Religious Liberty Concerns Exist in Nebraska

Details: 17 February 2012

The federal Department of Health and Human Services’ arrogant efforts to coerce all employers, including all but a narrow category of those with religious and moral objections, into purchasing health-insurance plans that cover abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization and contraception, are receiving the uproar and criticism they deserve. The threat this "preventive services" mandate poses to religious liberty is unmistakable.

Including these products and procedures as governmentally emphasized, cost-free health care for virtually all who are insured, regardless of the moral objections of those who provide the coverage or pay the premiums, is not the only context in which religious liberty is under mounting pressure.

Last May, the same federal agency added a new requirement to its contracts for services for victims of human trafficking so that the Migration and Refugee Services agency of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which had a record of exemplary, effective services, would be barred from participation if it did not provide the "full range" of reproductive services—namely, abortion, sterilization and contraception.

Last March, the U.S. Department of Justice stopped defending the congressionally enacted Defense of Marriage Act. Then in July, DOJ began filing briefs that actively attack DOMA’s constitutionality, arrogantly claiming that supporters of the duly enacted law could only have been motivated by bias and prejudice. If "bigot" is applied by the government to churches and religiously motivated institutions and individuals because of their teachings and religious convictions about marriage as a natural union of a man and a woman, conflict over religious liberty will exist for years to come.

Issues of religious liberty and freedom of conscience are not exclusive to federal policy actions. There are state-level examples as well.

Several years ago, the Archdiocese of Boston was forced out of its adoption ministry because, as a matter of fidelity to the Church’s teaching on marriage, it could not place children with homosexual and lesbian couples as the state government was dictating. More recently, in Illinois, the state cancelled contracts with Catholic Charities agencies because they were not providing adoption and foster-care services in a manner consistent with a new state law that legalized same-sex civil unions.

Individuals are affected by threats to religious liberty as well. In New Jersey, a dozen nurses had to file a lawsuit against a state medical facility in order to overcome an employment dictate that they assist in abortions. In New Mexico, a photographer who declined to provide professional services for a same-sex commitment ceremony because of her religious convictions was ruled to have engaged in unlawful discrimination by the state’s human rights commission.

Here in Nebraska, a serious matter pits governmental coercion against religious liberty. Unless state officials resolve this in a way that respects convictions of conscience, it is likely that Catholic diocesan agencies will be forced to terminate their counseling ministries, including those provided as charity care.

The state licensing boards that govern Mental Health Practitioners (also encompassing the affiliated categories of marriage and family therapists, social workers and professional counselors) and Psychologists, as well as the State Board of Health, are pushing for regulations that would delineate "unprofessional conduct" to include an open-ended proscription of all discrimination on the basis of "sexual orientation" and "gender identity;" neither of which is defined. The Nebraska Catholic Conference has taken a stand that defining unprofessional conduct in such a manner will dictate the type and scope of counseling that must be provided or for which referrals must be made.

No person is denied access to any of the counseling services that diocesan agencies can and do provide in accord with Catholic moral teaching and values, using state-credentialed staff as required by state law. The issue at hand is not at all about excluding persons from services; it is about accommodating exclusion of a narrow context of services; namely, therapy or counseling that has as its purpose to validate, affirm, support and/or enhance behavior (e.g., sexual expression outside the bond of marriage between a man and a woman) that the credential holder considers immoral.

The firmly held position of the Nebraska Catholic Conference is that individuals who hold professional credentials have a right of religious liberty to act in accord with their religious beliefs and moral values. They should not be coerced into participating—whether by providing or by the complicity of making a referral—in professional services that contradict their religious beliefs and/or convictions of conscience. They should not be forced into the untenable position of either acting contrary to their convictions or being subjected to administrative punishment, including license suspension or revocation.

Without effective accommodation for religious beliefs and convictions of conscience, these regulations that the licensing boards intend to be a shield against discrimination will instead be a sword used to dictate the scope and type of counseling services that must be provided or for which a referral must be made. Fortunately, the Director of Public Health has not allowed this unjust policy, this trampling of religious liberty, to occur. But conscience protection has not been settled on either.