“Boundaries Of A Mindset”: The Undermining Of The Freedoms Of Others
How a political party, movement — or nation — thinks is more important than WHAT it thinks. This is the larger lesson to be learned in the dispute between President Obama and the Catholic bishops over birth control.
With the President’s reasonable compromise announced on Friday the controversy with the Catholic leadership has been resolved in ways that I think strengthens the President’s hand and exposes the Republican Party, yet again, as the faction of reactionary anti-women extremists.
Some have mocked the President for stumbling into a dispute with a powerful religious constituency, which conventional wisdom says is the last thing a president up for contract renewal wants to do in an election year. I am not so sure and think critics of the President — both liberal and conservative — reveal their own bias in favor of the Catholic hierarchy at the expense of the Catholic faithful when critics speak so confidently about what “the Church” believes about anything in this controversy.
Nevertheless, the deeper and more important issue in the present controversy between Obama and the bishops is what are we to make of the claim by an absolutist institution, the Catholic Church, that a republic’s guarantee of freedom of religion gives to that church absolute sovereignty over all those areas of society where the Church’s interests intersect?
Fundamentalism is not a religion. It is a mindset. A liberal society can accommodate the demands of radical freedom expressed by the Catholic Church just so long as liberalism itself remains the dominant governing mentality. But a society in which the radical freedom of religious fundamentalists prevails would be a society that sooner or later descends into either anarchy or tyranny.
And this is an autonomy the Church says exists not only over the Church proper where actual religious worship takes place. It also extends everywhere the Church has business and economic interests, such as its schools, hospitals, universities — even it’s pizza parlors and taco stands if the Church decided to diversify into the fast food business as well.
The reason this issue matters is that we are talking about the governing mentality of our republic — HOW our republic will think as it tries to solve the problems we face, not only WHAT we eventually do think about the possible solutions to embrace. And it matters a great deal whether that overriding mentality is a liberal one or is one authoritarian, fundamentalist, or absolutist in nature.
The Founding Fathers were not anti-religious. But the wall of separation they built between church and state recognized that the absolutism so necessary in giving church followers the comforting sense of certainty they require was death to democratic republics where secular authorities had to accommodate and reconcile many such faith-claims. As James Madison said when talking about the system of federalism within the Constitution and of the mediating and political qualities thus necessary in democratic office-holders: When you “extend the sphere you enlarge the views.”
When they are working to attain power, and before they do attain it, “the fascist and communist parties invoke all the guarantees of the bill of rights, all the prerogatives of popular parties, of elections, of representation of the assemblies, of tenure in the civil service. But when they attain power, they destroy the liberal democratic institutions, as on a broad staircase, they climbed to power.”
That was written by the great American journalist Walter Lippmann in his 1955 classic, Essays in the Public Philosophy, and it applies equally to all illiberal political parties that seek to impose a faith or political ideology on an unwilling audience.
It was a book Lippmann started when Hitler’s rise in Germany threatened Western civilization and concluded during the height of the Cold War. Lippmann’s aim was to better understand the inner dynamics and pathologies by which liberal democracies were nearly made extinct in the 20th century — and often with the connivance of those democracies’ own citizens.
Democracy, Lippmann concluded, is for those who are for it. Democracy is for those willing to do more than simply claim a democracy’s freedoms for their own but to protect those freedoms for others. And this requires, first of all, recognizing the danger which non-negotiable and absolutist faith-claims by anyone pose to the fabric that supports the democratic way of life.
And the “borderline between sedition and reform,” writes Lippmann — the borderline between legitimate and illegitimate politics — is the boundary between a mindset that says there can be only one “Truth” and another that accepts the “sovereign principle” that in a democracy “we live in a rational order in which, by sincere inquiry and rational debate, we can distinguish the true and the false, the right and the wrong.”
Indeed, using a religious metaphor, Lippmann says that “rational procedure is the ark of the covenant of the public philosophy” of democratic republics. There are no election laws or constitutional guarantees which cannot be changed, says Lippmann. But what must always be unchangeable if a democracy is to survive “is the commitment to rational determination.”
The counter-revolutionists, says Lippmann, will in the end try to “suppress freedom in order to propagate their official doctrine.” They will, he says, “reject the procedure by which in the free society official policy is determined.”
And among these counter-revolutionaries I would include the present right wing, politically aggressive Catholic Church hierarchy that is now demanding the entire society give to the Church the same deference in the political realm which the Church demands of the faithful in the religious one, by accepting and accommodating the Church’s non-negotiable and absolutist faith-demands on birth control wherever the writ of the Catholic Church runs — whether in the sphere of religious worship or wherever the Church has business interests of any kind — as it uses its resources to carve out little Vatican Cities within our republic where the Church claims ultimate sovereignty and might as well start appointing ambassadors.
It is not possible to reject this faith in the efficacy of reason over absolutist faith, says Lippmann, “and at the same time believe that communities of men enjoying freedom could govern themselves successfully.”
It it not possible, in other words, to give the Catholic Church the power it seeks to shape a political agenda based on its own internal dogmas alone and at the same time still believe we have a democratic republic, not really.
Conservatives have tried to change the subject in order to deflect criticisms of them that they are ideologues who seek to impose reactionary beliefs on an unwilling American public. They have done this by trying to redefine liberalism — or “secularism” — to be somehow a competing “religion” itself so as to assert that liberals are equally dogmatic in trying to “impose” their “religious beliefs” of religious tolerance, open-mindedness and official state neutrality regarding all forms of religious worship on an unwilling traditionalist or fundamentalist audience that thinks Judeo-Christian orthodoxy ought to be the law of the land.
Like all religious fundamentalists and absolutists who seek political power, the Catholic Church is showing us again that the undermining of the freedoms of others begins with the demands for absolute freedoms for themselves.
By: Ted Frier, Open Salon Blog, February 12, 2012
“Beyond Pelvic Politics”: Choosing Between Bishops’ Sensibilities And Women’s Health
I may not be as theologically sophisticated as American bishops, but I had thought that Jesus talked more about helping the poor than about banning contraceptives.
The debates about pelvic politics over the last week sometimes had a patronizing tone, as if birth control amounted to a chivalrous handout to women of dubious morals. On the contrary, few areas have more impact on more people than birth control — and few are more central to efforts to chip away at poverty.
My well-heeled readers will be furrowing their brows at this point. Birth control is cheap, you’re thinking, and far less expensive than a baby (or an abortion). But for many Americans living on the edge, it’s a borderline luxury.
A 2009 study looked at sexually active American women of modest means, ages 18 to 34, whose economic circumstances had deteriorated. Three-quarters said that they could not afford a baby then. Yet 30 percent had put off a gynecological or family-planning visit to save money. More horrifying, of those using the pill, one-quarter said that they economized by not taking it every day. (My data is from the Guttmacher Institute, a nonpartisan research organization on issues of sexual health.)
One-third of women in another survey said they would switch birth control methods if not for the cost. Nearly half of those women were relying on condoms, and others on nothing more than withdrawal.
The cost of birth control is one reason poor women are more than three times as likely to end up pregnant unintentionally as middle-class women.
In short, birth control is not a frill that can be lightly dropped to avoid offending bishops. Coverage for contraception should be a pillar of our public health policy — and, it seems to me, of any faith-based effort to be our brother’s keeper, or our sister’s.
To understand the centrality of birth control, consider that every dollar that the United States government spends on family planning reduces Medicaid expenditures by $3.74, according to Guttmacher. Likewise, the National Business Group on Health estimated that it costs employers at least an extra 15 percent if they don’t cover contraception in their health plans.
And of course birth control isn’t just a women’s issue: men can use contraceptives too, and unwanted pregnancies affect not only mothers but also fathers.
This is the backdrop for the uproar over President Obama’s requirement that Catholic universities and hospitals include birth control in their health insurance plans. On Friday, the White House backed off a bit — forging a compromise so that unwilling religious employers would not pay for contraception, while women would still get the coverage — but many administration critics weren’t mollified.
Look, there’s a genuine conflict here. Many religious believers were sincerely offended that Catholic institutions would have to provide coverage for health interventions that the church hierarchy opposed. That counts in my book: it’s best to avoid forcing people to do things that breach their ethical standards.
Then again, it’s not clear how many people actually are offended. A national survey found that 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women use birth control at some point in their lives. Moreover, a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute reported that even among Catholics, 52 percent back the Obama policy: they believe that religiously affiliated universities and hospitals should be obliged to include birth control coverage in insurance plans.
So, does America’s national health policy really need to make a far-reaching exception for Catholic institutions when a majority of Catholics oppose that exception?
I wondered what other religiously affiliated organizations do in this situation. Christian Science traditionally opposed medical care. Does The Christian Science Monitor deny health insurance to employees?
“We offer a standard health insurance package,” John Yemma, the editor, told me.
That makes sense. After all, do we really want to make accommodations across the range of faith? What if organizations affiliated with Jehovah’s Witnesses insisted on health insurance that did not cover blood transfusions? What if ultraconservative Muslim or Jewish organizations objected to health care except at sex-segregated clinics?
The basic principle of American life is that we try to respect religious beliefs, and accommodate them where we can. But we ban polygamy, for example, even for the pious. Your freedom to believe does not always give you a freedom to act.
In this case, we should make a good-faith effort to avoid offending Catholic bishops who passionately oppose birth control. I’m glad that Obama sought a compromise. But let’s remember that there are also other interests at stake. If we have to choose between bishops’ sensibilities and women’s health, our national priority must be the female half of our population.
By: Nicholas Kristof, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, February 11, 2012
“Blessed Are The Tweakers”: The Battle Behind The Contraception Fight
It’s not really about birth control.
As you probably heard, President Obama changed the new rules on health care coverage to accommodate howls of outrage from the Catholic bishops, who didn’t want Catholic institutions paying for anything that provided women with free contraceptives.
Now, they can get a pass. But if their health policies don’t provide the coverage, their female employees will be able to get it anyway, directly from the insurance companies, which will pay the freight. Contraceptives are a win-win for them, since they’re much cheaper than paying for unintended pregnancies and deliveries.
Was it a cave, tweak or compromise? President Obama thinks of himself as a grand bargain kind of guy, but he really strikes me as the kind of person who will, when possible, go for the tweak.
Anyhow, it’s a good tweak. The women still get contraception coverage, the president has shown his respect for the bishops’ strong moral position.
Let’s skip over the flaws in the strong moral position position. Such as the fact that many states already require employers’ health care plans to cover contraception and that all over the United States there are Catholic universities and hospitals that comply.
Or that the bishops have totally failed to convince their own faithful that birth control is a moral evil and now appear to be trying to get the federal government to do the job for them. We’re rising above all that.
On Friday, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops called the tweak “a first step in the right direction,” which is certainly better than nothing. Sister Carol Keehan, the head of the 600-plus-member umbrella group for Catholic hospitals, applauded the change.
So far so good. Everybody happy?
No way.
Rick Santorum, Presidential Candidate On The Move, was unimpressed. At the White House, he said, they were still “trying to impose their values on somebody else.” Imposing your values on somebody else is definitely an area where Santorum is expert.
The leader of the Republican Study Committee, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, called the tweak a “fig leaf,” which he seemed to regard as a bad thing.
Representative Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican and leader of the House anti-abortion forces, said the latest announcement demonstrated that the president “will use force, coercion and ruinous fines that put faith-based charities, hospitals and schools at risk of closure, harming millions of kids, as well as the poor, sick and disabled that they serve, in order to force obedience to Obama’s will.”
I would take that to be a no.
Smith, however, seemed pretty mellow compared with Paul Rondeau of the American Life League, who took the president’s willingness to meet his critics halfway as proof of his unbendable will: “This man is totally addicted to abortion and totally addicted to the idea that not only is he the smartest man in the room, he is the smartest in the nation and taxpayers will fund his worldview whether they like it or not.”
Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, Potential Vice Presidential Candidate, expressed some vague appreciation for the president’s efforts, then rejected them totally. The whole thing, he said, “shows why we must fully repeal ObamaCare.”
And here we have the real issue, which goes way beyond contraception.
The bishops have made their point. Even if many of them had managed to avoid noticing the Catholic institutions in their own diocese that were already covering contraceptives to comply with state law, they are absolutely correct that Church doctrine holds that artificial methods of birth control are immoral. They’re not going to let the White House ignore that just because their own flocks do.
But Republican politicians have other fish to fry. They want to use the bishops and the birth control issue to get at health care reform. Right now in Congress, there are bills floating around that would allow employers to refuse to provide health care coverage for drugs or procedures they found immoral. You can’t have national health care coverage — even the patched-together system we’re working toward — with loopholes like that.
Which is the whole idea. National standards, national coverage — all of that offends the Tea Party ethos that wants to keep the federal government out of every aspect of American life that does not involve bombing another country.
But that shouldn’t be a Catholic goal. The church has always been vocal about its mission to aid the needy, and there’s nobody needier than a struggling family without health care coverage. The bishops have a chance to break the peculiar bond between social conservatives and the fiscal hard right that presumes if Jesus returned today, his first move would be to demand the repeal of the estate tax.
Let’s move on. Blessed are the tweakers.
By: Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, February 10, 2012
How The Vatican Almost Embraced Birth Control
Since 1870, when the Roman Catholic Church formally pronounced popes infallible, a lot of Vatican energy has gone into claiming that doctrine never changes—that the church has been maintaining the same positions since the time of Jesus. Of course, historians know better: Dozens of church conferences, synods, and councils have regularly revised the teachings, all the while claiming utter consistency. Thus, when the advent of the birth control pill in the early ’60s coincided with a major push for church modernization, there was widespread hope among Catholics that the reform-minded Pope John XXIII would lift the church’s ban on contraception. After all, the Second Vatican Council had explicitly called for greater integration of scientific knowledge into church teaching.
John did establish a small commission for the Study of Problems of Population, Family, and Birth, which his successor, Paul VI, expanded to 58 members. Its job was to study whether the pill and issues such as population growth should lead to a change in the church’s prohibition on all forms of contraception (other than abstinence during periods of fertility—the “rhythm method”). The commission was led by bishops and cardinals, including a Polish bishop named Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II. (The Polish government did not allow Wojtyla to attend meetings.) They were assisted by scientists, theologians—including Protestants, whose church had ended its own opposition to contraception three decades earlier—and even several lay couples. One of them, Patty and Patrick Crowley from Chicago, carried letters and stories from Catholic women worn out by multiple pregnancies, medical problems, and the financial burdens of raising large families. The commission deliberated for two years, amid much anticipation from the faithful.
The Vatican’s position on birth control has long held something of a paradox: Catholics are encouraged to plan their families, to bear only the number of children they can afford, and to consider the impact of family size on a community and the planet. In recent years, under Pope Benedict XVI, the church has also made a major push to embrace environmental stewardship. Yet Catholicism has also been the most intransigent of the world’s religions on the subject of contraception, alone in denying its use even to married couples.
This may have made some theological sense in the first century of Christianity, when Jesus’ followers believed he would return in their lifetime: Their mission was to prepare for the Second Coming by devoting themselves to the worship of God. Sex, they believed, was a distraction. The good life was best lived in celibacy—even in marriage. When the wait for the Second Coming evaporated, the belief that sex for its own sake was sinful did not, and abstinence remained the ideal.
Yet by the first half of the 20th century, change seemed to be in the air. In 1930, Pius XII issued the encyclical (papal letter) Casti Connubii (“on chaste wedlock”), which acknowledged that couples could seek pleasure in their sexual relations, so long as the act was still linked to procreation. Then, in 1966, Paul VI’s birth control commission presented its preliminary report to the pope. It held big news: The body had overwhelmingly voted to recommend lifting the prohibition on contraceptives. (The former Archbishop of Brussels, Cardinal Leo Suenens, went so far as to say the church needed to confront reality and avoid another “Galileo case.”)
Catholics rejoiced, and many began using the pill at once. But their hopes were dashed when, in July 1968, Paul VI released an encyclical titled Humanae Vitae (“on human life”), reaffirming the contraceptive ban. It turned out that three dissenting bishops on the commission had privately gone to plead with the pope: If the position on contraceptives was changed, they said, the teaching authority of the church would be questioned—the faithful could no longer trust the hierarchy.
Ironically, it was the prohibition on contraception that would help erode the church’s power with European and American Catholics. Laypeople overwhelmingly disregarded it, and bishops throughout Europe undermined it with statements reassuring couples to “follow their consciences.” American bishops were more circumspect, but a survey of Catholic priests in the early ’70s showed that about 60 percent of them believed the prohibition was wrong. Father Andrew Greeley, a noted sociologist, traces the decline in church membership and even vocations to the priesthood in the mid-1970s to Catholics’ disillusionment with the church’s integrity on birth control.
The church then turned its attention to Africa and Latin America—where bishops were more dependent on the Vatican for support, and Catholics, it was thought, were more traditional in their views of marriage and sexuality. The Vatican was able to keep the flock wary of modern birth control in part by linking it to colonialism: The West, the argument went, wanted to control poor people and reduce their numbers, instead of addressing the causes of their poverty.
A Congressional Research Service report on the 1994 United Nations population conference in Cairo recounts the church’s decades-long fight against population and family planning aid: “The Vatican…has sought support for its views from the developing world by accusing the West of ‘biological colonialism’ in promoting family planning programs and has sought allies in the fundamentalist Islamic nations of Libya and Iran.” (In this endeavor, it had the support of the Reagan and Bush administrations, which battled global family planning efforts seen as Trojan horses for abortion rights.)
The birth control-equals-colonialism argument was undercut, however, at the 1994 conference, when the UN for the first time framed the right to reproductive health as a human right. The shift was unwelcome news inside the Vatican—where the conservative Pope John Paul II had begun to dismantle some of the reforms of the ’60s—and it hardened the church’s resolve. Suddenly, opposition to contraception became almost as high a priority as battling abortion. At the UN, the Holy See announced that if family planning were designated as a part of primary health care—a designation that would define the terms of international aid for churches and NGOs.
Even US bishops, who had pretty much ignored contraception for 20 years, began a fresh effort to persuade American Catholics. A new “theology of the body” postulated that eschewing artificial contraceptives could foster deeper, more spiritual relationships, even—in a bit of Goddess-speak—put women in touch with nature. But few Catholics bought into the new rhetoric; it is estimated that pill use among American Catholic women is slightly higher than in the US population at large.
What will it take to get past this paradox? In my view, nothing short of a change in the rules that prohibit priests from marrying. It is no accident that the religions most in favor of contraception—such as Anglicanism—are those that have long allowed their clergy to marry. The Catholic Church had married priests for its first 1,000 years, until it became difficult to support their wives and children (and to determine which property belonged to the church and which to the family).
The vehemence with which today’s church defends the ban on contraception—Benedict XVI has shown no sign of departing from his predecessor’s position on the issue—is the same with which it refuses to consider a change to the celibacy principle. No pope understood this better than John Paul II, who reserved his harshest condemnation for priests who defied the marriage ban. He knew that if the church’s leaders had families to provide for, the ban on contraception wouldn’t have a prayer.
This story originally ran under the headline “Close Your Eyes and Think of Rome: How close did the Vatican come to embracing birth control?”
By: Frances Kissling, Mother Jones, February 10, 2012
“Version 4.0”: The Return Of Culture Warrior Mitt Romney
It’s easy to forget, but the iteration of Mitt Romney we see in 2012 is by no means similar to the 2008 version. If Romney 1.0 was an independent who distanced himself from Reagan, and Romney 2.0 was a moderate Republican with sensible positions on social issues and health care, Romney 3.0 was a social conservative who cared deeply about the culture war.
It was that third version who sought the Republican nomination four years ago, working under the assumption that this wing of the party would never accept John McCain or Rudy Giuliani, so he could be the far-right standard bearer.
For the 2012 race, Romney has moved on to a yet another persona — version 4.0 is an outsider businessman, representing the GOP establishment and the top 1% — but that doesn’t mean he’s unwilling to try on his old costumes from time to time.
With Rick Santorum positioning himself as a credible rival, and Newt Gingrich baiting Romney “into a discussion of religious values,” we’re getting another look at a facade we haven’t seen in a while: Culture Warrior Mitt.
Consider Romney’s message of late:
On marriage equality, Romney, who used to be a moderate on LGBT issues, was disgusted by yesterday’s Prop 8 ruling in California: “That prospect underscores the vital importance of this election and the movement to preserve our values. I believe marriage is between a man and a woman and, as president, I will protect traditional marriage and appoint judges who interpret the Constitution as it is written and not according to their own politics and prejudices.”
On Planned Parenthood, Romney is not only eager to cut off the health organization from all public funding, he endorsed Komen for the Cure’s original decision to eliminate grants to Planned Parenthood. (Romney attended a Planned Parenthood fundraiser in Massachusetts in 1994.)
On contraception, Romney is investing a great deal of energy in attacking the Obama administration over its decision to characterize contraception as preventive care in all health insurance plans. That Romney used to agree with Obama has apparently been forgotten.
On religion in public life, Romney has begun adding more faith talk in his stump speech, as evidenced by an appearance in Colorado yesterday. “When they wrote the Declaration of Independence, they chose their words with care,” Romney said. “The state did not endow us with our rights, nor did the king. Instead, the Creator endowed us with our rights.”
Whether social-conservative voters buy any of this remains to be seen. Romney’s Mormon faith, which is a deal-breaker for some evangelicals, and the fact that he was a pro-choice moderate a few versions ago, makes the pitch difficult. But if the race for the Republican nomination becomes a protracted fight, don’t be surprised if Culture Warrior Mitt sticks around for a while.
By: Steve Benen, Maddow Blog, February 8, 2012
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 