Posted on 10/30/2016 11:00:08 AM PDT by John Semmens
This week the American Civil Liberties Union filed a complaint with the Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights demanding that it force Catholic hospitals to sterilize patients. The complaint alleges that the refusal to provide a service the religiously supported hospitals deem a violation of their faith is unlawful discrimination against women.
ACLU spokesman Bertram Petty asserted that "religious dogma must yield to the government's right to determine what kinds of medical procedures are essential human rights under the Affordable Care Act. The government represents everyone. The Catholic Church represents a minority. Clearly, democracy requires that a minority's preferences must give way to the mandates derived from majority rule."
Petty dismissed the argument that there are many non-religious hospitals where patients could seek the services not available at Catholic institutions, saying that "the abundance of secular alternatives evades the main point. The ACA has laid out a list of procedures patients are entitled to receive from every health care provider. If we start allowing providers to decline to comply with requests we are elevating idiosyncratic notions of individual or religious rights to supersede the definition of rights granted to us by the government."
"While we have some sympathy for the idea that there is a zone of personal freedom for individual choice, we also must adjust when government decides to narrow that zone, as it has with the ACA," Petty added. "To do less would be to permit individualism to trump equality."
In related news, a recent poll conducted by Politico and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that 58% of voters oppose using taxpayer money to fund abortions performed under the Medicaid system, while 36% favor it. Hillary Clinton has pledged to repeal the law that currently bars the federal government from spending tax dollars on abortions. Robert Blendon, the Harvard professor who conducted the poll, doubts it will negatively affect her election chances "because few voters are aware of her actual views on the topic."
if you missed any of this week's other semi-news/semi-satire posts you can find them at...
http://www.gopbriefingroom.com/index.php?topic=232039.0
Might have been the truth, if Hillary were elected, but thankfully, that’s looking doubtful.
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