Consider women's right to health care first

This is in response to Kathleen Parker's Feb. 9 column, "Practice what you preach, Mr. President." It still amazes me that any thinking Catholic (or any other religious) can come up with such convoluted "thinking", that the mandate for employers to provide basic health care for women is denying employers' religious rights. No one is asking the objectors to use birth control in any form. In case you haven't noticed, women are full human beings who have religious rights as well as rights to health care and health insurance.

The employers' religious rights end where the employees' begin. They have the religious and civil right to use birth control and have it covered by insurance. Religious liberty does not include the right of any individual or community to deny the religious right of anyone else. Why should the desire of The Little Sisters of the Poor to deny their women employees basic health care be more important than the woman's health care according to her religious beliefs?

Parker, evidently, accepts the brainwashing of an all-male club that women should be subjected to the kind of logic regarding women's bodies and women's ordination that is still based on 13th century philosophy such as: "Since any supremacy of rank cannot be experienced in the female sex, which has the status of an inferior, that sex cannot receive ordination" (Thomas Aquinas).

The president's (actually Congress') mandate is valid and nonreligious. The mandate also includes a clause allowing the cost of birth control to be shouldered by the insurance companies, thereby relieving the religious communities of any direct participation in birth control distribution. This kind of issue is one the great failures of the Catholic Church to participate in the divine-human grace. Time to move on.

Berna K. Gingras

Schaumburg