OK, so the good Southern Baptists at Hobby Lobby don’t want
to have to comply with the Affordable Care Act (ACA)requirement that specifies that an employer’s
health care plan must cover all prescriptions that her (or his) doctor might
deem appropriate. Their primary objection (in addition to the ACA being an Obama initiative) centers on the fact that while they are ok with 12 of the birth control methods that an employee might use, they consider IUDs or the morning after pill as "abortions." First of all; do we think that Southern Baptists took the
regional descriptor as a badge of honor, or did regular, sane, Baptists assign
it as a disclaimer? In my opinion, that
could go either way, remembering the hate filled tradition of the Southern Baptists
through this century. You know, cross burnings, attack dogs, water cannons, lynchings, all in the name of Christ.
In cases where the sanity of one side of the argument is
questionable, the technique called reductio ad absurdum can be useful. This
just might be such a case. Here’s a definition and an example of this logic
tool. “A mode of argumentation or a form
of argument in which a proposition is disproven by following its implications
logically to an absurd conclusion.
Arguments which use universals such as, “always”, “never”, “everyone”,
“nobody”, etc., are prone to being reduced to absurd conclusions. The fallacy is in the argument that could be
reduced to absurdity -- so in essence, reductio ad absurdum is a technique to
expose the fallacy.”
Now the example: “If
everyone lived his or her life exactly like Jesus lived his life, the world
would be a beautiful place!” We
first assume the premise is true: if everyone lived his or her life like Jesus
lived his, the world would be a beautiful place. If this were true, we would have 7 billion
people on this earth roaming from town to town, living off the charity of
others, preaching about God. Without
anyone creating wealth, there would be nobody to get charity from -- there
would just be 7 billion people all trying to tell each other about God. After a few weeks, everyone would eventually
starve and die. This world might be a
beautiful place for the vultures and maggots feeding on all the Jesus wannabes,
but far from a beautiful world from a human perspective. Since the world cannot be both a beautiful
place and a horrible place, the proposition is false. Of course,
this itself is subject to further reduction, in that, to many mainstream
Christians, Jesus was essentially asexual, ergo, there would be no one left on
the earth, a fact that many mammals would applaud, if capable!
A more testable, yet equally fallacious statement is: “I
am going into surgery tomorrow so please pray for me. If enough people pray for me, God will
protect me from harm and see to it that I have a successful surgery and speedy
recovery.” We first assume the
premise is true: if “enough” people prayed to God for her successful surgery
and speedy recovery, then God would make it so.
From this, we can deduce that God responds to popular opinion. However, if God simply granted prayers based
on popularity contests, that would be both unjust and absurd. Since God cannot be unjust, then he cannot
both respond to popularity and not respond to popularity, the claim is absurd,
and thus false.
Now that we know the ground rules, let’s look at some possible outcomes of allowing
insurers or their carriers to refuse or moderate what they will or won’t cover
(and other ridiculous actions based on belief) , based on either the carrier’s
or employer’s personal religious beliefs.
A Jewish or Muslim employer might fire employees for eating
pork. (wanna bet they could find a Baptist lawyer to sue the employer?)
Jewish stockholders might
pressure Red Lobster to stop selling clams, oysters and lobsters.
Any Biblical literalist could stone adulterers, refuse to
serve a customer with a crippled hand, prohibit
employees shaving, and buy slaves and will them to their children as property.
A Catholic employer might have, until recently, fired an
employee for a clandestine Friday hamburger.
A Seventh Day Adventist hospital (and there are many) could refuse
to insure non-Adventist employees (and there are many) for an accident suffered
while working on Saturday. An Orthodox
Jewish employer might seek to do the same.
Southern Baptists might be, ought to be, militantly against the death
penalty (but the vast majority are not! I mean, go figure – these are the
people who want to thrust the Ten Commandments into secular buildings)
Imagine the uproar if a Muslim owned company even considered
disciplinary action against a non-Muslim employee for eating during daylight
hours during Ramadan!
Or a real favorite, right out of Leviticus, mistreating
foreigners – “the foreigner residing among you must be treated as your
native-born” So any self styled Christian who treats immigrants badly is
sinning.
Oddly enough, In all the Bible, there is no verbage that
makes abortion (let alone birth control) a sin, as there is for all the above mentioned acts, many of which Southern Baptists wouldn’t even think twice about. There is no Biblical
definition of when life starts other that doesn’t involve breath. Even later, Thomas
Aquinas arbitrarily picked 44 days after conception, as the time the fetus (somehow)
acquired a soul.
The point is that Christian tradition as exemplified by the
only writings considered scriptural by the vast majority of believers, and
especially for Baptist literalists like the Hobby Lobby owners, does not ban
abortion, and certainly would have nothing to say about the “morning after pill”
which is at the crux of the law suit before the Supremes. This isn’t about
freedom of religion as they would have it seem, it is about freedom from having
to conform to an arbitrary standard having nothing whatever to do with the job or
the workplace, but which may well have a great deal of importance to the
employee and their doctor.
In a setting which, by law, is inviolable, that of doctor
patient privacy, the idea that an employer owns some stock in their employees’
reproductive privacy is a throwback to the mentality prevalent across the South
in the 1830s, when slaves were bred, or not, according to a master’s wishes.
One wonders how strenuous would be the Hobby Lobby owners’ objections if the
exact same legislative requirement was a Republican initiative.
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