Let’s not dive back into the whole Hobby Lobby
contretemps, but consider for a moment that some folks over at
Talking Points Memo (TPM) are horrified to discover that
religious beliefs are “irrational.” Really? Readers are treated to
this deep insight from the article, “Science
Was Irrelevant in Hobby Lobby and That’s Congress’s Fault“:
“I think RFRA [Religious Freedom Restoration Act] was a very
unfortunate law because it enshrined a legal shield for [religious]
people even if they had irrational beliefs,” said Sara Rosenbaum, a
professor of health policy at George Washington University who
co-authored
an amicus brief in favor of the birth control mandate. “So if
the court feels it’s dealing with someone who’s sincere, I don’t
think anybody’s going to subject that person’s belief to a
scientific test.”…“The whole purpose of RFRA is to honor people’s religious
beliefs and so science steps out of the doorstep in RFRA,”
Rosenbaum said. “The wonderful thing about being religious is you
can believe all sorts of irrational things.”
Who would have thought it? And Professor Rosenbaum teaches at a
university run by a church that thinks that using regular
contraception (pills and condoms) is
sinful.
The TPM article cites a chart from The New Republic
showing that emergency contraceptive pills are not abortifacients
as the owners of Hobby Lobby believe. As it happens, the New
England Journal of Medicine in a 2012 editorial
excoriating the Obama Administration for not allowing emergency
contraceptive pills to be sold over the counter in pharmacies
noted:
The best available evidence indicates that it prevents pregnancy
largely by delaying or preventing ovulation, but prevention of
implantation cannot be ruled out. Levonorgestrel does not cause
abortion; it does not terminate an established pregnancy (an
implanted conceptus) and should not be confused with the
abortifacient mifepristone (RU-486).
As it happens, for some religiously irrational folks prevention
of the implantation of a fertilized egg would count as an
abortion.
Possibly the greatest achievement of the Enlightenment was the
principle of tolerance: I may or may not have access to
transcendent truth, but I am damned sure that you don’t. So let’s
leave each other alone in our irrational beliefs about the
transcendent.
Since between 60 and 80 percent of embryos are never born due to
natural causes, let’s reprise my column, “Is
Heaven Chiefly Populated with the Souls of Embryos?“
Disclosure: For what it’s worth I have been an out-atheist
since my teens.
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