Jophiel wrote:
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Making it about religious exceptions forces the government to do exactly that which you just said is impossible.
But they shouldn't. We abridge people's "religious" rights all the time under the general protection of the law for the common good. There's innumerable things you're not allowed to do or not do regardless of whether or not you want to claim "religion" as a reason why you're special and should get to ignore the law.
And I'll repeat for the umpteenth time that there's a difference between limiting what people can do to others, and mandating what what people
must do for others. Saying that you can't perform an action in accordance with your religious beliefs if that action would harm another is one thing. But requiring someone to perform an action which violates their religious beliefs on the grounds that it would help someone else is entirely different. We normally allow the former and don't allow the latter (except in rare and extreme cases and even then it's not exactly a settled issue. See: Forcing parents to vaccinate their children for an example of this).
The ACA clearly steps well past previous limits on that sort of infringement. So just saying "well, we infringed religious rights before, so this is ok" is a terrible argument.
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This shouldn't be any different.
Why? By that reasoning, all slippery slopes are valid, then right? I mean, if we allow the government to infringe the right of a Satanist to sacrifice live human babies, then I guess it's just ok to make it illegal to hold mass on Sunday then. Clearly, there's more to it than just allowing any infringement we want because we allowed the previous one. So where's the dividing line? Where is the point at which we decide that the harm to society by not infringing that right is so massive that we must do so? Cause I don't see it here. The harm we're talking about is not paying for someone else's birth control. Seriously. Do you honestly think that's worth infringing rights for?
I don't. Not even close. I don't think it's worth violating normal property rights for. IMO, we shouldn't even have gotten to the point of having to decide whether it's worth violating the 1st amendment rights over. But having arrived at the absurd position of having to decide if the religious rights violation exceeds that which should be allowable in this case, I think the answer is clearly "yes". The harm caused by *not* buying something for someone else? Are we seriously even asking this question?
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We avoid having to decide what constitutes a legitimate religious belief and what doesn't by largely requiring people to obey the law regardless.
We'd avoid it even more if we just decided that requiring one person to pay for another persons health care is a violation of the first persons rights (not special religious rights, just plain rights) in the first place and be done with the issue. That's where we should be with the issue.
Edited, Mar 26th 2014 7:36pm by gbaji