Obama [sticking by his guns]: ‘Not fair’ to deny contraception coverage at Catholic institutions
wwltv.com
Posted on July 9, 2012
Karen Swensen / Eyewitness News
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama was … talking to our Karen Swensen …
Channel 4 was one of eight stations invited to the White House to talk about issues that matter to our viewers. It was a five-minute opportunity to bring him your questions.
Many shared common themes, like this one from Michael Varino:
Swensen: “He describes himself as a Catholic voter and wrote ‘What can you say about a healthcare bill that’ll mandate insurance companies to provide birth control, sterilization, etc. to employees of Catholic universities, hospitals and churches since this goes against the Catholic religion?’ We know there is compromising language in place. Some say it doesn’t go far enough and that the real, the much bigger issue is religious liberty, not contraception.”
Obama: “Yeah. Well it’s absolutely true that religious liberty is critical. I mean that’s what our country was founded on. That’s the reason why we exempted churches, we exempted religious institutions, but we did say that big Catholic hospitals or universities who employ a lot of non-Catholics and who receive a lot of federal money, that for them to be in a position to say to a woman who works there you can’t get that from your insurance company even though the institution isn’t paying for it, that that crosses the line where that woman, she suddenly is gonna have to bear the burden and the cost of that. And that’s not fair.”
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