If anyone had any doubt that the current fight for religious liberty over the HHS mandate is a fight to the death – that it poses an existential threat to Catholic universities and indeed every Catholic apostolate as such – then he or she need look no farther than the State of California where word comes that Loyola Marymount University has caved in to the demands of Governor Jerry Brown’s California Department of Managed Health Care to provide insurance coverage for elective abortions to its employees.
A story in the student newspaper, the Los Angeles Loyolan, reports: “The news was confirmed in an email sent to faculty and staff yesterday, Vice President for Human Resources Rebecca Chandler confirmed that LMU's insurance providers will now cover all procedures deemed medically necessary, including electives abortions” (here).
As others have pointed out, abortion has had a corrupting influence on our law and politics and even our language. The report from Loyola Marymount provides yet another example: what is admittedly an “elective” abortion is now deemed medically “necessary.”
Briefly put, the background behind Loyola Marymount University’s recent decision is as follows. In 2013, both Santa Clara University and Loyola Marymount decided to drop [sic] elective abortion from their insurance coverage for employees (here). (To ask why they had provided this coverage in the first place is to peer under the dark rock that is religious identity at most Catholic universities today). Loyola’s decision was not a joyful embrace of its Catholic identity. The University’s president, David Burcham (a layman and a non-Catholic) vowed that the “pall of orthodoxy” would not “shackle” Loyola in its efforts to move forward as an institution of higher learning (here).
After Loyola initially decided to drop the coverage, it then decided to make such coverage available to employees, at their own expense, through a plan administered by a third-party. This “compromise” was offered in response to complaints from a number of faculty members protesting the absence of abortion coverage (here and here).
In response to this move, the California Department of Managed Health Care chose to conduct “an in-depth analysis of the issues surrounding coverage for abortion services under California law” (here). In August the agency decided that all insurance coverage must include abortion services. According to the department’s director, Michelle Rouillard, “All health plans must treat maternity services and legal abortion neutrally” (here).
Although Loyola has given in to the State’s demands, the California Catholic Conference has challenged the action, filing a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights of the Department of Health and Human Services (here).
It takes very little imagination to think that in the very near future an unelected federal administrative agency, aided by a politicized though ostensibly neutral panel of experts like the Institute of Medicine, could determine that abortion is a “necessary” aspect of “health care” and require all employers – regardless of their objections based on religious conscience – to provide coverage for both surgical and chemical abortions. Indeed, as Justice Alito noted in Hobby Lobby (slip op. at 45-46) the logic of HHS’s reading of RFRA in that case would allow the federal government to do precisely that. Should there have been any doubt that the totalitarian instinct is alive and well in American society, the actions taken by the California Department of Managed Health Care and Governor Jerry Brown show that there are people in this country who have the political will to impose such a burden on religious objectors without apology.
Some Catholics who disagree with Humanae Vitae might have been willing to look the other way when it came to the HHS mandate. It was only contraception, right? (or so the media said). They may have even been supporters of the mandate, seeing it as a way of getting the Church to “get with the times” – to modernize and become “relevant” again.
Even those who harbored such a mistaken view should now see plainly where all of this is headed: State enforced “modernization” leads to abortion. It leads to the Church paying for the use of a curette and a vacuum aspirator to snuff out the life of a developing human being. It leads to the death of religious liberty.
What is most disappointing in all this is how Loyola Marymount University – a Jesuit university that seeks to advance “the service of faith and the promotion of justice,” a school whose “Catholic identity and religious heritage” purportedly “distinguish [it] from other universities” (see LMU Mission Statement here) – would so easily capitulate.
Next month, Jesuit universities across the country will celebrate Ignatian Heritage Month (here), and part of these festivities will include a commemoration of the Six Jesuit Martyrs and their Companions in El Salvador who were brutally murdered on November 16, 1989 (here and here).
Certainly some will argue that Loyola Marymount’s decision to capitulate to the State was a prudential judgment made after much deliberation. Really? Wasn’t Judas similarly prudent? Didn’t he exercise the same kind of deliberative judgment?
Prudence, the master virtue, often demands the exercise of courage. Does Loyola Marymount’s decision embody the courage of the Jesuits of El Salvador or the heroic sacrifices of their brothers over the centuries? Does it proclaim the Gospel with a prophetic voice? Or is it a betrayal of Ignatian Heritage – of all that St. Ignatius held dear – and a cause of scandal?
These are, I would suggest, questions that Archbishop Josè Gomez should ask and seek to answer in determining whether Loyola Marymount should still be allowed to promote itself as a “Catholic” institution. These are questions that members of the Society of Jesus should ask themselves in reflecting on what is being done in their name. Are they furthering the “throw away culture” that their brother, Pope Francis, has said (here), “calls for the elimination of human beings” who “bear the face of the Lord”?
http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/news/2014/09/25/accreditation-board-gives-gordon-college-a-year-to.html?s=print
Alright, faithful Catholic friends. What should we be doing to defend the right of Gordon College, an Evangelical Christian college in Massachusetts, to uphold Biblical morality in its employment and student life policies? If the powers that be---in this case an accreditation board---can force Gordon College into line with the dogmas of expressive individualism and sexual liberationist ideology, no college (or law school) whose moral and religious commitments place it in dissent from the new orthodoxy will be safe.
For those in the Philadelphia area or nearby, Villanova Law will be hosting a symposium on Friday, October 17 at 1:30pm in Law School Room 101 on the US Supreme Court’s decision last term in McCullen v. Coakley, unanimously striking down on First Amendment grounds a Massachusetts abortion clinic buffer zone statute. The lead plaintiff in the case, Eleanor McCullen, will participate and will be in attendance along with her husband, Joseph T. McCullen, Jr., a Villanova alumnus and benefactor. Also participating will be the attorney who represented Mrs. McCullen before the Supreme Court. Confirmed participants include:
Gregory P. Magarian
Professor of Law, Washington University School of Law
Professor Gregory Magarian is an expert in free speech, the law of politics, and law and religion. Before joining the law faculty at Washington University, he was on the faculty of Villanova University School of Law from 1999 to 2008. He has written about a variety of topics in constitutional law, including free speech theory and doctrine, media regulation, regulation of political parties, the relationship between church and state, and substantive due process. As part of an ABA project, he led a team of faculty examining the work of Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan during the nomination process. Before becoming a law professor, he clerked for US Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, as well as for Judge Louis Oberdorfer of the US District Court for the District of Columbia. Professor Magarian also practiced law for five years with the Washington, DC firm of Jenner & Block. He earned his BA from Yale University and his JD and MPP from the University of Michigan.
Mark L. Rienzi
Counsel for Eleanor McCullen, Senior Counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, and Associate Professor of Law, The Catholic University of America
Professor Mark Rienzi's litigation and research interests focus on the First and Fourteenth Amendments, with an emphasis on free speech and the free exercise of religion. As Senior Counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty (a non-profit, non-partisan religious liberties law firm dedicated to protecting the free expression of all religious faiths), Professor Rienzi is counsel in several challenges to the HHS Mandate. Prior to joining CUA, Professor Rienzi served as counsel in the Supreme Court and Appellate Practice Group at Wilmer Hale LLP in Washington, DC. Prior to joining Wilmer Hale, he served as law clerk to the Hon. Stephen F. Williams, senior circuit judge for the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. He earned his JD from Harvard Law School and BA from Princeton University.
Carrie Severino
Chief Counsel and Policy Director, Judicial Crisis Network
As chief counsel and policy director of the Judicial Crisis Network, Carrie Severino has testified before Congress on assorted constitutional issues and briefed Senators on judicial nominations. Mrs. Severino has been extensively quoted in the media and regularly appeared on television, including MSNBC, FOX, CNN, C-SPAN and ABC’s This Week. She has written and spoken on a wide range of judicial issues, particularly the constitutional limits on government, the federal nomination process, and state judicial selection. Mrs. Severino regularly files briefs in high-profile Supreme Court cases. In the 2013 term those cases included Hobby Lobby v. Burwell, McCullen v. Coakley, and Schuette v. BAMN. Until March 2010, Mrs. Severino was an Olin/Searle Fellow and a Dean's Visiting Scholar at Georgetown University Law Center. She was previously a law clerk to US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and to Judge David B. Sentelle of the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. She received a BS from Duke University, an MA in Linguistics from Michigan State University, and a JD from Harvard Law School.
Kevin C. Walsh
Associate Professor of Law, University of Richmond School of Law
Professor Kevin Walsh teaches and writes in the areas of federal jurisdiction and constitutional law. His scholarship focuses on doctrines that define the scope of federal judicial power, and has appeared in the Stanford Law Review, New York University Law Review, and Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly. Prior to joining the Richmond Law faculty in 2009, Professor Walsh was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Villanova University School of Law. He earned his AB from Dartmouth College, his MA in Theology from the University of Notre Dame, and his JD from Harvard Law School. He clerked for Associate Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court of the United States and for Judge Paul V. Niemeyer of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
Linda Greenhouse has a column purporting to reflect on the Roberts Court's first nine years that doubles as an occasion to offer the hope that Chief Justice Roberts will "moderate" in the next decade--a hope then despaired of at the end of the column.
She also says this:
It has been an eventful nine terms for the court and its chief. Samuel A. Alito Jr., Justice O’Connor’s eventual replacement, is well to her right and has provided Chief Justice Roberts with a reliable if narrow majority for the court’s steady regression on race and its deregulatory hijacking of the First Amendment. Along with ever-expanding accommodation of religious interests, these are the areas in which the Roberts court has made its increasingly predictable mark.
But on the issue of religious interests, Greenhouse is, I believe, mistaken, at least insofar as constitutional law is concerned. As I show in this article, the defining mark of the Roberts Court in the area of religious rights has been contraction, not expansion. One of the very cases cited by Greenhouse herself involving the religion clauses--Town of Greece v. Galloway--is much more plausibly conceived as a contraction of the Establishment Clause, not an expansion. The Court's exercise of judicial review, the range of views among the Justices about religious rights, and the substance of the Clauses themselves--all of these, contra Greenhouse, have contracted over the last decade.
Wednesday, October 1, 2014
Today is the Memorial of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-1897), a figure from the Catholic tradition all too easy to sentimentalize about and thereby fail to appreciate her remarkable achievement. At the end of the nineteenth century amid a secularizing culture in Europe, a French girl from a small town in Normandy led a short, tragic, and holy life in a cloistered convent, leaving behind a spiritual classic that Charles Taylor notes in A Secular Age illustrates the possibility of religious faith amid moden disbelief (p. 765 and p. 850, n. 64). A century later, she was declared a doctor of the Church (one of only four women), and, as Dorothy Day wrote in 1949, "on the frail battleground of her flesh was fought the wars of today." For more on Thérèse and what she means for our world and for all of us in our various vocations, see this from the Houston Catholic Worker (on Dorothy Day's devotion to Thérèse), this from Rusty Reno, and this from Philip Zaleski.
