We’ve heard an awful lot from the really loud, really powerful public moralists so maybe we should hear from some quiet dissenters:
At a Jesuit institution in Ohio, though, some members of the faculty and staff have joined the debate, signing a letter urging the university’s president to accept the Obama administration’s compromise on contraception coverage and asking him to push Roman Catholic bishops to do the same
Forty-seven faculty and staff members at John Carroll University, including professors, librarians and at least two members of the administration, signed a letter to the Jesuit college’s president, the Rev. Robert Niehoff.
“We … are committed to freedom of conscience and religious liberty,” the faculty wrote, adding that Catholic bishops have the right to “proclaim Catholic teaching vigorously and loudly.”
“However, we also believe that access to contraception is central to the health and well-being of women and children.”
“We are all troubled that the bishops have chosen a path of continued confrontation,” they wrote, questioning the bishop’s motives for rejecting the compromise.
“We believe the faculty and the administration of John Carroll University need to take a stand in the face of the bishops’ unwillingness to accept the compromise offered by the Obama administration,” the letter concludes. “We thus ask that, along with the presidents of other Catholic and Jesuit universities, you urge the bishops to avoid the inflammatory rhetoric they have been using to attack the administration’s policy. We ask you to stand up to those who would play politics with women’s health.”“People were commenting on it from across the political spectrum, but there weren’t really any faculty voices in the conversation,” Lauritzen said. “We thought it would be important to hear from those who would be directly affected by the policy, however it gets implemented.”
Well, he has that all wrong. It’s not at all important to hear from people who are directly affected by health care policy. We’re absolutely last on the list.
Oh, and here’s a crazy and radical notion these leftists have. They were concerned about people other than themselves. They might not even know these co-workers they’re defending, personally, or be related to them, or see some career benefit to sucking up to them, or anything!
Many of the signers, including both Catholics and non-Catholics, were concerned about the policy’s possible impact on non-Catholic faculty and staff, Lauritzen said. Those faculty have made no moral commitment to church teachings but would still be denied birth control coverage.