Jophiel wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Churches have been in the education and medical business since long before Obama care was passed, and long before the US even existed.
So? And?
It means that arguing this like it's the religious organizations which are intruding into those areas is dishonest. It's the government that is intruding, not the other way around.
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The second part is not accurate since actual churches are exempt from the requirement.
The White House wrote:
Churches are exempt from the new rules: Churches and other houses of worship will be exempt from the requirement to offer insurance that covers contraception.
Um... Except they aren't. The White House doesn't write the laws Joph. Congress does. And the Congress just failed to pass an amendment which would have exempted churches. If they had passed this amendment, then what you say would be true. But they didn't.
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The bit that has people up in arms is auxiliary branches such as the mentioned schools and hospitals. As for the first part, we "violate" the free exercise on a regular basis for the good of the nation. You can't burn offerings to Moloch in your yard. The Amish still have to pay federal income tax. I don't consider "Religion!" to be carte blanche to decide which laws of the United States you feel like following and which ones you'll casually discard because... "Religion!"
There you go with the big gaping excluded middle again though. So because we can't allow religious people to ignore any law they want, it's perfectly ok to pass any law we want no matter how offensive it might be to a religious person? There should be some reasonable range in between that we can find here.
And as I've stated before, the religious angle is just the canary in the coalmine of this issue. It's a violation of all our rights to impose the sorts of mandates that are in Obamacare. It's just that the ones directly violating various religious institutions 1st amendment rights makes the issue that much more obvious. It isn't really about religion though. It's about the government requiring people to buy things they don't want to buy, and to sell things they don't want to sell. That should not be allowed regardless of whether there's a violation of someone's religious beliefs involved.
What I was saying earlier, is that by failing to pass this amendment they make the argument that much more stark. Had they actually excluded religious institutions from this, they might have been able to play the whole thing as "necessary intrusion via commerce clause". Maybe. Now? That's pretty much down the drain.