On Being Truly Pro-Life

Today’s tragedy in Newtown Connecticut makes me wonder even more deeply if one can truly be pro-life and at the same time support the NRA and the culture of violence that is devouring our society from within?   Why do we not hear about this culture of violence from our pulpits?  It is as an essential a component of the culture of death as is abortion and yet the voices that decry the one too often support the other.     

Night of the Long Knives

What Was He Thinking?

My friend Kathy commented at dinner the other evening that “we are supposed to bring our faith to our politics but it seems that most people bring their politics to their faith.”  I thought this was a comment worth reflecting on.  I remember the election of 2008 when so many Catholics were voting against Barack Obama supposedly for religious reasons when it fact, embarrassed by their Republican politics (and in the cases of two friends of mine, their racist prejudices), they were hiding behind the skirts of Mother Church as justification for their choice.  But the current flap over the issue of religious exemptions to President Obama’s Health Care Laws demonstrates that politics trumping faith is not simply the sin of the “religious” right.  The estrogen-deprived stridency of a range of voices from Nancy Pelosi to the internet chatter mavens show us that bandwagon-riders, liberal or conservative, crash the gates of faith with wacko political views.  We need people who will use well-informed reason to bring faith to politics. 
     I cannot conceive of why President Obama has put himself in this untenable position “between a rock and a hard place” over the issue of exempting Catholic institutions from the particular clauses of the health-care mandate that would require Catholic schools, universities, health-care facilities, diocesan offices, and other Church employers to provide employee coverage for contraceptives, sterilization, and abortifacients that are contrary to Catholic moral values.  All sorts of other establishments —Alliance One Tobacco, Ruby Tuesdays’s, Local 802 Musicians Health Fund,  CIGNA, Baptist Retirement, Denny’s, Aetna, UFT Welfare Fund, Cracker Barrel,  and about one hundred other employer groups were granted exemptions from the Health Care mandate in part or in full.  So why not Catholic institutions?  But the President has put himself in the middle of it now.  If he backs down, an alliance of groups as diverse as Planned Parenthood and the American Nurses Association will turn on him.  If he pushes on—well, there is no monolithic Catholic vote but he will lose valuable allies in the Catholic community.  Granted, he won’t lose all Catholics, but he will lose those who have most influence over others.  By that I don’t mean the bishops—they lost their influence over the Catholic faithful during the sex-abuse scandals.  He will lose Catholic teachers, professionals, writers, editors, journalists, social workers, and what clergy he has—mostly among the monastic and religious orders who are generally better educated than the diocesan clergy and have more influence over the laity they serve.      
      I was at a cocktail party the other evening—I hate parties of any kind and this was a particularly dull group of moneyed suburban liberal types —and there was plenty of chatter about this, most of missing the point as bandwagon riders have a tendency to do.  I have no doubt from the circles in which I am often trapped that the bandwagon liberals will support the President in ’12 just as the bandwagon conservatives opposed him in ’08 (and will again in ’12).  But as I posted on February 7^th, the progressive Catholic intelligentsia—Sean Winters from National Catholic Reporter, Douglas Kmiec, America Magazine, E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post, Los Angeles Cardinal Mahoney, Notre Dame President John Jenkins, Virginia Democrat Tim Kaine, as well as top officials of such agencies as Catholic Relief Services, Catholic Charities USA, and others feel betrayed and angry.  How does the President get out of this mess?  It’s beyond me.  What isn’t beyond me is that someone (ok not an individual but various advisors) got him to drive the getaway car for a hit on the big ol’ ugly Catholic Church 
     And don’t doubt for a moment that this is a slam on the Church.  Markos Moulitsas, in his political blog “The Daily Kos” is perhaps the most explicit in posting this vitriolic piece by one Kaili Joy Gray.  It tells us a lot about what the issue is for many in the “no-exemption camp.”
“… Catholic leaders who are outraged—outraged!—that women in this country will be receiving full, comprehensive health care through their insurers. Church leaders started whining last year that being forced to provide health care to women oppressed their First Amendment right to deny health care to women. And so, for the next several months, the Obama administration hemmed and hawed about whether to implement the new policy, as promised, thanks in no small part to the lie repeated by the bishops, Republicans, and even supposedly liberal commentators like E.J. Dionne at the Washington Post that such a decision would alienate the president's Catholic supporters. 
     Thank you Ms. Gray for your insightful and articulate comments.  Are you a raving maniac or just the ordinary everyday garden variety jerk?  Have you read the arguments supporting exemption?  Do you have any idea what they are about?  Well, I suppose facts would probably only clutter your pretty little mind anyway so why bother, but Kos why do you print  the brainless raves  of a religious bigot who doesn’t even understand that that the issue isn’t access to contraception but freedom of conscience?   As I asked yesterday: would you deny a Muslim woman the right to wear the  hijab? Wouldn’t you consider a person who wanted to make her act contrary to her religion a bigot?   Do you know anyone who thinks a yeshiva should be forced to serve pork barbeque to their gentile employees?  Wouldn’t you regard that as insulting and contemptuous towards Jews?  But it’s ok to tell not individual Catholic employers but the Catholic Church itself as an employer: we demand that you violate your tenets?  Why would you do that except to insult and degrade a particular religion?  Well, Ms. Gray isn’t the only one using inflammatory language.  The National Organization for Women (NOW) posted on their website:
TAKE ACTION: Tell President Obama: Free The Pill From the Bishops!  Will Obama through (sic) birth control under the bus.  (Obviously NOW needs to find a high-school graduate to check their spelling.  Maybe Kaili Joy  Gray needs a job and NOW will provide her with the coverage she covets). 
They also posted this slant:
Catholic Bishops Fail to Take Birth Control from More Women. In an important decision that ensures access to affordable birth control for millions of women, the Obama administration announced today that it would not expand an unconstitutional refusal clause that will already deny contraceptive coverage to some women under the Affordable Care Act.
     I am not sure what makes the refusal clause unconstitutional but until the Courts declare it to be so it is no more than NOW rhetoric designed to slant the issue.  And are the bishops taking birth control from more women or simply saying that if an individual wants birth control, sterilization, or abortifacients  please arrange for someone else who does not think these things to be immoral  to pay for them.  I don’t see Cardinal Dolan sweeping down to grab these pills from some sweet lady’s clenched fist.  
      Planned Parenthood, no friends with the Catholic Church (to be fair, the enmity is mutual)  has launched a nationwide television ad campaign encouraging Americans to back the President’s refusal to exempt Catholic institutions from requirements that violate Catholic moral doctrine, insisting that women have a "right" to have the Church provide them with birth control, sterilization, and abortifacients.  What right?  Who gives such a right?  Is it a right given by God? Is it a right inherent in nature?  Right?  Rights may be things recognized by law but they are not things conferred by law.  The Law may require the Church (or anyone else)  to do something but there is no intrinsic “right” to birth control or abortifacients.   Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, I grant you—but “the pill.”  No, not a right.  A law perhaps but laws are what we make them.  Rights transcend the law.  But I guess you have had to have  philosophy course or two to know the difference. 
One blogger, a Cecilia Bruck, wrote:
Exactly! First the Catholics try to force the rest of the world to live by their religious views, against our will, and take away our freedoms, then they are outraged when others do it to them. Can you hear the denials? This in no way forces catholics (sic)  to use contraceptives if they choose not to. The catholics (sic) are trying to force the rest of us to live according to a religion we don't want to be a part of.  …  we are entitled to the same respect as you are in our own religous (sic) freedoms and beliefs. If not, then you are discriminating against the rest of us because of our religion and because of our sex, and that is not only illegal, it is also against the constitution you claim to love so much.   (Well, I guess Ms. Bruck is not a winning candidate for that editing post so needed at NOW.) 
The Feminist Majority Foundation posted this on their website:  
Beginning today, women's rights groups - including the Feminist Majority Foundation, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the National Organization for Women (NOW), the National Council of Jewish Women, and others - have launched a campaign and blog carnival to support the Obama Administration's decision to maintain full contraceptive coverage under the Preventive Care package of the Affordable Care Act. The administration has been under enormous pressure from the Catholic bishops to broaden the religious exemption. The campaign, which will include a blog carnival this week and other actions, aims to correct misinformation generated by negative newspaper editorials and other media outlets. The request to broaden the religious exemption, primarily pressed by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, would have denied millions of American women contraceptive coverage, including students, teachers, nurses, social workers, and other staff (and their families) at religiously-connected or affiliated schools, universities, and hospitals, as well as social service institutions like Catholic Charities.
And so the vultures gather. 
I could go on and perhaps will post more on this in the near future.  But the question remains: what provoked the President to step into this pile of ****.  He is anything but dumb.  Why has he consented to drive the getaway car for those fiends who are fueled by a hatred for the Catholic Church?  This sort of divisive politics is against everything he has stood for to date.  How will he get himself out of this mess?   

Who Got Obama to Wear the Black Hat?

White House spokesperson, David Axelrod

On Tuesday White House spokesperson David Axelrod said that the Obama Administration was looking for some sort of a compromise that would ease the tension between the Administration and the Catholic community over Church institutions being required to provide employee insurance coverage for contraceptives, sterilization, and abortifacients.  Mr. Axelrod said on MSNBC program, “Morning Joe”

I heard earlier Joe [Scarborough] say, ‘Well, there may be compromises that can be reached.’ We have great respect for the work that these religious institutions do. …We certainly don’t want to abridge anyone’s religious freedoms, so we’re going to look for a way to move forward that both provides women with the preventive care that they need and respects the prerogatives of religious institutions.”  

      I don’t think the administration gets it.  Compromise isn’t what is needed.  Backing off from forcing people to do something that their religion believes is immoral is what is needed.  Don’t require by law for religious groups to violate their tenets.  I don’t think that Muslim women should be forbidden to wear the hijab or a yeshiva required to serve pork barbeque to its gentile employees.  I don’t think a Baptist seminary needs to have a bar or a juke box and I don’t think non-believers should be required to start the day with prayer just because their employer is “born-again.” Why should Catholic institutions have to pay for services that they believe are contrary to their religious faith?   I am not talking about individual Catholic employers—we are considering institutions run by the Catholic Church.  Ya’ might as well force the Salt Lake City Council of the Twelve Apostles to drink espresso.  

     The Catholic Church didn’t start this pissing contest and whoever advised President Obama to get into it must have been a double agent from The Karl Rove Academy for Vile Politics. What a gift to the Republicans this has been!  Now Speaker Boehner is getting into the act and using this as another hammer to beat up on the President.  Boehner and the Republicans will be the heroes and pass laws that will grant the Church protection from the harm that the President should never have exposed us to.  Good for Catholics; great for the Republicans.  What was Obama thinking of?  What motivated one of the brightest and most savvy men to live under that sometimes distinguished White House roof to do something so stupid in an election year?  (I looked in my thesaurus for a synonym for “stupid” but after considering several alternatives I thought that the plain unvarnished truth is best.  Nothing says it better than “stupid.” “Ill-advised”, “imprudent”, “injudicious”, what have you—just puts lipstick on the pig as the President used to say.  So we stick with “stupid.”)  I honestly don’t see how at this point the President can make this situation work for him.  The various foes of the Church—led by our friends at Planned Parenthood—are insisting that the President not back down to those horrible, nasty, Catholic bishops.  “This is,” they claim, “one more example of how the patriarchy of the Catholic Church tries to keep women from exercising full rights as human persons in our modern world.”  Any backing off from the mandate will inflame those whose political dream is to drive the Catholic Church from the public square and stuff it into the dust closet of “whatever you do in your private-life…”  “Wouldn’t it be nice if the Church just went away?”   On the other hand, to stay on this course of requiring Catholic institutions to violate their tenets on what Catholics perceive to be the sacredness of life is driving hundreds of thousands of liberal Catholics from the Obama (and Democratic) fold.  Maybe the President doesn’t need Catholics for his re-election.  (He did get 54% of the Catholic vote in 2008—a pretty good percentage.) He might think he is safe without us Catholics behind him.  Right now, the election looks better for him than it has in a long time.  The economy is showing signs that his policy of patient reorganization is bearing fruit.  The Republicans are split between a candidate who is too liberal for the base and three candidates who are two crazy for the nation. But November is a long way off and much could change for the President’s fortunes.  The President may find that he has painted himself into a corner and someday may want those Catholic votes.  He had mine in 2008.  It looks like he won’t in 2012.    But that’s ok,  Planned Parenthood has assured him that there are more women voters than Catholic bishops.  I suppose there are, but there is something wrong with that apples and oranges equation. 

Catholic Girl Goes Bad

Margaret Sanger and her two sons

Well, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure has reversed its decision regarding funding Planned Parenthood projects.  I am disappointed as I thought it was an important step in separating a very good charity from an organization that ethically is somewhat of a mixed bag.  Planned Parenthood is a complex and interesting organization and it something very different than its founder Margaret Sanger created.  Let’s take a look at the woman who gave birth to PP.

Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was born September 14, 1879 into a devout Irish Catholic family (her maiden name was Higgins) in Corning New York.  Her mother had 18 pregnancies in 22 years, seven of those pregnancies ending in miscarriages, and died at age 50 of cervical cancer.   After her mother’s death, and perhaps embittered by it, her father became an atheist.  He also was a strong supporter of woman’s suffrage.  In some ways, each parent was to shape the life and philosophy of their famous daughter. 

      Margaret showed much promise and her sisters put her through college and later nursing school.  She interrupted her education to take care of her mother during her final illness.  While taking care of her dying mother Margaret contracted tuberculosis.  After her mother’s death, she married William Sanger and the newly married couple moved to the Adirondacks for her health, but as she recovered they settled in New York City where they travelled in a radical-chic crowd of such figures as Upton Sinclair, John Reed, and Mabel Evans Dodge Sterne Luhan, one of the founders of the Taos Art colony.  The Sangers had two children, Grant and Stuart.  Sanger began writing a column (the then equivalent of a blog) in the Socialist magazine, New York Call called “What Every Mother Should Know” (sometimes supplement by “What Every Girl Should Know”) about sexual hygiene. By 1913 the Sangers were estranged and though they did not divorce until 1921, Margaret took a number of lovers during this period.  Presumably William may have as well.   

      Sanger practiced public health nursing among the poor of New York and years later she would tell the story about Sadie Sachs.  Sadie may have been a fictional composite of many of the women that Sanger helped; nevertheless the story has a ring of truth.  Sanger said that she was called to Sadie’s apartment where she found the woman at death’s door from a botched self-induced abortion.  After she recovered, Sadie begged the doctor for information on how she could prevent an unwanted pregnancy and the doctor’s only advice was “sexual abstinence.”  Within the year Sanger was called back to Sadie’s but this time she found Sadie dead from her attempts to end a second pregnancy.  It was in the story of Sadie Sachs that Sanger found her call to help women have some degree of control over their reproductive systems.  Sanger began publishing a monthly newsletter called The Woman Rebel: No Gods, No Masters and she coined the term “birth control.”  She said that “each woman should  be the mistress of her own body.”  She published a pamphlet called Family Limitation but it was a violation of the Comstock anti-obscenity laws to print anything concerning birth control.   Threatened with prosecution, Sanger fled to England but public opinion in the United States was on her side and she returned to the United States when she was promised that she would not be prosecuted.  The year was 1915.  America was changing.  During her time in England she had an affair with Havelock Ellis, the noted British Psychiatrist and sexologist.  Around this time too she had an affair with Science Fiction author H.G. Wells.  She was still married to William Sanger, though estranged from him.  They divorced in 1921 and the following year married oil tycoon Noah Slee.  His fortune was a boon to her work providing her with the financial wherewithal to spread her message of family planning.   

       It is important to note that at this time not only Catholicism but mainline Protestantism and Judaism also opposed birth control.  That would only begin to change in the years between the World Wars.  While Sanger had been in Europe—where attitudes towards sexuality and towards birth control had been changing for some time—she learned about various contraceptive devices.  Upon her return to New York she opened a Family Planning and Birth Control Clinic, distributing contraceptives she was importing (illegally) from Europe. She was arrested and convicted, the judge declaring that women “did not have the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there would be no resulting conception.” Those days of keeping women in reproductive bondage were ending, however, and a subsequent judicial ruling permitted physicians to prescribe birth control to women.  It was a great victory of Margaret Sanger and her cause.  In 1921 Sanger founded the American Birth Control League; it would merge with several other organizations over the years to become Planned Parenthood in 1942. 

       Margaret Sanger was a proponent of eugenics.  Eugenics is the philosophic view that the human race should be “bred” to greater perfection by limiting access to reproduction to people who have stronger genetic material.  Sanger advocated sterilization of those with hereditary mental or physical defects as well as excluding potential immigrants to the United States who had undesirable physical traits.  Her views were not as rabid as her contemporaries in Nazi Germany who favored not sterilization but murder of the genetically impaired, but they are still shocking views even by today’s standards.  Her racial philosophy is even somewhat more difficult to pin down.  She was not, as some critics claim, and out and out racist.  She did believe that more darkly pigmented races were inferior to those with paler skin but if she was opposed to miscegenation she was not in favor of racial segregation and did not permit her clinics to show any discriminatory behavior towards African-American patients. Indeed she worked closely with the African-American community and one of her first clinics was in Harlem where she worked hand-in-glove with local clergy and community leaders to make birth control available to poor blacks.  W.E.B. DuBois served on the board of the Harlem clinic.  

       Ironically, considering Planned Parenthood today,  Margaret Sanger’s preaching the gospel of Birth Control was rooted in her opposition to abortion.  She vehemently opposed abortion.  She saw the dangers of abortion to the life, health, and well-being of the mother but her convictions ran deeper than that. Sanger was not a woman of religious morals, nevertheless she saw the ethical problem of abortion and felt that no matter how early in the pregnancy the abortion was performed it was the taking of a human life.  Her work and dedication as a nurse would not permit her to go that far.  Birth Control was for her “the only cure for abortions.”  Margaret Sanger died as week short of her 87^th birthday in 1966. 

A Bad Sign for Planned Parenthood

Representative Renee Ellmers (R, NC)

whose campaign promise to investigate

Planned Parenthood has resulted in the

Susan G Komen for the Cure Foundation

pulling support for Planned Parenthood

I have long been concerned about breast cancer.  I have lost a number of friends to this disease and have always encouraged other friends to have their mammograms on a regular basis.  And I have always supported groups like Susan G. Komen for the Cure—a foundation—the leading foundation—to fight this disease.  I did have concerns about the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Organization having ties to Planned Parenthood.  Many of the foundation’s affiliates funded programs for breast cancer awareness, screening, and treatment through local Planned Parenthood outlets.  Those concerns were not enough for me to stop supporting the foundation.  In many places—especially among the rural and urban poor—Planned Parenthood is the only place women can turn for health issues.  I regret that.  I don’t like Planned Parenthood.  Even beyond its (extremely) pro-active approach to “abortion rights,” Planned Parenthood has a sordid history going back to its founder, Margaret Sanger, who in a desire to “assist the race toward the elimination of the unfit” was a proponent of eugenics.  Nevertheless, for some women, thanks to the inadequate health care available to the uninsured in our country and the unwillingness of so many who have to provide for those who have not, Planned Parenthood is the only one there to help women with routine gynecological care.  I would not support Planned Parenthood directly but my concern for the defeat of breast cancer impelled me to support Susan G. Komen for the Cure regardless of its affiliations.          It was announced yesterday that Susan G. Komen for the Cure is withdrawing its support from Planned Parenthood.   Supposedly this is because the foundation has a new policy barring grants to organizations under Congressional investigation.  A number of Republican candidates ran for House seats in 2010 with the promise to launch a House investigation of Planned Parenthood.  Chief among these is Roman Catholic Renee Ellmers of North Carolina’s 2^nd Congressional district.  Ellmers entered politics because of her opposition to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.  Representative Ellmers’ husband is a surgeon and they have a lovely home.  Ellmer’s 2010 campaign in which she successfully unseated Representative Bob Etheridge focused almost solely on the issue of affordable Health Care and was particularly dirty.  However, the investigation of Planned Parenthood was launched by Representative Cliff Stearns, a Presbyterian, who is chair of the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee.  There are serious questions about Planned Parenthood and its compliance with regulations regarding use of federal funds as well as allegations of systematic fraud and abuse in its financial organization and its cover-ups of human trafficking.  These allegations are nothing new and regardless of political bias should be investigated. If there is no problem Planned Parenthood will have its name cleared, but I wouldn’t bet on it.  I suspect—with the historian’s suspicion and not merely a biased cynicism—that Planned Parenthood like the Catholic Church has allowed its own institutional self-interest to take precedence over its altruistic mission.      
The Susan G. Komen for the Cure 's new regulation prohibiting funding for organizations under Congressional investigation is itself a cover-up.  No one—including Planned Parenthood—believes it.  Planned Parenthood is screaming that the funds were cut because of pressure from Pro-Life Groups on the foundation.  And it is true.  Many individuals as well as organizations had stopped contributing to Susan G. Komen for the Cure because of its links to Planned Parenthood.  Catholic groups in particular were withholding support.  Parishes were refusing to sponsor events and Church bulletins were warning parishioners about the links between Susan G. Komen for the Cure and Planned Parenthood.  That an organization like Susan G. Komen for the Cure would yield to such pressure is a clear sign that while the institutional levels of the Church may not have much clout anymore, the grassroots still do.  That is something to pay attention to.  I think the current Administration has judged the American Bishops to be a bunch of toothless old men whom they need not fear and I don’t think they are too wrong on that, but if the rank and file Catholics can be organized and motivated they would still be a force to be contended with.