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caseymoz

(5,763 posts)
Sun May 27, 2012, 11:16 AM May 2012

recced, but a little off-target.

As much as I hate to say it, what happened to the children has no bearing on the First Amendment separation of church and state.

The church is wrong in this way: if its going to run secular services, like hospitals and schools, it has to treat its non-clergical employees the way any other secular organization has to under the law. The SCOTUS has made that distinction clear. I think Scalia even made that ruling.

The compromise offered by the Obama administration is that the employees have the right to deal with the insurance company directly on the issue of contraception, taking the church out of the loop. This is a matter of the church interfering with a transaction between their employee and a third party. That's not the church exercising its rights under the First Amendment. That's the church butting into somebody else's business.

Now that I've made that point, I'll say, yes, and it's a deranged child-molesters' support group that's telling us how moral this is and how the First Amendment should be interpreted. Surprised?

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