He added that freedom of religious expression must not be limited to religious organizations but must also extend to religious individuals running secular companies.
“Institutional rights rest on the foundation of individual rights,” he said.
John Garvey, president of The Catholic University of America, explained that while not all employees of the university are Catholic, they all freely agree during the hiring process “to respect and support” the university’s Catholic mission.
He said that the mandate would require the university to contradict itself, denying through its actions what it teaches in its classrooms.
Garvey pointed to the analysis of Harvard University economics professor Greg Mankiw, who found that the cost of the additional coverage will ultimately be incorporated into the policy and “passed on to the purchaser.”
He referenced a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, in which three senators supporting the mandate estimated that contraceptives cost a woman $600 dollars per year.
These costs will not simply disappear, Garvey explained, and even if they did, religious employers would still be forced to provide plans that covered the services they found immoral.
Garvey and Bishop Lori were joined at the hearing by ministers of various religious backgrounds and both men and women who serve as administrators at Catholic and Protestant colleges.
Belmont Abbey College – which has filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration over the mandate – was among the groups represented at the hearing, as was the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, which was involved in the recent Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC case where the Supreme Court rejected the Obama administration’s narrow definition of religion.
Orthodox Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University, also testified at the hearing, arguing that the Obama administration has exhibited a “complete misunderstanding of the nature of religion.”
He explained that by carving out an initial religious exemption, “however narrow, the administration implicitly acknowledges that forcing employers to purchase these insurance policies may involve a violation of religious freedom.”
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However, the strict stipulations attached to the exemption assume that religious organizations serving those of other faiths “are no longer acting in a religious capacity,” he said.
In this way, the Obama administration is posing a grave threat by “unilaterally redefining what it means to be religious,” he explained.
Michelle La Rosa is deputy editor-in-chief of Catholic News Agency. She has worked for CNA since 2011. She studied political philosophy and journalism at the University of Dallas.