Martha Burk: Employees have 'religious' freedom, too

Via OtherWords.org

When Obamacare — aka, the Affordable Care Act — became law in 2010, it mandated coverage of birth control without co-payments.

Some employers didn’t like the rule, and Hobby Lobby hated it so much that the company filed a lawsuit to stop it. Company owners said they didn’t believe in contraception and claimed that covering it for female employees violated their religious freedom.

Understand, the Obama administration went to great lengths to exempt churches and church-related institutions from the rule, while still guaranteeing their female employees the right to birth control if they wanted it.

Then the Supreme Court stepped in, siding with Hobby Lobby and ruling that “closely held” corporations with religious objections could join religious employers in excluding birth control from their insurance plans.

Now the Trump administration has gone a giant step further. They’re now allowing any and all businesses, including publicly traded ones, to also cite “religious or moral objections” in denying their employees contraception coverage.

Wait a minute.

Corporations not only have religious freedom but now moral principles, too? I didn’t even know they went to church, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen one get down on its knees and pray.

On the other hand, I know women — who are actual people — have religious freedom under the Constitution, too. What about their right not to be forced to bow to their employers’ religious beliefs or highly suspect “moral” principles?

Massachusetts, California, and the ACLU have filed lawsuits to stop the rollback. Good luck. Besides Hobby Lobby, the conservative majority in the Supreme Court ruled years ago in the Citizens United case that corporations have constitutional rights, and they’ve consistently ruled in favor of their corporate buddies over women in employment discrimination cases.

On top of that, six of the nine justices are male, and most of them of rather conservative religious persuasions. The odds look to be stacked against women.

Expanding so-called corporate citizen rights deeper into health care could ultimately affect everybody, not just women.

Christian Scientists are opposed to all kinds of medical treatment, including for diabetes, cancer, and meningitis. Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t believe in blood transfusions. There are undoubtedly other religious taboos on medical procedures.

Enterprising businesses that want to save money could cite “religious freedom” to exclude virtually any medical treatment from their insurance plans. Surgery, antibiotics, immunizations — you name it.

Where will it end? We don’t know. Even if the lawsuits are ultimately successful, a decision could take years.

All I know is that I don’t want my neighborhood corporate citizen making my health care decisions.

Martha Burk is the director of the Corporate Accountability Project for the National Council of Women’s Organizations (NCWO) and the author of the book Your Voice, Your Vote. 

Lose the lawns

Drought-stricken California is starting to make developers reduce the area devoted to lawns, which are huge water-guzzlers. You'd think from looking at Southern California's heavily lawned landscape that it is as wet as New England rather than a desert made green by water from hundreds of miles away in the High Sierra. Lawns, even in usually damp New England, are huge wasters of water, and a major contributor of pollution from the fertilizers and pesticides  that folks dump on them, often to excess.

Ground cover or just trees are a much better use of the land, though I  still appreciate the beauty of a very green lawn. I have fond memories of lying on them on  hot, pre-air-conditioned nights watching the fireflies. But we give lawns far too much space.

I wish that my parents had planted over their lawns on the Massachusetts coast with something that didn't require my spending many hours a month cutting them -- my earliest  steady "summer job.''

Back then,  in the  '50s and early '60s,  we never worried about using too much water or about pouring on the (pre-Silent Spring) pesticides and fertilizer.

-- Robert Whitcomb

Robert Whitcomb: Still Golden State; Medicaid reform

  While driving around Los Angeles’s vastness last week, I kept getting a déjà vu feeling, and not just because I’d been in L.A. before.

My trip reminded me of motoring in the ‘60s, even in the Northeast, with the new and still mostly uncrowded Interstates, cheap gasoline and capacious sense of freedom so that you’d think nothing of jumping into your car, be it a beat-up Chevy or a death-trap VW bug (with the gas tank over your lap), and happily drive for hours to vague destinations.

There’s lots of color in my memories, but also black and white, as in those old Perry Mason and Dragnet shows set in  ‘50’s  L.A. They and the many films noirs shot in California (e.g., The Big Sleep) recall Somerset Maugham’s calling the French Riviera a “sunny place for shady people.’’

Southern California is preposterous:  mountains covered with highly flammable brush and an earthquake-vulnerable desert made to bloom with water diverted/stolen from the Sierra.

And yet, as I GPS’ed from Pasadena and the hip neighborhoods of Silver Lake and Mount Washington across Beverly Hills and out to the farthest points in Malibu, I saw few signs that people were worried.

Lots of water is still being wasted to evaporation via sprinklers and always-uncovered swimming pools – which seem to play more of an aesthetic than an exercise or cooling-off role. A few cars have stickers with which owners laud themselves for saving water by not washing their vehicles, but most seemed recently washed. You view only a few more cactus gardens and a tad fewer fantastically green lawns than two decades ago.

The state is starting to crack down on water waste with big fines, but it can only be the beginning, assuming that the statewide drought continues.

And yet, young people, many fleeing New York’s frigid winters, sweltering summers  and astronomical rents are pouring into Los Angeles these days, drawn by the  Mediterranean climate, cheaper  and more spacious housing and a very contemporary  species of decentralized creativity. (Few have read Nathanael West’s dystopian L.A. novel, Day of the Locusts.)

They love Californians’ ingenuity, most famously in recent decades in Silicon Valley but all over the state, as well as its style, much more relaxed than the Northeast’s.

The innovative spirit seems to overcome pessimism and anxiety about drought, general environmental destruction, earthquakes and illegal aliens crossing the border from Mexico.

So California remains the Golden State, the quintessence of the American Dream.

Whether even worse drought, a big quake or a surge in gasoline prices would end car-dependent Los Angeles’s latest boom is unknowable. In any event, mass transit is being expanded. Yes, you can take light rail in the City of Angeles.

This reinvention ethos also characterizes New England, with its ‘er, vigorous climate and rocky soil. Especially in Greater Boston, the capacity to churn out inventions keeps saving our region’s economy, albeit with the occasional recession.

Of course, Southern California has a sunny climate. But we have lots of fresh water, which in the long run is even better. Still, I now think that the Golden State has enough Hollywood and Silicon Valley risk-taking inventiveness to assure its long-term prosperity.  Giant solar-powered desalinization plants on the Paramount lot?

xxx

Kudos to Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo for tackling waste in the state Medicaid program. Oregon provides a model of how to do this. Medicare is a much bigger national cost problem for America but harder to control: The old have better lobbyists than the poor.

xxx

Rachel Held Evans’s  Washington Post piece, “Want Millennials back in the pews? Stop trying to make church ‘cool’’’ was spot-on.  Trying to maintain religion through trendy marketing is doomed.  We seek ritual that resists the gyrations of modern commercial culture.  We want the permanent and the transcendent to help maintain our sanity.

Even if we don’t believe the theology, we’ll take, say, The Book of Common Prayer over a Facebook “spirituality’’. The faster that technology and the consumer economy go, the more we need the quietly “traditional.’’

Robert Whitcomb (rwhitcomb51@gmail.com), overseer of newenglanddiary.com, is a Providence-based editor and writer, a partner in a health-care-sector consultancy, Cambridge Management Group (cmg625.com) and a Fellow of the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy.

Our weather narcissism

  By ROBERT WHITCOMB

Inevitably, some politicians and entertainers (e.g., Rush Limbaugh) are having great fun with the cold and snowy winter in the East and Midwest, saying that this shows that “global warming” is a fraud.

But they are extrapolating from immediate experience and anecdote, not science. I suspect that most of these people know better, but, hey, they’re in show biz.

Actually, January, for instance, which the news media lamented for its cold, snow and ice, has been rather severe in the eastern U.S. because of a huge dip in the jet stream that has brought cold (though not unprecedented cold) to the Upper Midwest and the Northeast while out West, including Alaska, it’s generally been very warm and dry for this time of year. Northeasterners and Midwesterners have endured temperatures 10, 15 or more degrees below normal; Alaska and California have been 10-15 degrees above. And the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that January was, on a global basis, the fourth-warmest on record.

That the Northeast is so densely populated and that much of the national news media are based in New York and Washington mean that the idea that this winter is particularly bad has particularly strong currency. It recalls E.B. White’s funny 1954 essay “In the Eye of Edna,” in which he noted that the nation lost interest in Hurricane Edna after it moved beyond Boston’s radio and TV stations to wallop White’s comparatively remote Mid-Coast region of Maine.

Then there are such relatively new weather-news outlets as the Weather Channel and Accuweather. These commercial outlets will die if they fail to constantly dramatize such old weather phenomena as “The Polar Vortex” — a low-pressure area in upper latitudes that now is presented almost as a new and lethal threat to civilization. Weather events that would have seemed par for the course of a season a half century ago are now characterized as world-historical events.

Changes in the route of the jet stream from time to time bring cold air deep into the eastern part of the United States while the other side of the country becomes much warmer than usual as the jet stream brings in mild, Pacific air from the southwest. The jet stream’s position, of course, can vary widely but it can sometimes get stuck, meaning warm, “open” winters for us some years and cold ones in others. The general trend, though, is for milder winters. The trouble is that we confuse events in our areas that are part of weather’s natural variability with global climate change.

The confusion of one’s particular circumstances with the wider reality reminds me of the heartening rise in recent years of “evidence-based medicine” as opposed to the more traditional “expert-based medicine.” I am simplifying, but evidence-based medicine relies much less on individual physicians’ experience, values and judgment and much more on cold, hard data derived from rigorous collection and analysis of information from broad populations. As with medicine, so with climate, follow the data.

Anyway, New Englanders have suffered through another week of below-normal weather and are heartily sick of it. That the population is aging and that old people, in particular, find winters wearisome may reinforce the winter fatigue of younger people, too.

In some winters, snow drops and crocuses would be popping out of south-facing slopes about now. It looks as if we’ll have to wait a while for them this year. Still, a gradual change in the mix of morning bird song and that there’s bare ground around the base of trees where there was snow a week or two ago reminds us that the sun is getting stronger by the day: Some birds are coming north again and there’s more solar energy for the trees to absorb. And on one of our recent, and for this winter, rare mild days, I found the worms wiggling enthusiastically in our compost bin, whose contents seem to have been frozen solid a couple of days before. Worms: A reminder of the cycles of death and life.

***

The Feb. 23 New York Times business section story “Loss Leader on the Half Shell: A national binge on oysters is transforming an industry (and restaurants’ economics)” was heartening for a coastal New Englander. It implied that our estuary-rich region could benefit a lot from much expanded shellfish aquaculture. Unlike, say, casinos, which are a net subtraction from a region’s economy, or local businesses that recycle money that’s already here, aquaculture, because it has exportable physical products and brings people here from far away to buy them in our eateries as local specialties, increases our region’s wealth.

And the business, with its demands for clean water, prods us to keep our coastal environment cleaner.

Robert Whitcomb (rwhitcomb51@gmail.com), a former  Providence Journal editorial-page editor,   is a Providence-based writer and editor and the overseer of www.newenglanddiary.com.  He  is also a director of Cambridge Management Group (cmg625.com).

January thaw

Jan. 25, 2014 A windy, mild and sweetly melancholic day with scudding clouds from the southwest. Snow and ice are melting without man-made stimulants. Once again I'm rather surprised and pleased by how the light is brighter in late January than even just a couple of weeks before, and by the power of  even the winter sun to quickly heat us in sheltered places.  Our unheated but glassed-in sleeping porch, which faces the south, gets up to 75 even when it's 15 outside. We use the space to heat the adjoining bedroom by day.

We New Englanders could do a lot more with passive solar heating.  It's not as if we're that far north; we're at the latitude of Portugal.

One nice thing about aging is that while the cold itself is harder to take, especially the windy chill of Northeast coastal cities, you're ever more aware of how fast time goes -- it will be spring very soon. And while it has seemed recently that we're living on Hudson's Bay, actually we're much closer to the Gulf Stream.

In New England, more than in most places, we have the weather to help mark off sections of our lives, as an aide-memoire, and that's handy. Now we have the predictable "January thaw,'' which, though this one will be very brief, reminds us that our weather won't  really be paralyzed by the likes of "polar vortexes'' or other such Weather Channel monsters. By the way, California is having record heat and drought. And Alaska has been pretty warm for, well, Alaska.

Scientists differ on why the rise in temperatures associated with the "January thaw' ' tends to happen in late January rather than in early February, which would seem to make more sense.  In any case, I'm more vulnerable to the sadness from lack of light than from the cold. And the light is moving in the right direction.

comment via rwhitcomb51@gmail.com