Comment Re:Employer, not church (Score 1) 903
But this is a case where the employers in question are not making personal choices and are not acting as a church, but are acting as ordinary employers offering coverage to employees who don't necessarily follow the same beliefs as their employer.
So you're telling me there's an exception built into the law for the case in which all employees do have the same belief, right?
They are asking to be allowed, as an ordinary employer, to say that because they don't believe in X that their employees are not allowed access to X either.
Woah, woah, woah, because I won't chip in on some contingency pool in case you want to pay for X, I am barring you access to X?
Look, the only issue here is whose name goes on the bill of purchase. If instead of having the employer buy the insurance you had the employee use the same money from their compensation to buy their own insurance there would be no issue at all. In fact, that is how it works now, with the one difference we've decided that people can't be trusted to buy insurance under their own motivation so the government needs to mandate it. There's any of a hundred different options to do this in such a way that no one except the employee has to sign off on what they buy. If the only resolution you can think of to this dispute is, "force the religious organization to do it whether they like it or not" when the only difference between some of these options is a symbolic one, then it's obvious whom is trying to oppress the beliefs of whom.
We don't allow him to say "Profess to follow my beliefs or you won't be allowed access to health insurance."
Now allowing coverage exceptions is going to mean health insurance will be capriciously allocated as a form of ransom? I think your dystopian view is going a little a far, especially since up until now being able to decide the nature of the offered policy has been the status quo, and I haven't heard of anything like this happening.
Plaintiffs aren't asking merely to be allowed to follow their own beliefs.
Yes, they are. No one wants to review all of your credit card purchases and verify you haven't bought anything untoward. All these organizations want is that when they pay their own accounts there is nothing which discusses, e.g., abortion.
Just let the religious organizations buy a cheaper plan and have them rebate the difference to their employees. If you give me $20 bucks I can buy my own condoms. I'm not exactly sure why a cheap regular purchase is something you would buy 'insurance' for anyway.