[RobbyS]

The Church has been providing social services since the very beginning and until the 19th Century virtually all the schools and hospitals were provided by the Church. Now you would have them provide these services only on terms set by you, which is without consideration of the moral law. Medicine must give what the public demands and if the public demands abortion and mercy-killing you will give it to them, right? Just so long as they can pay for these things.


Forget the marketplace crap. You speak of "competition," much of this competition is for money available through taxes. Doctors opposed medicare/medicaid because they opposed socialized medicine. But the medical industry has grown fat on these programs and could not live without them.

[hunter112]

There are a lot of established businesses that become subject to changes in law. Why should the business arms of the churches not be subject to the same laws? It's not me setting the terms, it's courts and legislatures, our system for enacting laws designed to bring about social justice. Now, the Catholic Church has already set the precedent by calling for laws designed to effect social justice, why shouldn't the Church be bound by them?

Conscience clauses for individual medical practitioners have long protected those who do not want to do abortions. And, there's a difference between performing a murder within the four walls of your institution, and merely following the law and giving spousal benefits to a person outside of your institution.

Maybe there should be law that protects business institutions of religious organizations, and then people who would otherwise be working for an institution that despises them would get the message. Do it through legislation that enacts civil unions, or you'll have judges imposing it on us the way they see fit. Massachusetts could have seen the handwriting on the wall when this happened in Vermont, if they had simple crafted a civil unions statute, that provided that religious organizations did not have to give spousal benefits, there might not have been anything for the Massachusetts SJC to decide on. Now, MA is faced with judge-created law, and its consequences.

I agree that some doctors have gotten fat on Medicare/Medicaid. But most I've heard from find that the Medicare/Medicaid patients take up far more paperwork than they are worth, and other paying patients make up the slack for them. What this has to do with the article at the top of this post eludes me, however.