The Senate is expected to vote Thursday on the so-called
Blunt Amendment which would override President Obama's contraception coverage
rule and allow any employer to refuse to cover any kind of health care service
for religious or moral reasons. The Republicans have been arguing that the amendment is just about religious
freedom and that it is unrelated to women's health.
The Amendment isn’t expected to pass but Republicans are offering it
anyway in a cynical effort to create some kind of wedge issue for the 2012
election claiming that Obama is somehow attacking Religion by support women’s
rights to a form of preventive health care that is universally recommended by the medical
community.
CB writes in response to one of my posts defending the Blunt
Amendment:
The Catholic Church is
one of the largest providers of charity in the U.S. The Church wants to
function as it always has, free of government intervention. The Blunt Amendment simply uses exact text
from the Respect for Rights of Conscience Act (S. 1467), so the church can
function as it did before Obamacare. So
basically no one wants anything other than to function with the same
"Religious Liberty" as the Church always has. Did you really think
everyone who warned us about the Obamacare Mandates would just say- "Oh,
OK"- we didn't really want the "Religious Liberty" our country
was founded on anyway.
Well CB, if you are wondering why the Blunt Amendment and the Respect
for Rights of Conscience Act contain the same wording, it is because Blunt
introduced both of them. Neither one
will pass I’m happy to say.
Also, the Blunt Amendment has nothing to do with protecting
religious freedom. It is an attack on
the rights of women, an effort to allow the extreme religious right to impose
its theology on other Americans, and a not so subtle effort to destroy
Obamacare by allowing any employer to opt out of providing health insurance
coverage simply by declaring his/her “moral or religious” opposition.
The National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) has posted an
excellent analysis of the problems the Blunt amendment would cause should it
pass. Among other things, if passed, the
Blunt Amendment would put CEOs between women and their doctors by making it
possible for them to deny women employees or any employees for that matter
access to health insurance coverage the CEO determined was against his “religious
beliefs” or “moral convictions.”
You can read the NWLC analysis at this link: http://www.nwlc.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/blunt_amendment_fact_sheet.pdf
Read the Blunt Amendment and Respect for Rights of
Conscience nonsense at these links:
Blunt Amendment
Respect for Rights of Conscience Act (S. 1467)
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