid outside of the church's funding.

Usually ministers do most of the bookkeeping in small churches. Sometimes they have a paid secretary, or volunteer help from a parishioner or a college student , but even they tend to handle little more than sending emails, and scheduling.

I was basically going off my one experience above, it was the treasurer, a volunteer who worked one day a fortnight.

For sure, I'm not saying there's a material incentive to tax churches. Some ministers advocate taxing churches because they see it as bringing the Church closer to the common condition, but that's about the only example of an incentive.

That's a pretty interesting argument. Also kind of weird.

dogma wrote:Yeah, my dad has had 5 different churches, and only one sprung for an accountant (~200 regular attendance), otherwise he's done the books (Granted, he has an MBA, so he has some basic knowledge.), or had me do them.

Looking at his friends, across multiple denominations, most of them either had a basic familiarity with accounting when they started, or acquired one on the fly (Rule 1 in NPOs: never trust volunteers.).

Oh for sure. "I've done a bit of that in the past and would happy to help out for free" is among the most dangerous sentences in the English language.


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biccat wrote:However, as has been discussed upthread, the President's compromise was actually nothing of the sort.

Do you think that the cost to the insurer of "free" contraceptions will not be passed down to the church?

If you'd read the thread, you'd have seen I already responded to that, and consider it not likely at all. Because contraception is very cheap, so why risk Federal penalties for the sake of allocating a pittance?

And more importantly, because such legislation already exists, including the state Rick Warren's church has been set up. And he never saw costs for the provision of contraception getting splashed across other areas, or at least never bothered to let it worry him. Yet now that it is to become Federal law he's freaking out. It's almost as if the whole thing is empty political theatre.


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Manchu wrote:This was the absolutely stupidest move the President could make. One of the advantages to being an incumbent is that you get to pick your battlefields if not necessarily your battles. Now why on earth would you pick this as your battlefield? Who do you stand to win? People who will already vote for you no matter what. Who do you stand to lose? Not just Catholic democrats but also and more importantly the idealistic young people who elected you to begin with.

Except that people that side with the President can't be just assumed to vote for him. People keep on talking as if US presidential elections are decided by winning over the undecided centre, adding them to your typical voters and seeing if you've got the most votes. But the number of people in the centre who can't decide and who actually bother to vote is utterly trivial.

What matters is giving your side a reason to vote for you, either by making the other side seem utterly horrible, or by giving them something to actually like in you. In 2010 the Democrats were utterly smashed, because Republicans turned out in about the numbers they always turn out, whille Democrat numbers were way down, and it was largely a result of Obama and the Democrat dominated congress giving them very little to vote for. Since then we've seen some efforts to deliver for the liberal base (such as repealing DADT), combined with a lot of liberal friendly rhetoric - all aimed at closing the enthusiasm gap.

No one ever won a battle by underestimating their opponents, sebster. You can foolishly say conservatives are playing pretend but what they are really playing is politics. And they're doing great at it -- at least compared to Mr. Obama, at the moment.

Except Obama's numbers have improved massively over the last few months, and particularly over this nonsense noise over contraception.

I agree that it could hurt Obama, that depends on how the issue is framed in the media. If the Republicans win it sounds like it's the state forcing religious bodies to do something, and that's bad. However, if he wins it sounds like religious bodies trying to stop people outside of their faith doing something, and any Republican who hitches on to that wagon comes out looking like a theocrat.


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dogma wrote:Hell, I know self-professed Catholics that don't care about the Catholic position on birth control.

In the developed world birth control use is as prevelant among catholics as it is among non-catholics, and it's been that way since, more or less, the 70s.

The celibate church hierarchy has their ideas, but the faithful moved on decades ago.


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gorgon wrote:Looking at it from that perspective, I wonder how much of the Vatican's view on the matter has to do with keeping a steady flow of new Catholics coming into the church. I mean, if Catholic couples start having 1.9 children...that really doesn't help grow the religion, does it?

And funnily enough, Italy has the lowest birth rate in the world, at just 1.7.


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Melissia wrote:Well, that's certainly a thing.

Yes, sourclam's statment is probably the stupidest thing that I've seen said on this forum in the past six months.

Manchu wrote:But this isn't a monthly news cycle. Actually, he gained a point coming out of January and has lost two in the wake of his "compromise" announcement. I'm not saying it's connected to the issue at hand. I'm also not saying these kind of polls reflect the wisdom of particular political tactics, i.e., I reject the substance of your retort as well as the approach

Are you honestly claiming that as evidence the issue has hurt Obama? Or that approval ratings are the core measure of electibility?

Trite and wrong. You might well bill this as "us v. them" but you don't seem to know who "they" are. As Catholics who have been paying attention pointed out, the hierarchs haven't seemed to bothered with contraception over the last few decades, either. If bishops haven't taught it all these years and almost no one actually observes it, the question for Catholics becomes a bit more nuanced than "the Church is out of touch."

Haven't seemed to have bothered is what you do when you've lost on the issue, but don't want to admit it. And yeah, there's nuance, what's your point?

HCR? To quote Joe Biden, it was a "big fething deal." By the standards of FDR, LBJ, and even Nixon, this might well be the biggest fething deal in American politics. The 2010 failure of Democrats had to do with Republicans demoralizing the center that carried Obama to office and scaring a good many of them into doing more than doubting.

Are you really, really going to claim HCR was successful policy? It was meant to be something for the progressives, but we all know it managed to be unpopular with every voting group.