Welcome to the first installment of GetGetReligion, an occasional look at GetReligion, the daily review of mainstream religion coverage that is dedicated to the proposition that "the press...just doesn't get religion." Written by Godbeat graybeard Terry Mattingly and a shifting cast of younger associates, GetReligion is bankrolled by conservative moneybags and Mattingly pal Roberta Ahmanson (a sometime MSM religion reporter herself). So while it loves finding missed religion angles and tosses the odd laurel along with the brickbats, the axe GetReligion perpetually grinds is that when it comes to religion, the press is guilty guilty guilty of secular liberal bias.
The question we ask here at GetGet is, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?--or, loosely translated, What's that damn dog barking about anyway? From time to time someone like Commonweal's Grant Gallicho will be sufficiently annoyed to administer a slap across the snout. The response is usually along the lines of: We're just pointing out the journalistic deficiencies, not spinning the story ourselves. Well, let's see.
Earlier this week, GetReligionista Mollie Ziegler was on deck with the latest in a series of critiques of coverage of the HHS contraception mandate story.
One of the ways the media have botched this story is by couching it as a debate over contraception as opposed to a debate over religious freedom. While it’s true that certain players in the battle do view it as a debate over contraception--and that is a legitimate and worthwhile avenue for coverage--it’s also true that other players in the battle (who may not even care about contraception or generally approve of it) view this as as a religious liberty debate. That side of the story has suffered from weaker coverage.
Given that over 1,300 stories mentioning "bishops" and "religious liberty" have appeared in the English-language media since January 1 (according to Lexis-Nexis Academic), I wouldn't say that the press has exactly ignored the story's religious liberty angle. But that's not been enough for Ziegler. As she puts it, "It has been a very, very, very frustrating experience for those of us who are expressing concern about the separation of church and state as it relates to the mandates of the massive health care legislation passed in 2010."
As sure as God made little green apples, there are parties to the debate who are terribly anxious to frame this as a religious liberty story. Whether the media should go along, however, is another question. Over at dotCommonweal, Peggy Steinfels is not so sure:
What are the U.S. Catholic bishops really arguing about with the Obama administration? Is it religious liberty, as they insist? Is it contraception and sterilization, as the headlines in my archdiocesan paper stress? Is it a desire, conscious or unconscious, to reassert their authority after the dog days of the sexual-abuse scandal? Is it simply anti-Obama prejudice? Maybe it’s all of the above, and then some: perhaps they just lack astute advisers.
And that's not to mention the possibiity that what underlies what some might call the grandstanding (a Ziegler bête noire) on religion liberty has been opposition to that massive health care legislation itself. Which legislation, according to Ziegler, "requires religious employers for the first time in history to fund insurance plans they morally oppose." Though actually, as Ziegler later seems to acknowledge, religious employers have been mandated to do this for some time by many states--21 one of them, to be exact. So why the big fuss about religious liberty now?
Ziegler professes unhappiness that no one covered a recent congressional hearing at which HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius confessed ignorance of the latest religious liberty court cases. She'd like the media to get down in the legal weeds and discuss the implications of the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) for the constitutional future of the mandate. As someone who's been following RFRA since it was just a gleam in David Saperstein's eye, I would not disagree that the press could do a better job of informing America in general and the Catholic bishops in particular about just how Justice Scalia cut the legs out from under Free Exercise jurisprudence.
But that is a very old story. Hell, Bill Clinton criticized the press for not recognizing the significance of RFRA when he signed the thing into law. The bottom line here is that by pushing the contraception mandate story's religious liberty angle hard, GetReligion is playing the mandate opponents' game.
EW88 | May 4, 2012 | 10:42am
In my own opinion, this really is an issue of religious liberty. Here the state is trying to force religions to act counter to the tenets of their faith. They do this with contraception, gay marriages, gay adoptions, and abortions. We are guaranteed religious freedom in the Constitution, yet the left seems unwilling to make concessions and exemptions for religions whose beliefs deny liberal social agenda. This is a problem. The more the religious community bands together in defense of religious liberty (and acts tolerant, rather than antagonistic) the more likely we may be able to preserve religious liberties.
http://www.conservativemormonmom.blogspot.com
Marty36 | May 4, 2012 | 1:24pm
The Hemingway and Mattingly’s reaction to the critique sort of underlines the GR problem: a tone-deafness to their own biases. Of course Hemingway’s religious liberty crusade is an adaptation of conservative talking points. She’s a professional conservative. Her critiques could just as easily be posted at Ricochet, the conservative site where she is an editor, or at the Weekly Standard, where her husband (and GR contributor) is an editor.
What’s shocking is their unwillingness to admit their biases (and conflicts of interest). Just be up-front about it and acknowledge they are players, not referees.
cermak_rd | May 4, 2012 | 1:50pm
I don’t see how it is a religious freedom issue. As an employer (and churches, mosques, etc) are exempt), the Catholic university is required to comply with regulations. In my state, if they offer health insurance, it has to cover infertility treatments, for instance. If the university doesn’t want to do that, they can, of course, not offer insurance, restrict their employees to only being consecrated virgins, etc.
In the compromise worked out, the school would provide health insurance and if the user of that health insurance wanted to use it for contraceptives, the woman would contact the health insurance provider herself. That means only self-insuring institutions now have a problem. After all, if DePaul is providing Blue Cross, do they care if their women employees are using Blue Cross to buy contraceptives? Probably not, it’s no different than if they used their salary to do it. Plus, there’s no real cost difference as the most expensive health care a young woman usually receives is maternity care. It’s in the health insurance companies’ interest for women to take contraceptives!
So that leaves only the self-insured. So why not have universities that self-insure, take out of the pool women who opt out and provide them with money toward an independent health insurers product? Yes, the women are going to use it for contraceptives, but that’s no different than using their salary for the same. Either way the university is paying for the product, and receiving the benefit, as I seriously doubt that DePaul would appreciate an employee that took maternity leave more than twice in 10 years.
cermak_rd | May 4, 2012 | 1:55pm
EW88 how is the state affecting religious people regarding gay marriages and gay adoptions? Not one church has ever been made to offer a gay marriage. There have been a real small handful of cases where businesses open to the public have refused service to gay people. In those cases, it is usually the human rights ordinances of which they are running afoul. And I fail to see how gay adoption is involved here. In my state of IL, Catholic Charities stopped providing adoptions but they didn’t have to. They chose to because they wanted the state money that came with providing the adoptions. Same thing in Massachusetts. The LDS organization is still providing adoptions in both places because they don’t take state money for it. I fail to see how a religious exemption could be made in the case of state money. That is money paid by the tax payers. All of them, including gays, religious, atheists etc. It stands to reason that state money should not violate our human rights laws.
Sterling400 | May 4, 2012 | 1:56pm
In the first place, the relgious institutions are not being forced to do anything. They are not being forced to spend any money to provide controversial health services. And their employees are not being forced to use them. Since 97% of Catholic women use birth control at some time, the opinion of the bishops would seem irrelevent. Maybe that’s the whole point. Of course, if they want to control women’s sexuality, maybe they are in the wrong organization. I understand the Taliban is pretty good at that.
Nanabedokwm8lsem | May 4, 2012 | 2:26pm
EW88, and others, what it seems to me is being overlooked is that the purchase of insurance does not provide contraceptives or sterilization or anything else. Rather, it enables a consumer to opt to use such services at reduced cost. At worst, the Church is being asked to make it easier for lay people, some number of whom are not Catholic, to violate what the Church considers to be moral rules. But the actor is not the Church. The Church is not being asked to come to the pharmacy and lay out money for birth control pills. The employee of the Church is invoking from the insurance carrier a benefit, and the insurance carrier is for whatever very small sum of additional premium, if indeed any additional premium at all, contributing to enable a lower price to the consumer-employee.
In one sense the only argument the Church has is that it wants to make it more expensive than otherwise for the employee to opt for birth control. It’s a marginal event of very small significance. For by paying the employee a wage or salary, the Church enables the employee to buy contraception without insurance. Why is paying a likely identical premium for the insurance company to help with that purchase really any worse?
I think the Church needs to hire a lay person on a fixed contract for a term of years to review and discuss with the Church its interactions with the public. The lay person should be immune from dismissal for disagreement, such as by having a right to his salary for the term, period, with some sort of horrendous penalty for discharging the lay person or failing to interact with him or her. The purpose would be to correct the Church’s myopia. I think sometimes they fall into the trap of knowing what all their concerns are and speaking to the current one, without considering that the others were back page and this one is front page and how that will strike their audience seeing only the one front page item. I think sometimes they get wrapped up in a first impression without dissecting the situation to see what’s really at stake. Maybe their filter person should be a lawyer or accountant, or a team of both, people who are focused on being analytical in context.