Fed judge sees sense with religious institution lawsuits about contraception

A lot of religious-oriented colleges have been taking their own stance against the federal government, filing lawsuits claiming that their religious beliefs are being violated if they have to offer health insurance policies to their employees that cover the cost of contraception.

Among the most prominent of these schools is the University of Notre Dame, which filed such a lawsuit back in May just a couple of years after it attracted controversy from the ideologues when it got President Barack Obama to be its commencement speaker.

BUT IT WAS a bit of a pleasure to learn that these lawsuits are starting to be dealt with – and in a way that recognizes them as the politically partisan attacks that they truly are.

The Chicago Tribune reported that a judge in U.S. District Court in Washington dismissed the lawsuit filed by Wheaton College – the evangelical Christian college in the DuPage County suburbs that likes to boast of its ties to Billy Graham (Class of 1943).

Officials cite their religious beliefs for opposing contraception, and they claim the federal policies meant to bolster access to health care will force them to provide things they would rather pretend don’t exist.

That is an argument that always struck me as being a bit nonsensical. Nobody forces any of those employees to use any particular benefit in their health care package.

IF THEY REALLY have employees who have moral objections, they probably won’t be using them to begin with.

Which means this issue always struck me as being a case of these religious institutions trying to force their views on others, almost as bad as those ideologically-tainted textbooks that get published to appease the views of school board types in Texas.

Perhaps the federal government ought to be suing these religious organizations for trying to deny health care benefits to other people? Nah, I’m not that hard-core. I’d like to think that the federal government has better things to do than go around suing church-related groups.

Just as I’d also like to think that those groups have better things to do than to go around suing the United States of America! Only it seems that some either don’t have better things to do, or the streak of bullying in their personality is just a bit too strong.

WHICH IS WHY I was pleased to learn of the opinion issued by federal Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle, who tossed out the Wheaton College lawsuit because the federal government itself had said it was not going to start enforcing its new insurance regulations until August of next year.

Federal officials have even said they’re willing to consider some sort of exemptions to accommodate religious organizations. Which strikes me as a federal government willing to make some sort of compromise on this issue.

Which means the lawsuit itself was the position of NO compromise – which all too often IS the problem that confronts our society.

“Tilting at windmills” is how Judge Huvelle described the lawsuit. A comparison to Don Quixote is never a positive – unless one is in a literature class and the name of Cervantes is taken into account.

HERE’S HOPING THAT this ruling is a harbinger of things to come (time to bring out the clichés) for how these other lawsuits will be handled.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops may have put a coordinated effort into getting all these institutions to file their lawsuits. There may be a lot of religious muscle involved.

But I can’t help but think that while God himself may be infallible, man (even the men who claim to represent the thought of God) is not.

And this may well be one issue where these church leaders (and the heads of universities that offer a religious-inspired education) are missing the greater point.

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It’s all a matter of perception

Will the day come when some tunnel dug under the walls being erected along the U.S./Mexico border to let people slip through undetected will come to be seen as some sort of historic treasure worthy of commemoration?

It may sound extreme. I’m sure the very thought will offend some people on this planet.

BUT AFTER READING an account of a suburban Chicago college that has found evidence that one of their buildings was once a part of the “Underground Railroad” path that was used by slaves trying to flee to a place where they would be regarded as human beings, I can’t help but wonder.

For the record, we’re talking about Wheaton College, which is the kind of school that imposes a strict moral code on its students (no tobacco, and dancing is frowned upon) and takes pride in the fact that the Rev. Billy Graham was once a student. It’s not a knee-jerk liberal place.

The local rumor mill always included stories that slaves once used the buildings of what was then known as the Illinois Institute to hide away until they could slip through Chicago in the darkness.

Now, officials have found entries in books kept by military regiments that made reference to specific buildings on campus being used for the Underground Railroad, and also called the school, “an abolition school in an abolition town.”

SOME PEOPLE DON’T want to believe this has any significance, claiming that if it were really true there would be much more documentation. Supporters of the concept point out that the whole “Underground Railroad” was an illegal concept – one that people would not have wanted to provide documentation of.

Nothing would have stopped a prosecutor from that era from using such documentation to prosecute the people who were supposedly helping another man’s “property” flee. It would have been regarded as some form of “theft,” and for all I know the incarcerated abolitionists likely would have been set upon by their fellow inmates for extra abuse.

And I’m sure the mentality of conventional society of the era would have looked at such thought as proper.

Now I’m not claiming that the predicament of the slaves brought to this country from the African continent (or breeded from the slaves who were purchased) is comparable to the waves of people who found the whole legal procedure of trying to get a legitimate visa to come to the United States so ridiculous and absurd that they chose to ignore it and just come.

FOR ONE THING, we’re talking about one group of people brought to this country by force, compared to another group that wants to be here.

But what is comparable is the attitude of the people who have the biggest hang-ups about the issue.

They want to repeatedly use the word “illegal” to describe the newcomers to this country because they have their own ethnic hang-ups and don’t want to have to acknowledge that these are human beings.

Dehumanizing the newcomers makes it easier for the nativist elements to look themselves in the mirror when they engage in their trash talk, which on a moral standard is of the same absurdity as those people of past centuries who would have thought that the law-and-order approach would be to side with those human beings who seriously thought that ownership of another human being could be predetermined by race, or that some people were entitled to nothing more than being owned like a piece of livestock just because of that same race.

IT WAS THOSE people who could see beyond what was supposedly “the law” to do what they thought was the morally correct thing who were the equivalent of those abolitionists of old.

It was they who offered their covert help to get enslaved human beings to a place where they could be regarded as more human than slave.

And I’m sure it is their 21st Century counterparts who will be among those who try to offer that helping hand to someone that “the law” would prefer to brand an “illegal alien.”

If it means that I think the slave-catchers of old who tried their best to snatch slaves using the routes of the “Underground Railroad” to flee the Southern states and places that were not sympathetic are comparable to the would-be vigilantes (and I include the “Minutemen” in that category, taking offense that they would use such a label loaded with historic references to describe themselves) who spend their time along the U.S./Mexico border trying to detect movement in the desert, you’d be right.

YES, I’M SURE if you went back into history, you’d find the equivalent for fleeing slaves of the “coyotes” who prey on people wanting to get into the United States, only to rob them of whatever money they have and leave them for dead.

But that, in my mind, makes them all the more sympathetic characters – the potential victims of this whole issue (and yes, I realize that line will tick off the nativists).

I also realize that it is the passage of time that now makes it possible for us to realize how wrong U.S. society was some 200 years ago. It will be that same passage of time that makes us realize the humanity of the people trying desperately to get into this country for a better life.

So I wonder, will those tunnels someday be accorded historic respect? Or are we more likely to memorialize those road signs alongside Interstate 5 near San Diego – the ones showing a silhouette of an entire family trying to run across the road from Mexico to the United States while dodging the cars speeding by.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: Will we learn a century from now that a series of routes as extensive (http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=324236) as the “Underground Railroad” exists to help people coming up through the southwestern deserts into the United States?

Will this (http://chnm.gmu.edu/cyh/primary-sources/289) become a historic artifact?

Division III gives Chicago basketball fans their only Illinois-based rooting interest in '08

For those of us from Chicago who root for an Illinois-based team come NCAA college basketball tournament time, this year has to be downright depressing. Not one of the universities that play men’s basketball at the Division I level managed to qualify.

While Illinois State and Southern Illinois universities both managed to qualify for the NIT, the second-rate nature of that tourney will keep all but the most hard-core alums from caring whether the Redbirds and Salukis manage to win.

I WOULD ARGUE that for Illinois residents, the superior fan experience this year belongs to a school at the Division III level – and chances are good you missed the story.

For while the NCAA Division I tournament is just getting under way beginning Thursday, the Division III tournament has been underway for weeks already, and one Illinois-based school’s team managed to make it to the Elite Eight.

So in the interest of fairness, we all ought to take a look at what was accomplished by the Wheaton Thunder, the DuPage County-based college that likes to brag it is the alma mater of evangelist Billy Graham and former House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not a Thunder fan (although I’ve seen enough Wheaton College games going far enough back to when the school’s teams were called the Crusaders). I am an alumnus of Illinois Wesleyan University, which plays in the very same College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin as Wheaton

SO WHEN THE Division III tourney began March 7-8, there were two Illinois-based schools playing for a national title – Wheaton and Augustana University, which was the conference champion.

Augustana got knocked off early in the tourney, but Wheaton managed to survive until Saturday, when they lost to Hope College, playing in Hope’s home arena in Holland, Mich.

Why is it that I can say I was taking some interest in Wheaton? It is because I know in my heart that the IWU Titans this season were a superior team. Just how Wheaton got an at-large bid to go to the tournament while Wesleyan got to stay at home is something that can still get me outraged.

After all, the Titans beat the Thunder twice during the conference season, and then again in the first round of the CCIW conference tournament.

KNOWING THAT THE “Fighting Titans” are capable of holding their own against a team that managed to survive so long in the Division III tournament this year makes me all the more optimistic that next season, IWU will manage to qualify and perhaps even have a chance to win the whole thing.

Yes, I’m greedy. Four “final four” appearances in the past 11 years (and one Division III title back in 1997) is not enough. Call it the mentality of a Yankees fan, if you will, but I’d like to see my alma mater make another trip to Salem, Va., (the regular site for the Division III tournament, unlike the revolving locations for the Division I tourney).

Watching Wheaton not only gave me an “Illinois” school to root for, it gave me optimism that I’m not delusional in thinking that “my school” can win something again in the near future.

Now some people might ask me why I’m snubbing women’s athletics. They might wonder why I don’t pay attention to any Illinois schools that had women’s teams continue to play.

ACTUALLY, I WAS prepared to. IWU’s women’s team won their conference championship and made it to the women’s Division III tournament, but then got knocked out in the first round.

It makes me wonder about the ideal dream – Fighting Titan men’s and women’s teams managing to win national titles in the same year.

Perhaps my alma mater could become the Illinois-based, Division III equivalent of the University of Connecticut, which pulled off this very trick in 2004, when both of their basketball teams won their respective Division I tourneys.

Some people might wonder if it is ridiculous to see these college sports tournaments so personally. After all, Illinois Wesleyan is a place that hasn’t been a part of my daily life in nearly 21 years and it has been eight years since I last set foot on campus.

YET TO ME, it is a place that helped inspire me to accomplish much of what I have done in life. And having a personal rooting interest is what makes a college sports tournament interesting to begin with.

I can’t see the point of paying any attention to a 64-team tourney where there is nothing that connects me to any of the schools. For those people who just want to view college basketball as the National Basketball Association’s version of minor league baseball, that really defeats the purpose of college sports by trying to change them into a second-rate version of the NBA.

The energy and enthusiasm of player and fan alike at the smaller level schools is what makes their game so appealing, even if you do wind up seeing the talents of players who obviously devoted a significant portion of their life to practicing their skills dribbling and shooting a basketball – but can’t play at the highest levels because life’s cruel irony cut off their growth spurt at 5-foot, 6-inches or so. (Seriously, the major difference between Division I elite programs and Division III is that 7-footers are scarce at the lower level).

At the Division III level, you get the ideal of student/athlete that the Ivy League schools would like to think they still represent.

THERE’S ONE OTHER reason I prefer the Division III tourney – it has not become a television-dominated spectacle. It has already been underway for two weeks, and will come to an end Saturday, with either Amherst, Hope, Ursinius or Washington universities taking home a national title.

By comparison, the Division I tourney is just getting underway (even though the March in “March Madness” is two-thirds of the way over), and will wind up stretching out so long that it will run into baseball season – stealing attention away from the truly significant experience of professional sports – baseball’s Opening Day, when even Chicago Cubs fans can dream about their team winning a pennant.

Personally, I wouldn’t mind seeing St. Louis-based Washington win the Division III tourney, just because I know IWU plays them regularly and is capable of handling themselves against their team. It would be yet more evidence that I may see another national title for my school’s team during my lifetime.

And if you’re really going to insist that I pick somebody from the Division I tournament to root for, then I’m going to have to go with American University.

THE EAGLES MANAGED to win the Patriot League title this year, and I did attend the D.C.-based school for a semester back in the autumn of ’86 (my semester of study in Washington coincided with the breaking of the Iran-Contra scandal). But I won’t be the least bit surprised when Tennessee wallops American in the first round.

Even if AU wins a game or two before going home, it wouldn’t mean as much to me as a Titan title in the future.

So congratulations to the Wheaton Thunder for advancing further in post-season play this year than any other Illinois college team. After all, you’ve given this Titans fan some reason to be optimistic for next year.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: The St. Louis Post-Dispatch recently commented on the lower-key (http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/sports/columnists.nsf/bryanburwell/story/459287C0FE27A78E8625740E00161A6B?OpenDocument) atmosphere surrounding the Division III tourney.

For those people who want to know more about the Illinois-based college that did the best this year (http://athletics.wheaton.edu/index.asp?path=mbball) in post-season play.

American University of Washington, D.C., is making its first-ever appearance (http://aueagles.cstv.com/sports/m-baskbl/amer-m-baskbl-body.html) in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament.

Results from Salem, Va., can be found here (http://www.d3hoops.com/) this weekend.