The Catholic Charities of Sacraficial

The absurdity of the current system of property rights in our country is being highlighted once again.

Catholic Group Must Offer Birth Control in Calif.

The California Supreme Court ruled on Monday that a Catholic charity must offer prescription contraceptives in its employee health insurance plan even if church teaching opposes birth control measures.

The state's highest court upheld a lower court decision rejecting Catholic Charities of Sacramento's claims it did not have to offer prescription contraceptives because it considered itself obliged to follow the Roman Catholic Church's religious teachings, which hold that the use of artificial birth control is a sin.

I hold no water for religious opinions or belief. I am an atheist and I haven't attended any church in any spiritual capacity in almost a decade. But this is bullshit of the most foul order.

The state supreme court said the charity, incorporated separately from the church, was not a "religious employer" exempt from legislation mandating such coverage.

While affiliated with the Catholic Church, the charity's purpose is not to inculcate religious values, a majority of court justices noted.

The charity could avoid any conflict with religious values by not offering its employees prescription drug coverage, the justices held. Employers in California are not required to offer such coverage.

And that's the problem. It's not that some segments of business aren't required to provide coverage, it's that any are required at all. This is properly a business decision; it's properly the OWNER of the business in question. Under any other regime, the businessman is acting on the permission of the government to operate. And as the years have gone by, permission is being required for more and more things. The reach has grown to the point where we have these completely unnecessary problems that are wholly government-created that force people to do things they not only consider wrong, but SINFUL.

Be it a bicycle helmet law, smoking or noise ordinances, or demands that employers provide certain benefits to their employees, they all operate under the same guiding ideas:

• You as an individual don't actually own your property. The state does and it will step in at will, whether a majority of voters want it to or not, to determine what you can and cannot do with it, crime committed or no crime.
  
• You really don't know what's in your interest, because if the state didn't have some plausible "problem" to fix that isn't in someone's interest, it wouldn't do it. Unfortunately, the interests being served are collective ones and as such are illegitimate when the proposed solutions infringe upon personal freedom.

They know not in what they meddle. Only those who make it their business know.

Only Associate Justice Janice Brown dissented.

"Here we are dealing with an intentional, purposeful intrusion into a religious organization's expression of its religious tenets and sense of mission," Brown wrote. "The government is not accidentally or incidentally interfering with religious practice; it is doing so willfully by making a judgment about what is or is not religious."

Timothy Muscat, the California deputy attorney general who argued the state's case before the state high court, said the justices drew a line between purely religious employers and affiliated groups with broader purposes.

Purely religious employers would remain exempt from the law requiring prescription contraceptives coverage, Muscat added.

"The religious employer exemption stays," Muscat said. "A church, synagogue or mosque qualifies for an exemption."

Copyright 2004 Reuters News Service. All rights reserved.

But that isn't the real point. It is indeed important to separate the church and the state, but this is important not because religion is somehow more important to protect, but because the feelings behind it are so personal that any attempt to force behavioral changes strikes a deeper chord than hearing about some new (de)regulation of coal-fired electricity plants in Ohio. It matters because religion is personal and individual. Matters of the mind and thought are treated with more respect than matters of physical objects and property. That gap hasn't yet been bridged in the minds of enough people.

This shouldn't be fought on the basis of a separation of church and state. This should be fought on the basis of private property rights and the freedom of individuals to peacefully use that property. This is a fucking CHARITY, man; by nature it doesn't have the resources to be thrown about however the politicians demand it.

Do fight this in any way other than on the bedrock of property would keep the system in place as it is and guarantee the future development of these kinds of disagreements. Don't sacrifice anything for this.

UPDATE(3/2/2004 9:02am)
Catholic Group Must Provide Birth Control

The American Civil Liberties Union applauded the ruling and called it "a great victory for California women and reproductive freedom."

The ACLU has it's good moments and it's bad moments. This is one of it's bad moments. You don't have a right to force someone to provide something or some service for you. Now, they've helped persuade the government to stamp down on private choice, i.e. liberty. Which is annoying since the ACLU stumps for the pro-choice side of the abortion debate on generally the same grounds I use to support abortion:

Our mission is to ensure that every person can make informed, meaningful decisions about reproduction free from intrusion by the government.

If the "liberties" in it's name meant anything, they would have opposed this tooth and nail. What they got was MORE intrusion by the government that FORCES individuals (the business and charity owners) to provide certain employee benefits; they have removed the right to decide from the people who have the most right to make it.

Posted by Drizzten at March 01, 2004 05:00 PM