February 2012

by Jeremy Leaming

Beltway Religious Right lobbyists are finding some success, with the help of opportunistic lawmakers in Congress, in painting the Obama administration’s health care policy that requires many insurance plans to provide free contraceptives as a brazen attack on religious liberty.

TPM reported earlier today that weak-kneed politicos, such as Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) are opposing the new rule. That opposition, not surprisingly was joined by Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), who tweeted yesterday, aping Religious Right rhetoric, that “Government should not compel religious organizations to provide services contrary to their beliefs.” (TPM's Sahil Kapur is also reporting that Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has introduced a sweeping bill that would not only overturn the administration's contraception rule, but would "effectively permit any employer to deny contraception coverage in their employee health plans ....")

Christian Right lobbying group, the Family Research Council, will conduct a webcast this evening blasting the contraception rule as “not only an attack on the consciences of employers and employees, but a direct attack on religious freedom.”

But the Religious Right’s rhetoric should be recognized for what it is, overwrought spin.

The contraception rule is not difficult to understand, unless you’re Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, now a columnist for The Washington Post.  Later this year, the Affordable Care Act will require most health insurance plans to provide women access to contraception for free or by paying a co-pay or deductible. Houses of worship, however, are exempt from the rule, meaning they get to play by different rules than secular organizations, so if they wish to provide their employees limited health care coverage, they can.

by Jeremy Leaming

As noted here yesterday Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote in Perry v. Brown that the state of California had no reason to strip from lesbians and gay men the right to wed. It was a classification of a group of people for apparently hostile reasons that doomed the rabidly anti-gay ballot measure, Proposition 8.

The writer and law professor Garrett Epps provides for The American Prospect, not surprisingly, a clearer understanding of Reinhardt’s opinion, which many pundits suggest could, if not likely, reach the Supreme Court.

Epps notes that Reinhardt (pictured) is a “last great liberal lion of a once-numerous pride,” who has authored “dozens of decisions that embody old-style judicial liberalism (including one that terminally ill individuals have a right to seek medical assistance in suicide).”

But in this case that lion, Epps says, has crafted an opinion that may have a longer “shelf-life” than many of his other decisions. For the opinion, did not sweepingly find that gays have a fundamental right to marry. As ACSblog noted, Reinhardt was focused on the targeting of a group of people for ill treatment, rather like the matter that resulted in the Supreme Court’s 1996 opinion in Romer v. Evans, where Justice Anthony Kennedy led a majority in finding unconstitutional Colorado’s noxious Amendment 2, a voter passed measure altering the state constitution to prohibit localities from enacting policy protecting lesbians and gay men from discrimination.

Epps says in his latest opinion, Reinhardt may have been itching to roar – “to say something broader about human dignity and the essential worth of gays and lesbians.”