Religion and birth control

Here's the situation: Obamacare requires that every citizen have health care starting in 2014. Part of that health care is access to contraception. One big provision is that many employers will be required to provide that health care to their employees as part of their employment. One big objection to that by religious institutions is that they don't want to pay for contraception for their employees if it goes against their pro-life religious beliefs. There's a complicated and highly nuanced discussion of this today in the New York Times.

Basically, religious institutions don't want to buy condoms and pills or cover abortions for their employees, and I think that's fine.

There will absolutely, positively never be a national agreement on what the correct way to take care of our fellow citizens is, so I can't see a time when we will all agree on a checklist of services that everyone agrees everyone else should have. As a country obsessed with the interplay of church and state, the largest of those objections will, at least for a long time, be religious.

So the issue addressed by the Obama administration today, after two years of planning and argument, seems pretty sensible to me. Obamacare won't force religious institutions to pay for things they deem morally wrong. OK, fine. The government will create a separate path available to any individual employed by one of these religious institutions to get funding for their birth control.

Awesome. To me, this is the government doing its job. They passed a law and certain people have a moral objection? No problem. Let's not make it a national debate over who is right and wrong; let's just preserve everyone's personal liberty here. The institution can choose not to support it, but the government will cover people who work at said institution if they want to make a personal medical choice that their employer will not support.

Great. Everyone is able to choose their path and be supported by the government.

Image courtesy of anqa via flickr