Next week my Law and Ethics class will be reading (or supposed to be reading) a case called Lawrence v. Texas. In Lawrence, two men were arrested and charged with violating a Texas law that banned certain sexual acts between two people of the same gender. The men, who were in a consentual relationship and acting within their own house, challenged the law under their constitutional right to due process. The main reasoning in the case holds that morality cannot be a compelling government interest that justifies an infringement of due process rights. Thus the Texas law was unconstitutional.
One thing anyone who reads Supreme Court cases learns is that Justice Scalia’s opinions are by far the easiest to read and often the most entertaining, regardless of your opinion of his judicial philosophy or politics. Well, Scalia is his usual self in his dissent in Lawrence, blasting the majority for its reasoning, pointing out the multitude of laws that are based on morality. As usual, one must begrudgingly admit that Scalia has a point. Isn’t our legal system based on morality? Whether it is the crime of murder or the ban on incest, all of these laws are founded in our morality. Just because we don’t agree with the morals of the majority of voters in Texas, doesn’t mean, according to Scalia, that the morality can’t be the basis of a law.
Today we have a new example: the Blunt Amendment. The Blunt Amendment is a bill pending that would amend the new health care law to allow an employer or hospital to deny coverage for or provision of health services if they, conflict with their “religious beliefs or moral convictions.” To read more about it, here is a Wall Street Journal Blog that has a link to the actual bill.
The most obvious concern that has been raised in reaction to this bill is that of reproductive rights. If the bill passed, it would allow your employer to refuse to cover your insurance bills for contraception or abortion, as long as your employer could say that the health service “conflicts with its moral convictions.” But the bill is so much broader than one about birth control; it could impact fertility treatments, HIV testing or treatment, or really anything that your employer or doctor objects to morally. Imagine the extreme case scenario: the owners of your company belong to an extreme religion that prohibits traditional medicine to treat disease. Your employer could refuse cover any of your medical treatments for any disease because it conflicts with their morality.
Some of the senators that have signed on to the bill claim it is about protecting religious freedom under the Constitution. The idea is that the government should not be able to force, for example, a Catholic Hospital, to provide contraception. Regardless of your views on reproductive rights, the Constitution does protect the ability to exercise your religious beliefs. And I am sure most of us do not want to allow Church and State to intermingle (any more than it already does). But by focusing on morality, the Blunt Amendment creates a loophole that you could drive a truck through in terms of health care.
The question for us is whether this is bad. As Scalia said, we do this already; morality is the basis of so much of our legal system, so why not allow morality to weigh in on legal obligations with health care? In a country founded in part on the idea of individual rights, don’t we want an individual to be able to make their own decisions based on their own morality? Why should the government be able to force people to pay for things that they don’t agree with? Or are some rights so fundamental that they have to be protected from the varying morals of individuals?
2 Comments
Madeline Steiner posted on February 22, 2012 at 10:57 pm
I think this is Church and State intermingling – a doctor or employer can personally choose not to participate in traditional medicine, but I don’t think they have the right to impose those same beliefs onto their employees or patients.
It also feels like an invasion of privacy. People should be able to make their own decisions regarding what sort of medicine they take or treatments they receive. A doctor can make recommendations, but ultimately it is the patient’s decision. As for employers, by not covering certain medical treatments or drugs, they are putting an obstacle in the way of making that decision, or in some cases completely taking away the option to decide.
Spencer Li posted on February 26, 2012 at 5:57 pm
Before I begin, I want to make clear that I have an underlying assumption: both the government and the church want what’s best for people. Even though not everyone might understand the intention of each, I believe that both aim to better human life (from their perspective). For example, government hopes to keep everyone healthy by requiring healthcare, while the church condemns lies is to keep oneself pure.
When the questions arises to “why do I have to do xyz”, it is most likely because there is a significant amount of people who think that one’s life would be better if they did xyz. So when the employer really believes that traditional medicine is a bad idea, or when a Catholic hospital doesn’t want to provide birth control, they are hoping to better the lives of who they have an impact on.
I’m not going to give a conclusive answer to “how much should morality affect law”. I feel that a simply reply to a blog would not suffice for a topic of this magnitude.