What do Koch Industries and the Catholic hierarchy have in common? A determination to shift rights away from individuals and assign them to institutions.
In their campaign to block medical access to contraceptives, marriage equality and death with dignity, religious institutional leaders are going after a non-profit version of corporate personhood. They want the organizations they control to have the constitutional rights of natural persons (in this case freedom of conscience/religion) just like multinational corporations want the constitutional rights of natural persons (in their case, free speech). The only real difference is which rights they find most conducive to their ends.
Since this country’s founding our ancestors have wrestled with the question of who counts. Who gets the rights and dignity that define the promise of America? For two hundred years generations of Americans have fought to bring the rights of personhood and citizenship to those who had been excluded: the landless poor, religious minorities, Blacks, First Nations, women, gays. But always, as we have expanded those rights it has been with the goal of giving greater dignity and self-determination to individuals.
Now we have both multi-nationals and religious institutions seeking to do the opposite, to create rights /powers for themselves that trump individual self-determination.
Under the Affordable Care Act, places of worship and parochial schools are exempt from providing contraceptive coverage for their employees. Now, the Catholic Bishops are demanding the same exemption for affiliated hospitals, social service agencies, and colleges (all of which, incidentally, receive vast sums of public dollars to support their work and most of which serve majority non-Catholic clientele). This is a matter of religious freedom they say. So it is: The aim of their demands is to suppress religious freedom. Conflict exists only because the employees of these institutions have religious beliefs at odds with the religious hierarchy. Employees of Catholic hospitals and the students and faculty at Christian affiliated universities, including devout believers, don’t all interpret God’s nature or God’s will in the same way as the Bishops and institutional leaders. Many believe that it is morally permissible or even morally obligatory for them to use contraception, and they exercise their own freedom of conscience and religion by seeking contraceptives.
Catholic institutions now control 18% of U.S. hospitals, including many that have no competitor. They derive much of their power and financial wellbeing from public-private mergers and from government funds. The same is true of Catholic universities like Georgetown and Notre Dame. Perhaps a majority of American private colleges have their roots in one religious tradition or another. This means that at a practical level, individual persons are not free to exercise their own conscience if health care and educational institutions with religious roots suppress access to death with dignity or contraceptive services.
The hard won rights of natural persons belong to natural persons. They are baked into our laws for a reason – specifically to protect individual freedoms against the aggregated power of institutions, whether those institutions are motivated by political power, religious ideology or money. The cry of religious freedom should be long and loud in this fight, and it should be coming from those of us who believe that freedom of conscience is far too sacred to be given over to institutions.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.