Today's NY Times has an article entitled, depending where you look, as either
"Religious Groups and Employers Battle Contraception Mandate" or "A Flood of Suits Fights Coverage of Birth Control".
There are several issues in this article that I'd like to wrestle with, but I don't have time to deal with all of them in detail now. I might come back to this in the future, which is why I've added roman numeral 1 to the title of this post. If I get to it, there might be a "II" and a "III" in the future. For now, I want to tackle the issue with how "religious employers" are defined by the Health & Human Services Dept. The article states:
"As applied by the Health & Human Services Department, the law offers an exemption for 'religious employers,' meaning those who meet a four-part test: that their purpose is to inculcate religious values, that they primarily employ and serve people who share their religious tenets, and that they are nonprofit groups under federal tax law."
I take a serious issue with how the Health & Human Services Department (HHSD) defines a "religious employer". It hits a problem with the 3rd portion, where a religious employer primarily serves people who share their religious tenets. You see, the Christian Church has a commission to serve everyone, not just those who share the beliefs of the church. This is an essential part of its entire existence. In every part of its teachings, beliefs, & practices, the Christian Church holds that it must reach out to the rest of the world in service. In order for the church to actually be the Church, it simply must serve those who don't share its beliefs. To not do so, it would in a way cease to be itself.
Take for example the Kankakee IL
Center of Hope. The Center of Hope is a food pantry, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing free food to families in need. It has only 3 part-time employees, but over 75 regular volunteers. It was started by College Church of the Nazarene, and continues to operate based on the donations given by College Church & its people. Many of the volunteers are college church members. My wife has volunteered numerous times, for a while she did so on a regularly scheduled basis. While I'm no lawyer, it sure seems to me like the Center of Hope would not be considered a religious employer by the HHSD, because the people that the Center of Hope serves are not its own members or even necessarily Christians. Instead, it serves "individuals who meet the IDHS Income Guidelines". It doesn't say anything there about the religious views of those who are served by the organization. So it sure seems like the HHSD would not consider the Center of Hope as a religious employer. And that's where the problem lies -
the HHSD definition walls in religious organizations so that they can only be considered religious if they only serve themselves, a position that is contradictory to the very nature of religious organizations! There is no question that the Center of Hope is a religious organization, and it should be treated as one by the U.S. Government.
This should also apply to a large number of other organizations - many adoption agencies, hospitals, crisis pregnancy centers, & universities are in the same situation. They are most definitely religious organizations, originated by church people with religious motivations, sustained by the not coincidental giving of time & money by religious people. And yet, their purpose and mission is to serve those who need help regardless of their faith. By this act, they fulfill the mission of the Church to reach out and serve the larger world, but in doing so fail to be defined as religious organizations by the Health & Human Services Department.
This definition simply has to be adjusted to account for the reality of religious social organizations. If this definition were corrected to remove the clause about organizations serving those who share the religious beliefs, most of these lawsuits against the Obama health care law would not exist.
