According to a New York Times article today, the White House has now publicly confirmed that President Obama is considering caving to demands by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and other far right religious groups on the requirement that insurance plans under health reform cover birth control without a co-pay.
The Department of Health and Human Services has included contraceptive coverage as essential preventive care under the Affordable Care Act, while exempting organizations with an explicit religious mission from having to comply. For some, this exemption does not go far enough. But how far can religious right organizations go in denying their employees access to essential preventive care?
Deep within America, beyond your typical evangelicals and run of the mill fundamentalists, nurtured within the homeschool movement and growing by the day, are the Christian Patriarchy and Quiverfull movements. This is where I grew up.
Fundamentalist Christians are convinced that contemporary American society is the World’s Most Spectacular Display of hideously mutated, diseased and anomalous freaks. ”Step right up folks!” the preacher yells, “and witness a grotesque parade of ho-mo-sex-uals, lesbians, Wiccans, radical feminists, godless liberals, secular humanists, and … (congregation gasps) Muslim extremists!”
The Texas Independent reports today on violations ranging from fire safety to client privacy in Texas’ many “alternatives to abortion” contractors.
Even after the Silsby affair, when ten American missionaries were arrested in Haiti for attempted child theft, the Christian adoption movement is unchastened.
There’s one “little” detail in THE FAMiLY LEADER’s “Marriage Vow” that critics have overlooked – small, subtle, and yet glaringly obvious once you see it: Simply stated, women who are unwilling to subordinate and sacrifice themselves to populate America’s economic and political war machine are selfish with a capital “I” - s.e.l.f.I.s.h.
When accumulated in one place, the number of lies the religious right tells about human sexuality and gender roles is dizzying. But countering their lies with facts, while important, is more complex than simply insisting on the facts.
Is murder a right-to-life issue?
Think you know how Catholic voters feel about the issues and how they’ll vote in the elections? Think again.
