Where they got the impression that I was categorically against taxpayer funded abortions , I don't know. It is a feature of the Abortion Wars that the fiercest partisans channel the thoughts of others, without benefit of much dialogue. But the comment came back to me when I read this in the news:
Some Catholic Bishops Assail Health Plan
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has been lobbying for three decades for the federal government to provide universal health insurance, especially for the poor. Now, as President Obama tries to rally Roman Catholics and other religious voters around his proposals to do just that, a growing number of bishops are speaking out against it.
The Catholic Church bishops have been in the forefront of the Abortion Wars for a long time. At some point, they allied themselves with the Republican Party on the basis of this issue. Meanwhile, they continued to point out the injustices visited upon America's poor and especially her children. But in the hierarchy of their political calculus, being against Abortion's trumphed everything else.
I had a friend who had voted Democratic for most of his adult life, as far as I knew, until the 1984 Presidental election. His wife approached me at a social function and announced , apologetically, that they could no longer vote Democratic. The reason was abortions. Taking his faith seriously, he felt he had no choice, and that is the tragedy.
For in the end, what did that calculation, made by millions of Catholics and like minded citizens cost us? Twennty plus years of Republican ascendancy later, what is the balance sheet ?
Let me share my answer to the poster on Facebook:
As to your questions, it is high time we stop holding the well being of 43 million uninsured Americans , of which 6.8 million are children, hostage to the insolvable problem of whether or not a woman, her doctor and any other trusted advisor - spiritual or otherwise- can decide under what conditions she may or maybe not seek an abortion.
Such "moral absolutism" has given us both one of the highest abortion rates in the industrialized world AND the one of the highest infant mortality rates at the same time.
Which is more moral , killing a bill that would do nothing to change abortion laws( already in place ) or passing one that would help meet our moral obligations to poor children and OF MOTHERS TO BE in the form of prenatal care? How do you parse these competing moral claims?
I would submit good people can honestly disagree .
But the embrace of the Republican Party had other poisonous consequences as well within the Church. The same article contained this comment:
Some Catholic Bishops Assail Health Plan
"The Catholic Church does not teach that government should directly provide health care," Bishop Nickless of Sioux City wrote, adding, "Any legislation that undermines the vitality of the private sector is suspect."
I ran into a group of Catholic Free Marketers during the Reagan years from a group called the Acton Institute. Their vision of a just society was straight out of Adam Smith on steroids. I also learned that they had been invited to teach about economic issues to seminarians in my neck of the woods. I literally wanted to throw up. I see in the good bishop's comments that their message was recieved loud and clear, and uncritically.
The institutional church , as opposed to the believers in the pews, must always dress up their positions in some fancy philsophical rhetoric.The Acton institute , part of the widespread conservative think tank armada that sprang up after 1964 knew this well. They discovered , among papal writings, the rule of Subsidiary.
link Decisions are made as close as possible to the area of activity to ensure that the local environment and circumstances (cultural, social, political, etc.) are taken into consideration
How do you get to Bishop Nickless' deification of private property from this starting point? Easy, private initiative is closer to the people involved in any exchange then government action, thus private enterprise is sacred and presumptively superior to public action on health care.
On the basis of such bloodless pretzel logic we are to decide the fate of the uninsured?
This kind of deep pseudo-philosphical analysis used to intimidate me to no end. Not any more, not after realizing how convoluted and contrived such analysis can be. The rules and principles, including the rule of Subsidiary are great, but it was St. Thomas Aquinas, the great codifier of such rules and laws who pointed out that the devil was in the application.
Here good people can disagree. Here , abstract principles must be weighted against real consequences. |
