Right Wing Congress Puts Religion Over People
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roy-speckhardt/right-wing-congress-valui_b_7154292.htmlRoy Speckhardt
Executive Director, American Humanist Association
Posted: 04/28/2015 4:56 pm EDT Updated: 04/28/2015 4:59 pm EDT
Last week the Senate passed legislation meant to fight against human trafficking, an epidemic that affects millions of people worldwide and crosses boundaries of gender, race, and religious belief. This bill is especially relevant considering the recent tragedy in Europe where nine hundred migrants died attempting to travel from Libya to Italy in inhumanely overcrowded boats run by human traffickers. While heartrending, that number is just a tiny percentage of the 20.9 million people "subjected to forced labor as the result of human trafficking," according to International Labor Organization in the Global Economy Journal.
Unfortunately, the bill as passed won't provide all of the necessary services that survivors of human trafficking require to move past the traumatic period in their lives and attempt to begin anew. The religious right and their allies in the Senate managed to strip the victim's fund, as authorized within the bill's language, from financing abortions--even if the person was a raped.
This shameful failure to act morally in the interest of the harmed may placate religious conservatives, but its practical implication will be extreme suffering on the part of those the bill was intended to help. Survivors of human trafficking are usually destitute and disconnected from government services and, as a result, are unable to pay for the medical procedures they need in order to live a healthy life. By removing funding for abortion, Congress relegates them to either keeping unwanted pregnancies or jeopardizing their lives by attempting a dangerous abortion without proper care.
Humanists, as well as most religious people for that matter, place an appropriate emphasis on doing what we can to help others. But somewhere along the way, a small group of religious extremists in Congress decided that upholding dubious and outdated religious teaching was more important than assisting those who need our help most.
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this is nothing new. When Congress and the Court can decide that funding for health care doesn't need to be provided by religious employers at the same level as non-religious employers we've sort of missed the point of what a business is versus what a person is and how that difference shouldn't be confused or mixed into law.
It would seem a more appropriate course of action is either the business is the same or it's separate. If it's the same for religious reasons it should be the same for asset liability reasons.
If your business is separate in terms of fiduciary responsibility to employees and the public from your personal assets how can you claim it's not separate with respect to your religious rights. The entire reason you created this entity is to define the legal separation, yet the current buffoons on the SCOTUS blew that call and now Congress is taking up the banner to keep those who are destitute and in dire straits desperately poor and without options.
