| President Obama’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) seems determined to go after a small Catholic college in North Carolina. Readers of First Things, the thoughtful journal founded by Rev. Richard Neuhaus, are familiar with the funny ads regularly run by Belmont Abbey. “Got Monks?” reads the white-on-black ad that encourages serious young Catholics to consider a college where the Benedictine monks seek God and where the students seek truth.
But Obama’s EEOC obviously reads that ad as an invitation to “get the monks.” The EEOC’s district office in Charlotte, N.C., is demanding that Belmont Abbey cease and desist violating Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. If you thought that act was about ending racial and sex discrimination, you would be right. If you thought that unelected bureaucrats could not use that law as a sledgehammer to threaten religious schools, you would be naïve.
What the EEOC is complaining of is Belmont Abbey’s practice of not providing abortion-inducing contraceptives to their employees in their health insurance plan.
But Belmont Abbey is a Catholic institution, one that prides itself on its adherence to Catholic teaching. The college maintains that it cannot be guilty of discriminating against female employees since it does not provide any form of contraceptives to its all-male body of monks, or to its lay male employees. How can this be sex discrimination?
Why should all Americans, whether they are Catholic or not, be concerned? Because the legal theory being advanced by the Obama administration would force all employers to provide abortifacient drugs as part of health insurance plans for employees. They are maintaining that not only the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but the 1978 amendment, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, mandate coverage of all “drugs, devices, and preventive care.” The Obamatons love that word “mandate.”
So, we see, laws intended to protect Americans’ basic civil rights are now being used as sledgehammers to destroy the most basic of our civil rights—the right of conscience. President Obama’s radical appointees to the EEOC include Stuart Ishimaru. Named on Inauguration Day, acting chairman Ishimaru pledged to attack “both traditional and emerging forms of workplace discrimination. [emphasis added]” Emerging forms could readily include employers who would prefer not to hire or promote employees who dress as members of the opposite sex. Would you rather not have a receptionist or customer service representative of your company who has tattooed his or her face with fierce Maori markings? You could be forced by the EEOC to make that hire.
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