For years I have publicly stated that the government is eventually going to try silence the message of the Christian church. Generally I thought such a move would involve sexuality and marriage. The scenario would look like this: the church refuses to marry a same-sex couple and will then be billed a “hater church.” Next, legislation is passed to revoke the church’s tax-exempt status.
Now it’s happening on another front–abortion.
California’s Department of Managed Health Care has ordered all insurance plans in the state to immediately begin covering elective abortion. Not the Plan-B pill. Not contraceptives. We’re talking about “elective surgical dismemberment abortion.”
At the insistence of the American Civil Liberties Union, the DMHC concluded that a 40-year-old state law requiring health plans to cover “basic health services” had been misinterpreted all these decades. Every plan in the state was immediately ordered, effective August 22, to cover elective abortion. California had not even applied this test to its own state employee health plans (which covered only “medically necessary” abortions). But this novel reading was nevertheless quietly imposed on every plan in the state by fiat.
The news of this stealthy move is just leaking out.
While California (like the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS) exempts churches from its contraceptive mandate, there is no exception to this bureaucratic abortion mandate. This leaves California churches in the illogical and impossible position of being free to exclude contraceptives from their health plan for reasons of religious conscience but required to provide their employees with abortion coverage.
If your pastor is unaware of this, tell him. If he ignores this warning, I advise changing churches.