Bake That, Linguist!

According to the “freedom of religion” clause, the government cannot impose a particular religion on its citizens, which is what Rick Santorum and his followers want. They want to make it legal for conservative Christians to force their religious dogma on their underlings. Santorum himself is Catholic, and subscribes to a very narrow religious dogma. He is “not a believer in birth control” and in October 2011 qualified this belief by saying that “The Catholic church has a theology that says [contraception] is wrong.” He believes that it is constitutional for a Catholic employer to impose his views on birth control onto others, even outside of religious organizations.

But as Mark Sumner of the Daily Kos says, employers should not be allowed to do this because they don’t own their employees, and therefore the employees are to afforded all of the same rights as the employer, including the right to practice her own religion and to have control over her own body. As Sumner says, “No matter how strong your personal faith, your employees are not obligated to live according to those beliefs, expressly because they are personal.”