Bishops Defend Freedom of Conscience

I need a bumper sticker that says "I support my bishops." Media criticisms of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops notwithstanding, they have delivered a cogent defense of conscience in the face of the Obama administration's recent attempt to stamp it out.

At stake is whether or not the Church must provide contraception at no cost to the employees of its various institutions. The Church does not ask that it be permitted to impose its morality on its employees or anyone else. The Church asks only that it not be compelled to participate in the commission of acts which its conscience cannot tolerate.

Archbishop Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York and president of the USCCB, delivered a clear defense of the Church's freedom of conscience in the Wall Street Journal:

Religious freedom is the lifeblood of the American people, the cornerstone of American government. When the Founding Fathers determined that the innate rights of men and women should be enshrined in our Constitution, they so esteemed religious liberty that they made it the first freedom in the Bill of Rights.

In particular, the Founding Fathers fiercely defended the right of conscience. George Washington himself declared: "The conscientious scruples of all men should be treated with great delicacy and tenderness; and it is my wish and desire, that the laws may always be extensively accommodated to them." James Madison, a key defender of religious freedom and author of the First Amendment, said: "Conscience is the most sacred of all property."

Scarcely two weeks ago, in its Hosanna-Tabor decision upholding the right of churches to make ministerial hiring decisions, the Supreme Court unanimously and enthusiastically reaffirmed these longstanding and foundational principles of religious freedom. The court made clear that they include the right of religious institutions to control their internal affairs.

Yet the Obama administration has veered in the opposite direction. It has refused to exempt religious institutions that serve the common good—including Catholic schools, charities and hospitals—from its sweeping new health-care mandate that requires employers to purchase contraception, including abortion-producing drugs, and sterilization coverage for their employees.

Last August, when the administration first proposed this nationwide mandate for contraception and sterilization coverage, it also proposed a "religious employer" exemption. But this was so narrow that it would apply only to religious organizations engaged primarily in serving people of the same religion. As Catholic Charities USA's president, the Rev. Larry Snyder, notes, even Jesus and His disciples would not qualify for the exemption in that case, because they were committed to serve those of other faiths.

Since then, hundreds of religious institutions, and hundreds of thousands of individual citizens, have raised their voices in principled opposition to this requirement that religious institutions and individuals violate their own basic moral teaching in their health plans. Certainly many of these good people and groups were Catholic, but many were Americans of other faiths, or no faith at all, who recognize that their beliefs could be next on the block. They also recognize that the cleverest way for the government to erode the broader principle of religious freedom is to target unpopular beliefs first.

Now we have learned that those loud and strong appeals were ignored. On Friday, the administration reaffirmed the mandate, and offered only a one-year delay in enforcement in some cases—as if we might suddenly be more willing to violate our consciences 12 months from now. As a result, all but a few employers will be forced to purchase coverage for contraception, abortion drugs and sterilization services even when they seriously object to them. All who share the cost of health plans that include such services will be forced to pay for them as well. Surely it violates freedom of religion to force religious ministries and citizens to buy health coverage to which they object as a matter of conscience and religious principle.

The rule forces insurance companies to provide these services without a co-pay, suggesting they are "free"—but it is naïve to believe that. There is no free lunch, and you can be sure there's no free abortion, sterilization or contraception. There will be a source of funding: you.

Coercing religious ministries and citizens to pay directly for actions that violate their teaching is an unprecedented incursion into freedom of conscience. Organizations fear that this unjust rule will force them to take one horn or the other of an unacceptable dilemma: Stop serving people of all faiths in their ministries—so that they will fall under the narrow exemption—or stop providing health-care coverage to their own employees.

The Catholic Church defends religious liberty, including freedom of conscience, for everyone. The Amish do not carry health insurance. The government respects their principles. Christian Scientists want to heal by prayer alone, and the new health-care reform law respects that. Quakers and others object to killing even in wartime, and the government respects that principle for conscientious objectors. By its decision, the Obama administration has failed to show the same respect for the consciences of Catholics and others who object to treating pregnancy as a disease.

This latest erosion of our first freedom should make all Americans pause. When the government tampers with a freedom so fundamental to the life of our nation, one shudders to think what lies ahead.

A number of other bishops - including Bishop Conley of Denver, Bishops Vann and Farrell of Ft. Worth and Dallas, Bishop Olmsted of Phoenix, and Bishop Loverde of Arlington - have reechoed Archbishop Dolan's appraisal.

The bishops are urging Catholics - and, indeed, all Americans concerned about the freedom of conscience, to write to their congressmen asking them to support the Respect for Rights of Conscience Act (H.R. 1179, S. 1467). While you're at it, contact the president and implore him to reverse this decision.  (And don't mark this down as a "health care" concern, because it is not; for your subject, choose "civil rights."  Because that is what is at stake.)

And then say some prayers. Not least for our bishops, who bear a tremendous burden in their work as shepherds.

For Washington's comments on conscience, see his Letter to the Quakers. For the full text of Madison's comments, click here.

Money, Creepy Criminals, and Respectability

Why do we equate money with respectability?

Maybe money has not always equaled respectability, but it certainly does now. I myself unconsciously assume that a man wearing a nice suit must be more trustworthy than a man wearing a blue-collar work uniform with his name tag sewn onto his shirt. Maybe some people are less prejudiced in favor of wealth than I am, but I know I am certainly not unique in this respect. There is a reason, after all, why professionals dress well—most of us would not place our confidence in, or give our money to, a man who dressed like a bum, or like a used car salesman.

This equation of wealth with respectability is so deeply entrenched in our society that we don’t notice it until something makes us examine this prejudice. When I was growing up, I was surrounded by government employees, university professors, businessmen who could afford to be country club members, etc. I didn't know any criminals. Criminals were people who did horrible things, like rob and murder people, in poor neighborhoods. I only knew about them because their crimes were reported in the local newspaper. That changed, though, once I started working for lawyers. But, before I started working for lawyers, I also didn't know anyone who embezzled tens of thousands of dollars. Over the last few years, I’ve realized that we underestimate the injury caused by the breach of trust that is at the heart of white-collar crime.

What first made me examine my prejudices about wealth was that I realized that money is not necessarily a predictive factor for "creepiness" among criminals. One of the occupational hazards of working for criminal defense lawyers is that you meet some real creeps. Some of the creepiest defendants I’ve met have been quite wealthy, or at least middle-class, not the poor street criminals I thought of as a child. The creepiness that emanates from all criminals comes from two sources. First, the initial meeting between a client and a criminal defense lawyer is always uneasy because (in my experience with criminal defense) there is generally not much doubt that the client at the very least did something bad, if not always criminal. Both client and lawyer do their best to dance around the question of guilt, and that dance produces a strange sensation in the onlooker.

Second, each individual criminal gives off his own weird vibe. Different sorts of criminals, though, are different sorts of creeps. And white-collar criminals have been among the creepiest, in my experience. What makes some white-collar criminals so creepy? The answer comes back to society’s equation of wealth and respectability. The fact that a man can maintain a façade of respectability for years, all the while defrauding those who trust him because of his respectable wealth, means that at a very fundamental level of his personality he must be extremely devious. This deviousness I find just as frightening as the lack of remorse in a cold-blooded murderer; in both cases it is a sign of a complete lack of conscience. It is this lack of conscience, which leads to a willingness to violate any confidence, or any ethical boundary, that is truly creepy and even more disturbing than a street criminal who can’t restrain his anger over a failed drug deal or his frustration in his personal life. These street criminals possess a certain simplicity. It’s obviously not a good type of simplicity, but at least these men are not devious and manipulative like most white-collar criminals.

(On a side note, pedophiles are especially creepy because they combine the worst aspects of both kinds of criminals. Their actions are violent and repulsive, like those of street criminals, but like white-collar criminals they usually first build up a great amount of trust between themselves and their victims before committing their crimes.)

* * * * *

The special creepiness of white-collar defendants prompted me to examine my prejudices, and led me to conclude that their violation of trust is in some ways worse than what common street criminals do. But we are rarely outraged over white-collar crime, usually because the criminal has money, even though we should be more outraged because the criminal has betrayed a trust.

The result is that somehow it's more "respectable" for an investment banker to steal money through fraud, e.g., through the use of complex financial instruments he doesn’t understand (see “master of the universe” Fabrice Tourre of Goldman Sachs), than it is to mug a pedestrian. It's even more respectable for a bank to commit usury, or for a lawyer to overcharge his clients. These are all forms of theft, and they often involve a breach of trust when one person relies on the professional for help. The 7th commandment makes quite clear that all theft is wrong, yet too often we make nice distinctions based on the criminal’s wealth where the 7th commandment doesn't.

Unfortunately, most of the time we view these behaviors in abstract economic terms; this makes us afraid to call a thief a thief. It takes some up-close experience to see that theft is theft, no matter who the thief is.

Lawyers for a prominent trust company can get away with depleting half the assets of a sizable trust in questionable fees—they were paying themselves directly from the trust until the primary beneficiary asked to see some invoices. Jarndyce and Jarndyce may be not a completely fictional case, after all.

A man can write checks to himself and embezzle from a charity for mentally disabled children. He may not get away with it forever—the IRS might want to ask him about his new personal airplane—yet, because such a man can pay for his defense, he is more respectable in most people's eyes than the simple street criminal who has to rely on the public defender.

On the other hand, there are men who rob jewelry stores who are not very clever—as well as oblivious to the fact that the entire robbery has been caught on videotape—and the police generally have little difficulty in recovering the jewelry within a couple days. They certainly deserve to spend some time behind bars, but I have a hard time seeing that what these armed robbers do is necessarily any worse than what white-collar criminals do. What these armed robbers do is obviously more traumatic for the victim in the short term but they generally steal less money than white-collar criminals; people like Bernie Madoff have easy access to lots of money. Finally, will those trust beneficiaries or charity beneficiaries ever be able to recover the money stolen by their trustees? It’s highly unlikely.

You can call me a soft-on-crime bleeding-heart liberal, if you want, but I am simply asking why we do not stigmatize white-collar crime as much as street crime. Is the physical injury the street criminal inflicts on his victim always worse than the breach of trust committed by a white-collar criminal? True criminality does not depend on a person’s violence. Rather, it depends on a person’s willingness to transgress basic ethical commands without compunction. And that lack of conscience is often more evident in a wealthy white-collar criminal than it is in a poor street criminal.