Amanda Marcotte reminds us what popes and bishops really care about.
Remember Pope Francis said some pretty stuff about how Catholic authorities need to be less obsessed with their attempts to control human sexuality and more interested in helping the poor, and how a bunch of liberals who are grading the pope on a massive curve got excited? Remember how meanie atheists said that it doesn’t matter and we can tell you right now that nothing will change?
It turns out we were wrong?
No.
Think Progress reported yesterday that the United Conference of Catholic Bishops sent a letter urging House Republicans to shut down the government rather than let women use their earned insurance benefits to buy contraception without their employers’ permission. So important is it for the Catholic bishops that your employer get veto power over how you spend compensation you paid for with your labor that they are now openly ranking it over….feeding babies.
That’s because keeping women down is the most important thing.
The government shutdown means that WIC is going to run out of money to feed infants. (At first, it was assumed they would only have enough to last a day, but they’re funded through the rest of the month, something the bishops could not have known when they sent the letter.) More than half of babies born in the U.S. get some of their nutrition through WIC.
God will provide. God will feed all those babies, but women getting contraception, that has to be stopped, by bishops.
Yet again, the Catholic Church demonstrates that it doesn’t give a rat’s ass about people after they are born.
Undermining democratic policy-making — something the Church seems to have learned from all the right-wing dictators they’ve catered to since the 1930s.
Reminds me of something Carlin said:
“Boy, these conservatives are really something, aren’t they? They’re all in favor of the unborn. They will do anything for the unborn. But once you’re born, you’re on your own. Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months. After that, they don’t want to know about you. They don’t want to hear from you. No nothing. No neonatal care, no day care, no head start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing. If you’re preborn, you’re fine; if you’re preschool, you’re fucked.”
That last line is the kicker/clincher/whatever.
Frankie talks a good line. I’m waiting to see whether he’ll deliver. So far, indications ain’t so good….
Remember half those babies are girls, so they’re not important to the bishops in any case.
Perhaps someone could remind the Bishops that without an adequate level of nutrition women will find they are physically unable to bear all these BAYBEES at the appropriate rate or, perhaps, to produce any at all.
One of the interesting effects of famines is what they do to the rate of spontaneous abortion. (And to infant mortality and maternal mortality, of course, but we realise those don’t matter.)
The ethos of the Conference of Catholic Bishops is:
“To unify, coordinate, encourage, promote and carry on Catholic activities in the United States; to organize and conduct religious, charitable and social welfare work at home and abroad; to aid in education; to care for immigrants; and generally to enter into and promote by education, publication and direction the objects of its being.”
They omitted: to “shut down the government rather than let women use their earned insurance benefits to buy contraception without their employers’ permission. “