I was lecturing in July at the Chautauqua Institution about the right to religious freedom in our Constitution, and was amazed at the information deficit among the mostly left-leaning 25-member audience.
I brought up the Hobby Lobby case in which the Supreme Court decided that a closely held corporation with religious objections to abortion didn’t have to include coverage for contraception in its employee health insurance. The religious objection was only to four of the designated twenty methods of contraception required for insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
These four methods, which include the IUD and the morning after pill, may prevent a fertilized egg from implanting on the uterine wall. Some religious people believe that a fertilized human egg is a person with a right to life, which is why they oppose abortion. They consider these four methods of contraception to constitute abortion in those cases where the egg has been fertilized.
The people I was addressing at Chautauqua didn’t know that the Court’s decision in the Hobby Lobby case didn’t deprive any employee of insurance that included free access to all twenty methods of contraception. Contraceptive coverage is exceptional in being cost-free to insurance companies. The coverage saves the companies as much as it costs because it reduces the number of pregnancies in the covered population. Each pregnancy costs the insurance company a lot of money, so there’s no net cost for them to supply all twenty types of contraceptives free of charge, which is what they do through coverage that's independent of Hobby Lobby's insurance policy.
“In fact,” Justice Samuel Alito points out in his majority opinion in the Hobby Lobby case, “HHS [the Department of Health and Human Services] has already devised and implemented a system that seeks to respect the religious liberty of religious nonprofit corporations [such as the Catholic Church] while ensuring that the employees of those entities have precisely the same access to all FDA-approved contraceptives as employees of companies whose owners have no religious objections to providing such coverage.”
The issue in the Hobby Lobby case was whether this accommodation should be extended to “closely held” profit-making corporations. Why not? Alito writes, “The effect on the HHS-created accommodation on the women employed by Hobby Lobby and the other companies involved in these cases would be precisely zero. Under that accommodation, these women would still be entitled to all FDA-approved contraceptives without cost sharing….” No one in the group at Chautauqua seemed to know this.
More alarming, when I got home I saw a panelist on MSNBC decry the negative effects of the Supreme Court’s deference to religion, citing the lack of contraception coverage resulting from the decision in the Hobby Lobby case. Even worse, award-winning court reporter Linda Greenhouse wrote in the New York Times that “tens of thousands of women have been deprived of contraceptive coverage” as a result of the Court’s ruling. Haven’t these people read the opinion? Any deprivation of insurance coverage results from NOT following the opinion.
Philip Bump, a correspondent for the Washington Post, also inappropriately denigrated Alito, in this case by claiming that his views overlap significantly with those of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene on issues of religious liberty. Bump’s major evidence is Alito’s comment, “There’s … [a] growing hostility to religion, or at least the traditional religious beliefs that are contrary to the new moral code that is ascendant in some sectors.” Bump sees overlap with Rep. Greene’s view: “We need to be the party of nationalism. And I’m a Christian and I say it proudly: We should be Christian nationalists.”
Bump ignores the fact that Alito expresses no nationalism in connection with his support of religion. Nor do his remarks support giving Christians any special rights. He supports the right of Jewish prisoners to have a Torah study group, the right of Muslim women to wear headscarves, and the right of Muslim police officers to wear beards. He decries the religious persecutions overseas of Uyghurs and Yazidis. He seldom mentions the right to attend church without also mentioning synagogues, mosques, and temples.
So, one is a nationalist, the other an internationalist. One supports Christianity over all other religions, the other supports religious faiths of many kinds. One supports intolerance, the other tolerance. Associating Alito with Greene looks like an attempt, which worked on me until I read Alito’s speeches, to trash Alito through association with Greene. This promotes intolerant silo-thinking on the left. It suggests that we can ignore what Alito says because he’s just like Greene.
Other indications of promoting ignorance, intolerance, and silo-thinking on the left are disinvitations targeting right-wing (much more than left-wing) speakers at many universities, such as speakers who don’t support affirmative action or who represent the Federalist Society.
In sum, progressives should be wary of living in the kind of (mis)information silo that they rightly accuse many conservatives of inhabiting.
You can reply by e-mail to wenz.peter@uis.edu.
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