On Sunday, New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan, culture warrior extraordinaire, made a curious argument for why the Supreme Court should allow Hobby Lobby to eliminate the morning-after pill from its employee health care plan: if you want contraceptives, “all you have to do is walk into a 7-11 or any shop on any street in America and have access to them.”
The East Coast’s top Catholic made his comments Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation. “I think they’re just true Americans,” he told host Norah O’Donnell of Hobby Lobby’s owners, who claim that providing emergency contraceptive pills violates their religious beliefs. “Is the ability to buy contraceptives, that are now widely available—my Lord, all you have to do is walk into a 7-11 or any shop on any street in America and have access to them—is that right to access those and have them paid for, is that such a towering good that it would suffocate the rights of conscience?”
Couple of things:
- The owners of Hobby Lobby are proposing to eliminate one kind of contraception from the company’s employee health care plans: the morning-after pill. The Greens, who own the company, do not have a problem with all contraception. In fact, the company plan still covers birth control pills.
- Birth control pills are a form of contraception that isn’t available without a prescription. They are not sold on any shop on any street in America.
- If Dolan is talking about emergency contraception, we would note that only one type of morning-after pill for sale in the US without a prescription: Plan B One Step and its generics.
- These are also not sold on any shop on any street in America.
- These are not sold at 7-11.
It’s almost as if Dolan doesn’t know very much about the contraceptives he opposes. Either that, or he hasn’t been to a 7-11 since giving up Go-Go Taquitos for Lent.
