by Ken Blackwell
President Obama’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) seems
determined to go after a small Catholic college in North Carolina.
Readers of First Things, the thoughtful journal founded by Rev. Richard
Neuhaus, are familiar with the funny ads regularly run by Belmont
Abbey. “Got Monks?” reads the white-on-black ad that encourages serious
young Catholics to consider a college where the Benedictine monks seek
God and where the students seek truth.
But Obama’s EEOC obviously reads that ad as an invitation to “get the
monks.” The EEOC’s district office in Charlotte, N.C., is demanding
that Belmont Abbey cease and desist violating Title VII of the 1964
Civil Rights Act. If you thought that act was about ending racial and
sex discrimination, you would be right. If you thought that unelected
bureaucrats could not use that law as a sledgehammer to threaten
religious schools, you would be naïve.
What the EEOC is complaining of is Belmont Abbey’s practice of not
providing abortion-inducing contraceptives to their employees in their
health insurance plan.
But Belmont Abbey is a Catholic institution, one that prides
itself on its adherence to Catholic teaching. The college maintains
that it cannot be guilty of discriminating against female employees
since it does not provide any form of contraceptives to its all-male
body of monks, or to its lay male employees. How can this be sex
discrimination?
http://townhall.com/columnists/KenBlackwell/2009/10/29/got_monks__get_the_monks!#at