Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Health Care / Mike Huckabee Huckabee: For contraception mandate before he opposed it
Posted by Max Brantley on Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 7:50 PM
Mike "We Are All Catholics Today" Huckabee, when he was Arkansas governor, apparently signed a health insurance mandate law in 2005 that included contraception in preventive care. He was among many Republicans in many states who did the same.
Oops. In Arkansas, that law had two Republican co-sponsors. More checking will be required. But I hope Sen. Missy Irvin and the ALEC squad is on the lookout for these apostates.
The background, as I've mentioned here before, is that the federal EEOC said in 2000 that all employers with more than 15 workers must cover contraceptives for women if they offer health plans that cover preventive services and prescription drugs. Many states, including Arkansas, passed mandates into law. Republicans supported the legislation, in states such as Iowa, Arizona and, in 2001, New York, where George Pataki signed the legislation.
Four years later, the Arkansas law easily cleared that state's Legislature, with help from Republican lawmakers, including two GOP cosponsors. Huckabee signed it in April 2005.He defended the law in a statement. "Religious employers are not required to comply with this policy," he said. "My position is, and always has been, that religious entities shouldn't be forced to pay for contraception."
But like the original federal regulation proposed by Obama, the Arkansas law did not exempt church-affiliated hospitals and universities. It exempts only "religious employers" that are nonprofit organizations whose primary mission is "the inculcation of religious values," and primarily employ people who share the same religion, a standard few Catholic hospitals meet.
The new Obama regulation makes no requirements of even religious affiliates. It requires health insurance companies to pay for preventive care.
PS — We inquired of a St. Vincent Infirmary spokesman recently whether their health coverage provided for contraception. She said it did not. Sounds like we need to re-check.
UPDATE: Thanks to a Huckabee supporter for providing a link to the Arkansas law in question. It's the Equity in Prescription Insurance and Contraceptive Coverage Act. If plans provide prescription coverage, they must cover birth control.
Here's the religious exemption language, verbatim, from Arkansas law:
"Religious employer" means an entity:(A) That is organized and operated for religious purposes and has received a § 501(c)(3) designation from the Internal Revenue Service;
(B) That has as one (1) of its primary purposes the inculcation of religious values; and
(C) That employs primarily persons who share its religious tenets
And here's the crux of the coverage requirement:
Every health benefit policy that is delivered, issued, executed, or renewed in this state or approved for issuance or renewal in this state by the Insurance Commissioner on or after the effective date of this subchapter that provides coverage for prescription drugs on an outpatient basis shall provide coverage for prescribed drugs or devices approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration for use as a contraceptive.
"Abortifacients" are exempted, but, still a good law and kudos for Huckabee's signature. It would appear to go even farther than the Huckabee Obama compromise in mandating coverage under health policies issued by institutions with religious affiliations if they don't exist primarily for that purpose and don't primarily employ people of that religion.
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Comments (28)
Showing 1-28 of 28
Oh, brother. They won't STOP, those Catholic Bishops and evangelical theocrats.
Here, Jewish journalist Sarah Posner addresses latest Catholic GOP dog-and-pony show. Curtain up tomorrow!
"Republican Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, will convene a hearing tomorrow, 'Lines Crossed: Separation of Church and State. Has the Obama Administration Trampled on Freedom of Religion and Freedom of Conscience?'
"It’s obvious that Issa has posed what he considers to be a rhetorical question and lined up nine like-minded rhetoricians to answer it anyway. None of the religious groups supportive of the Obama administration will be heard from."
http://www.salon.com/2012/02/15/rep_issa_t…
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Imagine this, an entire blog thread featuring blatant Republican hypocrisy and not a single Repub blogger can be found. Max knows how to run them off.
Of course they're politicizing a single, simple issue. What the hell do you expect a morally bankrupt Party to do? Argue policy?
Here's Martin Bashir on Catholic theocrat Rick Santorum. Strong stuff.
http://video.msnbc.msn.com/martin-bashir/4…
The ostensible motive behind Roman Catholic opposition to contraception has two fundamental components: 1) the belief that the primary purpose of sexual activity is reproduction, and 2) the belief that life begins at conception and that anything which interferes with the natural development of concepti is therefore murder. Let’s break this down, shall we?
A random glance at online sources informs me that the likelihood of a woman becoming pregnant from any single act of sex is probably in the 15% to 25% range. Of course, this is dependant upon any number of factors—where the woman is in her menstrual cycle, sperm count of the man, etc. While fertile, a woman’s body releases one egg a month, but even if fertilized, the likelihood that said egg will successfully implant into the wall of the uterus and start developing is probably around 50%.
I don’t think you get to say that the primary purpose of sex is reproduction if sex only ends in some attempt at reproduction 25% of the time. I mean, the primary purpose of one’s lungs is the intake of oxygen and the expulsion of carbon dioxide. The fact that I have yet to pass out as I write this tells me that my lungs are working at a fairly high rate of efficiency. Likewise with stomachs, the primary purpose of which is the breakdown of food into chemical components for use of the body. Granted, there have been occasions when my stomach has failed to do this, but this seems to be more the case of me having overlooked the expiration date on some can than a systematic breakdown of the digestive process—I can reasonably say that the stomach has completed its task 99% of the time, gas station burritos included.
Now, I had a friend who, for a university engineering class, was able to get a passing grade on a model elevator that worked beautifully 90% of the time but failed miserably and killed all the riders the other 10%. But sex as a method of reproduction doesn’t even rate that at its miserable 25% success rate (and that’s assuming the fantastically high levels of health and nutrition of the Western world). Saying that the primary purpose of sex is reproduction is like saying that the primary purpose of toasters is hammering nails into wood. Sure, I can probably hammer a nail into something with my toaster at the same 25% success rate, but my local hardware store is not about to stock them just because of that.
More and more research leans in the direction of perceiving sex as, first and foremost, a means of social cohesion in human beings and related animals. Interestingly, this view helps explain homosexuality, which you find in a number of species. In a hierarchical society such as that of chimpanzees, in which access to females is restricted to those at the top, homosexuality can actually serve an adaptive purpose by helping to provide a sexual outlet for non-dominant males and thus aid in social cohesion, keeping those males within the group. Sex as pleasure and social bond is arguably more a part of the survival of the species than sex as reproduction.
Secondly, let’s look at the idea that life begins at conception. A while back, in light of new proposed legislation across the states attempting to enshrine a definition of personhood as beginning at conception, I developed an to explore some of the legal and philosophical absurdities I see as inherent in this project. Like all analogies, it no doubt has some imperfections, but it does compare life processes to homebrewing, so it has that in its favor.
After all, beer, like life, is hard to define. The old German Purity Law held that beer was composed of only barley, water, hops, and yeast. However, there are long-standing traditions of wheat beers, and other cultures have introduced rice and maize into the mix. (This is currently at issue in the EU as German trade negotiators are trying to limit the labeling of “beer” only to those items which conform to the old purity law.) Therefore, my operative definition of beer for this particular thought exercise is: “Beer is the result of combining grain, water, hops, and yeast in such a way as to produce a beverage with a modicum of alcohol.” (Of course, all true beer lovers know that beers vary wildly, but this catches all of them from the two-percent alcohol “lite” beer to the fifteen-percent barleywine.)
Now, the way that this is done is that your grain product and your hops are boiled in water for a set amount of time and allowed to cool before yeast is added in. Before the yeast is added, what you have is called “wort.” The added yeast consumes the sugars that were in the grain product and metabolizes them into alcohol and carbon dioxide, resulting, over a period of time, in what can be called beer.
At what point does wort become beer? After all, our operative definition of beer is not based upon a certain alcohol content. Therefore, one could conceivably (no pun intended) make the argument that beer begins at fermentation, when the first yeast cell produces the first molecule of alcohol—at that point, the substance does literally have an alcohol content, thus meeting out definition of beer. Never mind that you would need a mass spectrometer to detect such an infinitesimal amount of alcohol—it is undeniably there.
And here is where we hit our legal absurdities, for if this substance with its 0.000000000000000001% alcohol is defined as beer, then it must be a controlled substance. That means that, if my underage nephew sticks a straw in the fermenter and sips away, then I’ve contributed to the delinquency of a minor and can be jailed. Or, likewise, I can sell it in liquor stores, never mind that the overconsumption of my product will not result in the slightest drunkenness whatsoever.
Does beer begin at fermentation? (In other words, are we defining beer, something which has been on this planet for thousands of years, according to scientific equipment which has been in existence for less than one hundred years?) Or is there instead some magic point we cannot necessarily point to at which beer begins, before which it is but potential beer? Is beer instead in the eye of the beholder or recognized by the consensus of the community?
An attack on religious freedom. It is not about contraception. It is about the government forcing people of faith to do something against those beliefs.
Give it up Holmes. Or at least try to find something original or new to say.
Every dollar spent on the military/war machine goes against deeply held Quaker beliefs. Where's the outrage about their rights?
This issue is not going away for obama. He may be victorious in subverting the Constitution but people of faith will oppose him. We all know what happened to King George.
Holmes, I used to think you were just uninformed or misinformed (in other words ignorant). I've discovered what is really going on---you are just simply stupid, and there's no cure for that.
"Every dollar spent on the military/war machine goes against deeply held Quaker beliefs. Where's the outrage about their rights?"
Now you're just talking crazy talk, outlier; the right to wage eternal wars, after all, is sacred above all that silly love stuff folks like Jesus blathered on about...at least according to our country's One True God: MoMoney. (And, as always, I give thanks for my religious enlightenment to elwood...whether he wants it or not.)
Huckabuck is a perfect example of what's wrong with today's Republican Party and why it would no longer welcome a comparatively sane moderate like Reagan.
Great article by Catholic scholar Garry Wills in NY Review of Books today. It's entitled "Contraception's Con Men." The opening line, "By a revolting combination of con men and fanatics, the current primary race has become a demonstration that the Republican party does not deserve serious consideration for public office. Take the controversy over contraceptives."
Wills goes on to eviscerate the "[o]mnidirectional bad-faith arguments have clustered around what is falsely presented as a defense of 'faith'"--the phony religious freedom argument, the phony contraception argument, the phony "church teaches" argument, and the phony "undying principle" argument.
Must-read article for anyone who wants to know what real-life Catholics, the huge majority of us, really think about these issues--and this from a scholar whose work on Thomas Jefferson and the foundations of the notion of religious liberty is considered canonical.
The Wills article is at http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/….
Reagan only wanted to go back to the 1950s. Santorum and the new nutt cases want to go back to the 1650s.
Meanwhile, in the reality-based community of discourse that tries to pay attention to what real-life Catholics really think about these issues, here's the just-published editorial of the prominent Jesuit journal "America" about the "religious-freedom" crusade of the U.S. Catholic bishops:
"By pushing the religious liberty campaign to cover the fine points of healthcare coverage, the campaign devalues the coinage of religious liberty. The fight the conference won against the initial mandate was indeed a fight for religious liberty, and for that reason, won widespread support. The latest phase of the campaign, however, is essentially an effort to bar healthcare funding for contraception. Catholics legitimately oppose such a policy on moral grounds. But that opposition entails a difference over policy, not an infringement of religious liberty. It does a disservice to the victims of religious persecution everywhere to inflate policy differences into a struggle over religious freedom. Such exaggerated protests, likewise, show disrespect for the freedom Catholics have enjoyed in the United States, which is a model for the world—and the church."
The editorial is at http://www.americamagazine.org/blog/entry.….
Now once again: whose "religious liberty" did you say you're arguing for and protecting, SHolmes?
Huck is so convinced he just cha-chinged with the biggest denomination in the country.
Another side effect of this ludicrous debate is that the rest of the world once again gets the impression America is a backward country run by a bunch of religious fanatics. Let's elect Santorum president to show the world what we have learned from the Taliban shall we?
William D., you always seem like a voice of reason and sincerity.
I've posed this question before on this and other blogs (and all of my life). I'd like to ask your take.
How does one justify supporting (with time, participation and tithes) an organization like the Catholic church while claiming (with presumed honesty) to support women's equality, their right to choose their own health care and reproductive options, same-sex equality and the United States Constitution?
The Catholic Church you say you're a part of actively and financially fights against all of those and for a theocracy.
Since you're a Christian, why not simply leave that church for another Christian church that (mostly) supports those things -- like many Episcopal churches?
I am not looking to rebut or slam your response. In fact, I promise not to respond to your reply, if you give one, at all.
I am sincerely curious how you and others like you do it. You seem best-equipped to share constructive answers.
Thank you.
I can't decide if this should be tagged "Assholes" or "Why Conservatives Aren't Funny". Either one fits.
http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/02/…
Religious liberty can only exist at an individual level. The Catholic church has no rights. Catholic people have rights, and they aren't being touched.
To allow a religious denomination (1 of well over 1000 in this country) to dictate national health policy is no different than allowing Goldman Sachs to dictate national economic policy, Blackwater to dictate national defense policy, or Penn State to set child molestation law.
They don't give a damn about citizens, the bill of rights or life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They exist only to preserve and protect their organizations.
I loved this conversation between Bob Wright and tech guru, Jaron Lanier. I am enchanted with everything about Lanier from his ideas (interesting ones on religion/spirituality. among other things) to his dreadful dreads to his infectious giggle. He coined the term "virtual reality". His latest book is "You Are Not a Gadget". He is an advisor to Microsoft---he was vague about his title there. His wikipedia page describes a Renaissance man who has led a fascinating life.
Lanier tells a particularly poignant story about Alan Turing who broke the Nazi code during WWII making him a genuine war hero. He was gay and was criminally prosecuted for it in 1952 as homosexual acts were still illegal in the U.K. at the time. He agreed to chemical castration using female hormones rather than go to prison. Two years later he committed suicide by eating a cyanide laced apple, saying he had become Eve. He was 42 years old.
http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/8903
More "not funny" from conservadumbs. But he was only joking when he said a sitting U.S. congresswoman should "lay off the crack pipe:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/16/e…
Catholics, Baptists and Orthodox Jews and other Evangelicals are prepared to pracitice civil disobedience on this issue. It will net a great deal of press coverage. Are you prepared to see clergymen hauled into jail on the nightly news? Can that benefit obama? I think not. If the MSM attempt to ignore it then they have access to media that will cover this embarassment for the obama administration. It will be interesting to see tactics employed by the liberal establishment utilized effectively by religious groups.
SHolmes, please go for the civil disobedience.
Pretty please.
I'd love to see the bishops in their huge scarlet cappa magnas chain themselves to the White House fence to defend birth control, when 98% of Catholic women practice it and when heavily Catholic nations across Europe, including Italy, provide it as a routine matter of health care--with nary a peep from their bishops and the Vatican.
That picture of the bishops chaining themselves to the White House fence with their long red cappa magnas would do a world of good towards getting Obama re-elected--ESPECIALLY among American Catholics, who would be vastly amused at the picture.
As amused as we are at hearing evangelicals suddenly jump on the anti-contraception bandwagon when they have NEVER had a word to say about birth control until now, and when they don't share the natural law teaching of the Catholic church that regards birth control, along with masturbation, gay sex, or ANY FORM of sexual activity between a husband and wife in which semen is ejaculated outside the vagina as "grave matter" and "mortal sin."
Bring it on. LOVE to see the civil disobedience of all these puffed-up little MALE "religious" gurus who have suddenly latched onto a 1968 issue long settled in everyone else's mind as the hill to die on du jour.
I begin to think the stupidity of the white men who have turned the Republican party into their own little exclusive country club is terminal stupidity.
"Are you prepared to see clergymen hauled into jail on the nightly news?" Yes, I am, although it's not going to happen.
"Can that benefit obama?" Yes, it can. The whole situation is win/win for him. Except for the 27% of the country that bat shit crazy, the rest of the country is with him.
That old Southern Baptist, Bill Moyers has a good essay on the subject. It includes a wonderful clip of President Obama's 2009 speech at Notre Dame.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-moyers/…
P.S. Mr. Holmes,
Will you be wearing your little sleuth cap when you're chained to the White House fence?
That way we'd be sure to recognize you so we could bring you a sup of water.
Or kool-aid, if that's your tipple.
Steven Colbert, Catholic, shows how humor is done with his raucous, wildly funny take on the contraception issue.
http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/colbe…
Here's an interesting, unrelated, tweet from David Frum, former speech writer for George W. Bush. Frum is now an excommunicatee from the party of the crazies.
davidfrum In a Florida cab listening to Limbaugh urge listeners not to be "disheartened" by improving economy
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