Let’s go back to February 2012 for a sample of the rhetoric used by the Catholic theocrats to demand special exemptions from ordinary secular laws. A Catholic priest at the top of Human Life International made a statement.
We at Human Life International stand with the Catholic bishops and a diverse group of organizations and individuals in rejecting the false compromise offered by the Obama administration in an apparent attempt to gain wider acceptance of the mandate that requires free coverage of contraception, sterilization, and abortion inducing drugs.
Having closely examined all available information on the compromise, we are appalled at the cynicism displayed by both its content and the means by which it was announced. The original unjust mandate required that conscientious objectors to this policy would be forced to pay for insurance that will cover morally abhorrent ‘care.’
With the so-called compromise we are still forced to pay for insurance that covers procedures and drugs that directly contradict our religious beliefs. The compromise is a distinction without a difference and merely an accounting trick that does nothing to change the fact that we will have to pay for chemical abortions, sterilizations and contraception for any employee.
The phrase “that directly contradict our religious beliefs” is the core of their case, and it’s meaningless. It’s empty. It’s so arbitrary that it could apply to anything. Forcing everyone to defer to it and be harmed by it is sheer bullying.
If their “religious beliefs” tell them that contraceptives are evil, then their religious beliefs are terrible things, which should have no purchase whatsoever on public life.
The Obama administration’s verbal engineering is an egregious and blatant attempt to divide certain Catholic organizations from others and from the bishops, all in an effort to secure even the thinnest possible façade of Catholic approval. Sadly, the administration has found prominent organizations to be complicit in this calculated move. It should be noted that though the bishops were not consulted on this compromise, it appears that Catholic Health Association (CHA) and Catholic Charities USA were consulted and their agreement secured before the bishops even had an opportunity to examine the proposal. The Obama administration’s proposal was clearly not an attempt at good faith dialogue and genuine compromise.
The apparent agreement between the Obama administration, CHA, Catholic Charities and Planned Parenthood is utterly untenable from a Catholic point of view, requiring that we become complicit in evil.
Except that there is no evil here, the “evil” is invented, it’s manufactured, it’s worked up for the purpose of religious vanity and privilege-enhancement.
It appears that the stalwart unified voice of bishops, laity, Catholics and all citizens of good will compelled the administration to offer this weak, symbolic compromise because of questions about what the mandate meant for President Obama’s reelection campaign. We have seen clearly the ideological goals this administration is pushing with this unjust mandate. We can only imagine what will be inflicted on Catholics and on all Americans should the president win reelection and not have to worry about currying favor with Catholics.
It’s the Catholics who are doing the inflicting.
Under the Affordable Care Act (‘Obamacare’), the HHS has entirely too much unchecked power over health care in the United States, and given their history of disregard for both religious liberty and human life, we have no confidence that the federal government can be trusted to administer health care that respects the dignity of every human person from conception to natural death. Not only do we support legislation currently being considered in Congress to ensure clear and strong protection for freedom of religion and conscience, but we also call upon our political leaders to repeal the Affordable Care Act in its entirety so that it may be replaced by a system in which human life and dignity, and the principles of solidarity and subsidiarity, are secured.
Really? Do these people have anything to say about the for-profit health care system that chews people up and spits them out? What’s that got to do with “the dignity of every human person”? Do these people have anything to say about harsh sentencing laws, proliferating prisons, low wages, dangerous working conditions? Do they pay any attention to human beings after the fetal stage?
This compromise offered by President Obama demands that we compromise our religious beliefs and our commitment to the health and life of women and children while they compromise nothing. We at Human Life International stand with our Bishops and call upon the administration to honor the freedom endowed by God and honored by our nation’s Bill of Rights. We will render unto Caesar only that which belongs to him and not what belongs to God.
Talk about being complicit with evil…
That’s against their religious beliefs, but this isn’t:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-05/vatican-wont-give-all-child-abuse-documents-royal-commission/5574192
Part of the “deeply held religious beliefs” (a phrase that needs to die now) includes opposing women’s health, but not participating in investigations into child sexual abuse cases of which they’re complicit.
Fuck those fucking fuckers.
@ Tony: They clearly have a great many religious beliefs, all of which appear specifically aimed at exempting them from being required to obey society’s laws.
Why, again, are we giving these jerks a big fat subsidy in the form of tax exemption for their jerkishness? Is this really the kind of behavior we want to reward?
Let’s say it is against their religious beliefs to allow or to *enable* their employees to gain access to contraception. My comment is — who cares? When it comes to laws regulating the relationship between workers and their employers, employers SHOULD be forced to do things they would prefer not to do .I see no reason why a religious exception is any more valid than say, an economic one about a law imposing a cost, or just ‘we don’t feel like it. ‘ One entire purpose of laws regulating employment is to make sure workers don’t get totally screwed. This means employers will be forced to do things they don’t feel like. In the end, I don’t see why they don’t feel like it should matter.
Blanche:
To the first, perhaps we should ask SCOTUS or Congress.
Once that’s done, we can let them know how we feel about the second. Somehow I don’t think they’ll like the answer.
I grew up listening to the Vietnam War on my parents’s radio. They were strongly against the war, but they paid their taxes.
In response to Tony on the Vatican’s refusal to hand over records of their deliberations, it actually is not so much, I think, a matter of the Church protecting its own or a matter of ‘deeply held religious beliefs’, but a matter of – for the Vatican – political principle: it was the principle for which Henry Edward Manning, later Cardinal Manning, left the Anglican Church and joined the Roman Catholic Church: (the following is a reworking of Wikpedia since I do not have much time) The fact that a civil and secular court had the power to force the Church of England to accept someone with an unorthodox opinion about baptism (someone whom some powerful people within the church had tried to reject) proved to Manning that, far from being a divinely created institution, that church was merely a man-made creation of the English Parliament; and so he left it. That is to say, it is not so much that the Catholic Church is protecting its own or making excuses about its ‘deep’ and doubtless sincerely held ‘religious beliefs’ about this and that, but that it refuses ON PRINCIPLE to allow a secular authority to tell it what it should or should not do, since this would be tantamount to denying that it derives its authority from God. THAT is what it is holding on to, and that is what is driving it in the its opposition to ‘Obamacare’. And that is what makes it so formidable an adversary: it is bloody well convinced it is in the right, however many children have been abused and however many women suffer because of its position. . And in dealing, or trying to deal, with this, I think we need to recognise this.
Crudely, it’s a question of who is to be boss: the secular state or an institution that claims its authority derives from God – it has always been that, and it will contyinue to be that.
In other words it’s a question of power. Quite so.
I’m not convinced by the “since this would be tantamount to denying that it derives its authority from God” though. I think that’s more the window-dressing than the core; the self-deception more than the real motivation. I think basically they just think they are Special and should be treated as such.
Yes, but they think themselves special not just out of some shared narcissism, say, or some other arbirary feeling, but for a reason – and that reason is the core, the real motivation, in the Catholic Church’s constant attempts, as an institution, to deny and to evade the right of any secular authority to tell it what or what not to do. Otherwise, what do you think the Church is deceiving itself about – what they are hiding with their window-dressing?
Well, I think it is a kind of shared narcissism. It is of course connected to the idea of god, but I think their feeling of Specialness is stronger than their feelings about god. I don’t know, of course, it’s purely a guess, but…it’s how they strike me. As if the whole thing has become the end in itself, and looms a good deal larger than the supposed reason for it.
I suppose I think that’s how power works, especially this kind of weird arbitrary illegitimate power. It takes on a life of its own and becomes the purpose, while the reason for it becomes subordinate.
Also of course it’s that I hate them. I have a hard time crediting them with genuine anything that rises above self-aggrandizement.