Gail Collins and David Brooks have a very illuminating exchange on the ongoing controversy over the contraception mandate. Brooks is, as you might expect, rather astonished at the “absolutist” stance taken by the Obama administration. He sees it as politically foolish, but he also sees it as substantively mistaken. He says:
The truth is that institutions with a strong sense of mission often attract diverse groups of people who want to attend or work there. Those schools and hospitals and charities are strong precisely because of their distinct mission and in the real world everybody involved tries to preserve that mission while respecting the diversity of those who aren’t members of that group. These accommodations are often messy, but they are worth making. We all make accommodations. It happens every day in a pluralistic society.
What Brooks recognizes is that this issue, however much Catholics as a whole may follow or not follow the teaching, is central to Catholic identity, and that therefore it is very much a matter of maintaining the “distinct mission” of the institutions. While the “assault on religious freedom” rhetoric can get a little overheated, Brooks correctly recognizes that in a genuinely pluralistic society, religiously-sponsored institutions which benefit the society should be given leeway to maintain their mission and identity.
Collins, however, is having none of it. Rarely have I seen such an unguarded, impolitic statement of the position defending the mandate. She calls the idea of exempting religious institutions “ridiculous” and “totally unjust” and even “crazy.” Furthermore, in response to Brooks’ reasonable example of a Jewish school (employing many non-Jews) that refrains from serving pork in its cafeteria, Collins says,
There’s a difference between what an institution serves its staff in its cafeteria and whether it can dictate what drugs they can use to facilitate their sex lives at home.
Collins does not elaborate on this “difference,” which seems obvious to her. Presumably it is that not serving pork isn’t “unjust” to anyone, whereas sex (unlike pork?) has some more fundamental status. But isn’t it worrisome that Collins feels so overwhelmingly confident in her ability to dictate this difference to religious institutions? However, this is not the biggest problem. Based on other (snide) comments, such as one claiming that priests and nuns who do good social justice work do not worry about “contraceptives lurking around the neighborhood,” it is evident that Collins is in fact crusading for contraception. That is, she views this not as an issue about whether institutions should provide health care coverage that covers contraceptives, but about whether contraceptives are available. Look at the above quote. What Catholic school or hospital is proposing to “dictate what drugs they can use to facilitate their sex lives at home”?! Contraception is widely available in our society. The issue is not the availability of contraception. The issue is whether contraception should be mandated to be provided free of charge as an employee benefit to all employees. As Collins evidences in her concluding comments that any compromise should force “the institution” to bear the extra freight, she views the right to free contraception as fundamental justice. Exempting religious institutions from acknowledging this right is akin to accepting them discriminating based on race. It is “totally unjust.”
I am not one to go out for the culture wars, but this kind of rhetoric (and its complete lack of understanding of the religious significance of the issue) sure makes it hard not to get into a little skirmish.
UPDATE: Aha, now we know why Collins is so upset. A (bad) priest called her mother a whore in the confessional for using birth control. So Collins is visiting the sin of that priest back on Catholics. On the one hand, serves us right. On the other hand, d’ya think we could have a public discourse a little less infected by individual stereotypes based on single personal experiences???? Imagine if Collins were writing about Latinos or Muslims…
David,
Thanks for calling attention to this exchange. I think you’re exactly right about Collins’ argument: the assumption of a right to free contraception is the wedge with which she seeks to make her case, in the final analysis. Brooks’ argument, by comparison, is more prudential; it doesn’t appeal to rights but to our experience of what seems to work in a pluralistic society. And so the exchange reveals not only a disagreement at the level of conclusions, but disagreement about the appropriate mode of moral discourse.
The telling remark for me is Collins’ closing claim that “the people who are trying to torpedo this policy aren’t aware of how strongly women feel about their right to control when they get pregnant.” The insinuation, of course, is that the refusal to provide free artificial contraception as an employee benefit is tantamount taking from employees their control over their reproductive lives. That seems to me to be an enormous stretch, one that suggests, implicitly, that truthful descriptions of circumstances are irrelevant to determinations of the right thing to do.
Sounds like my mom’s experience when a nun told her that her mom was going to hell for being divorced and remarried (mind you, the first husband was an alcoholic from the beginning). My mom said, “If my mom won’t be in heaven, I don’t want to be there either.” And thanks to people like that nun only 1 out of the 9 kids from that family is still practicing Catholicism. I always take it as an indication that we need to be charitable, compassionate, and careful with the “new evangelization.”
But thanks for pointing us to that dialogue. I thought Brooks was very insightful.
I see the point of Brook’s and Clouthier’s concern about the ethos of an institution. Granting the value of ethos, and granting the general right of an institution to establish and protect its values and traditions even when serving a diverse public, the question remains: how far does that right go when the well being of others is at stake? David Clouthier criticizes Collin’s ham-handed (no pun intended example) and her evident agenda, but at the same time he overlooks that there are many reasons besides ” facilitat[ing] their sex lives at home” that contraceptive medication is used for. On this same site, Chris Vogt offers an example.
Analogies are interesting and helpful, when we recognize our limits. David says Collin’s example of a Jewish school not serving pork is a flawed example. I wonder what you would think of this one: Should a Jehovah’s Witnesses university be allowed to offer an employee health plan that denies coverage for any employee needing a blood transfusion? It is not meant to be a silly example; it is a hypothetical that stands on the other side of the spectrum from the pork example, insofar human health and an employee’s ability to pay is at stake in a more serious way. I would love to hear what David and other contributors think of the relevance of such an example.
See http://socialvirtues.blogspot.com/2012/02/two-questions-for-us-bishops.html
Brian–
Thanks for your comment here. It is a fair point that some Catholic institutions (wrongly, it seems to me) deny women needed medical care when a contraceptive medication is required to treat some other medical condition. There should be some kind of waiver system offered. My comments are aimed specifically at contraceptives-as-birth-control, which is evidently also what is of concern to Collins. To her credit, Collins’ Saturday column turns out to be more measured, and I agree with her that the politicization of this in order to skewer health care is a problem. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/11/opinion/collins-the-battle-behind-the-fight.html?hp I do not think the Obama administration (or any foreseeable Democratic administration) is out to run people’s lives. I think they want health care for citizens – which is supported by the Catholic tradition. But I think they do have an absolutist conviction about individual sexual freedom with which the Catholic tradition strongly disagrees, and (what is more problematic) many of this belief do not recognize that they are holding an absolutist conviction.