Right Wing Will Stop At Nothing To Get Its Way
In a perfect world, advocates for women’s health who believe human life begins at the instant of fertilization, and advocates of women’s health who believe in a women’s right to choose, ought to be able to find common ground in their shared mission of finding a cure for cancer.
Liberals were at least willing to give it try. Out of respect for the ethical misgivings of religious conservatives, liberals agreed all funds raised for cancer research and screenings ought to be carefully segregated from the financial support given for abortion services so that no one morally opposed to abortion would feel compelled to lend support to the procedure, however indirectly.
But conservatives were having none of it. In their mind abortion is a sin and a crime and that was that. Any organization connected with the procedure was irredeemably unclean. This was true even if the organization in question performed many other life-saving works and if abortion constituted just 3% of the overall health services the organization provided.
And so, the life-giving alliance between two of the nation’s most prominent organizations in the fight against breast cancer – Planned Parenthood and the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation — may forever be ruined after Komen leaders temporarily pulled funding for Planned Parenthood in deference to the demands of anti-abortion contributors who have long targeted Planned Parenthood for extinction.
The estrangement of these two long-time allies could very well set back the cause of finding a cure for breast cancer, a disease that killed an estimated 39,500 women in 2011 with more than 230,000 new cases reported. But fighting breast cancer seems less important in the minds of anti-abortion militants than destroying an organization they detest as evil.
Even within the Komen organization itself the decision by Komen’s brass to sever all ties with Planned Parenthood seemed to come out of nowhere. That may help explain the angry letters written by those at Komen’s local affiliates who announced they would defy their bosses and continue doing business with Planned Parenthood no matter what the organization’s new policy may have been.
Nonetheless, conservatives were quick to blame liberals for the rift, saying liberals should have been more sensitive to the concerns of abortion opponents in the first place by recognizing that associating in any way with any organization that provides abortions was, for the religiously devout, utterly impossible.
In a column harshly critical of the media’s portrayal of Komen’s leadership as betraying the health needs of women, New York Times conservative Ross Douthat said the decision by Komen to disassociate itself “from the nation’s largest abortion provider” was no more “political” than was the decision by liberals to enlist Planned Parenthood in the fight against cancer in the first place.
For every American who greeted Komen’s decision with outrage and derision, says Douthat, “there was probably an American who was relieved and gratified” by the funding cut for Planned Parenthood, since there are “millions of Americans, including millions of American women” who loath the organization for the 300,000-plus abortions it performs every year and for its “tireless opposition to even modest limits on abortion.”
Maybe. But after conceding that the fight against breast cancer should be “unifying and completely uncontroversial,” Douthat then attacked the media for suggesting the fight against breast cancer should take priority over the objections of abortion opponents, as well as for what he called the “wave of frankly brutal coverage” against anyone seen as sabotaging the fight against cancer with their ideologically-motivated objections.
That the fight to save lives could actually be undermined by those who advertise themselves as “pro-life” is further proof that the most important contribution the Founding Fathers made to democratic thought was to separate religious commitments from governing ones.
The whole point of politics, writes professor Theodore Lowi, is in fact to “trivialize all manner of beliefs drawn from private life” – including religious belief — so as to put them into a form where they can dealt with politically, meaning where compromise is possible.
That is because when private beliefs are pursued without full appreciation of their public consequences, “Act I of the tragedy of the true believer has begun,” he says.
The price we pay for living in a diverse and modern world is that there can be few, if any, non-negotiable demands. The price we pay for securing “domestic tranquility,” in other words, is that we must be governed by politics and not by rote application of rigid religious dogmas or political ideologies where life’s complexities are resolved by reference to 10 easily memorized talking points – or commandments.
Predictably, those who oppose Planned Parenthood and the good-faith compromises that have been made to keep the focus on breast cancer prevention have framed their dispute as an extension of their Constitutionally-guaranteed right to freedom of “worship.”
It’s a trump “People of Faith” have been playing a lot.
Just this Sunday, the letter from our own Cardinal that was distributed at Mass began peacefully enough with a greeting to all his “dear brothers and sisters in Christ.” But then, sparing no words, the Cardinal took out after President Obama like Thomas Jefferson against George III as our Cardinal inveighed against a decision by the President on birth control the Cardinal said “strikes at the fundamental right to religious liberty of all citizens of any faith.”
I’ll make a deal with the Cardinal: He can have his waiver from the government’s new requirement to provide birth control if the Church puts its objections up for a vote with its employees. Since we’re talking religious liberty here, let’s see if Catholic workers think their religious freedoms are being imperiled by having access to health insurance that pays for birth control.
If workers vote to deny themselves coverage for contraception because their religious convictions forbid it, then I for one agree we should honor that. I’d also be willing to grant the Church a waiver if it agrees to first divest itself of all those benefits it gets from the government and from We the People. But otherwise, the Church must pay to play.
Let’s keep things in perspective here. The Catholic Church maintains schools, hospitals and charitable organizations to fulfill its mission of service to the community. But it also supports these institutions in order to enhance its political power and its ability to use those institutions to shape American culture generally.
It’s in disputes just like these that the Church’s true political nature is revealed to us as the Church flexes its political muscle and shows just how elastic its definitions of “religious worship” really are.
We’re not talking about penitents singing psalms in their pews. In the present dispute, to “worship” means to advance the Church’s anti-contraception agenda by denying contraception coverage to even those non-Catholics who work for the Church, using the premiums it pays as leverage to re-frame the nature of its disagreement with President Obama as one over “religious freedom.”
In the debate over “Obamacare,” “worship” meant pressing for further restrictions on abortion by using as leverage the fact that taxpayer dollars were being used to subsidize the coverage of 50 million uninsured Americans.
But the Church hardly needs provocation or pretexts like these to advance a political agenda or to hide that agenda behind the First Amendment and glittering generalities about religious liberty.
For the Catholic hierarchy, freedom of worship means the right to prevail politically and on any matter Church leaders decide is important.
I remember very well working for Massachusetts Governor Paul Cellucci when then Boston Cardinal Bernard Law made a special trip to the State House to fight us on the Governor’s nomination of Margaret Marshall to be the first woman chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. The Cardinal opposed Justice Marshall because she had ruled in favor of abortion rights in the past. And despite the Cardinal’s objection, she was confirmed anyway.
Law, who was later forced to step down in disgrace over his shocking mishandling of the Church’s child abuse scandal in Boston, continued a long tradition of politically promiscuous Bay State Catholic leaders dating back to Cardinal William O’Connell, who towered over Boston politics from 1908 to 1944.
“Authoritarian in temper, medieval in outlook, Cardinal O’Connell sought to remake Boston’s Catholics as soldiers of a modern day Counter Reformation,” wrote Jack Beatty, senior editor of the Boston-based Atlantic Monthly.
Among O’Connell’s political dark horrors, Massachusetts killed a proposed amendment banning child labor that the Cardinal called “socialistic” because it put “the State above the Parents” – presumably preventing those parents from hiring out their children as indentured servants if they so wished.
Along with the rest of the Catholic hierarchy, O’Connell also fought liberalization efforts to legalize the sale and distribution of contraceptives – even for non-Catholics – fueling a controversy that wasn’t resolved until the Supreme Court finally ruled anti-contraceptive laws unconstitutional in 1965.
And, until the 1960’s when these laws were finally repealed, women who taught in the Massachusetts public schools were compelled to resign once they became pregnant because of the Church’s objections to women with small children who worked.
Across the board in American politics today — and not only in matters of religion – right wing interests have been undermining America’s democratic institutions and conventions by insisting we bow down to their demands that they get to re-shape America entirely to their liking.
Politically, we’ve seen this manifested in the institutionalization in the US Senate of minority rule by mostly Southern reactionaries.
Culturally, we’ve seen it in the resurgence of talk about state’s rights for sub-groups, like white conservative Christians, who are dominant at the local level and hope to resist national standards on such things as gender, racial and religious equality.
Even in economics, demands by Republicans that public policy be geared almost exclusively toward assuaging investor “uncertainty” can be seen as a massive redistribution of political sovereignty away from the public and toward the rich who ultimately gain whenever the public interest is subordinated to the arbitrary and subjective whims of the “job creating” investor class.
The larger danger we are talking about here goes by an old-fashioned name that the Founding Fathers used a lot: “Faction.”
The friend of democratic government never finds himself so alarmed for their character and fate “as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice,” writes James Madison in his famous Federalist 10.
And it’s the “instability, injustice and confusion” of factions like a Catholic Church that equates politics with Constitutionally-protected “worship,” or the financial backers who pressured the Komen foundation to compromise its own life-saving mission to advance an extreme pro-life agenda, that Madison said has always been “the mortal disease under which popular governments have everywhere perished.”
Like the leaders of most faction, the Catholic bishops say they are not running a democracy here. And they are right. But the bigger question is whether they will let us have one at all.
By: Ted Frier, OpenSalon, February 7, 2012
Why Evangelicals Don’t Like Mormons
According to a CNN exit poll of South Carolina Republican primary voters, Newt Gingrich, a thrice-married Catholic, won twice as much support from evangelical Protestants as Mitt Romney, a Protestant. And among voters for whom religion meant “a great deal,” 46 percent voted for Mr. Gingrich and only 10 percent for Mr. Romney.
This is the second evangelical-heavy state Mr. Romney has lost. With a third, Florida, next on the list, it’s important to consider the often antagonistic skepticism that many evangelicals have of Mr. Romney’s brand of Protestantism: Mormonism.
For many evangelicals, that faith — a “false religion,” as the Baptist pastor Robert Jeffress called it — raises serious doubts about Mr. Romney’s suitability for office. But such concerns ultimately say more about the insecurities of the establishment denominations than about Mormonism itself.
Many evangelicals assert that Mormonism denies the divinity of Christ and is therefore not a branch of Christianity. But the Mormon belief is that Jesus was the first-born child of God and a woman, and that humans can aspire to share his spiritual essence in the afterlife.
What’s more, if a belief in Christ’s divinity were used as a test of our politicians, many past American leaders would fail abysmally. Most of the founding fathers — including Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine — endorsed deism, which sees Jesus as a very good human being, not part of the godhead.
It was precisely the founders’ religious tolerance that, over the years, has given rise to many new denominations and sects — particularly during the so-called Second Great Awakening, the 19th-century period of religious revivals that energized existing churches (including the Baptist and Methodist churches, bulwarks of today’s Bible Belt) and yielded new ones, including the Mormons.
In that era, it was a short step from feeling that one was possessed by God, as often happened at revivals, to feeling that one was appointed by God for a special mission. Joseph Smith Jr., who founded Mormonism after experiencing a vision of an angel, was among them.
But Smith wasn’t alone; many religious groups sprouted during the period. Like Mormonism, some were founded by people considered divinely inspired by their followers — for instance, Ellen G. White by Seventh-day Adventists and Mary Baker Eddy by Christian Scientists — while others, like Charles Taze Russell of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, were admired for their charisma.
There’s plenty about these and other surviving Protestant groups that’s out of sync with mainstream religion. Christian Scientists, for instance, eschew doctors and medicine. Seventh-day Adventists have often set dates for the end of the world that have come and gone, while Jehovah’s Witnesses reject the doctrines of the Trinity and eternal punishment.
But neither those nor other American-bred religions arouse nearly the degree of anxiety that Mormonism does. Why?
For one thing, many people associate Mormonism with polygamy; according to a recent poll, 86 percent of Americans aren’t sure whether Mormons practice polygamy, despite the fact that the church banned the practice in 1890.
Then there’s the issue of race. In 1852 the church banished blacks from the priesthood and did not allow them back in until 1978. But while this is undoubtedly a stain on the church’s history, it was also a reflection of the country’s racial attitudes at the time.
Still, the church’s doctrines and practices, past and present, don’t fully account for evangelical uneasiness. After all, there are hundreds of religious groups in America today, some of whose tenets or practices are far more distant from the mainstream.
The real issue for many evangelicals is Mormonism’s remarkable success and rapid expansion. It is estimated to have missionaries in 162 countries and a global membership of some 14 million; it is also, from its base in the American West, making inroads into Hispanic communities. Put simply, the Baptists and Methodists, while still ahead of the Mormons numerically, are feeling the heat of competition from Joseph Smith’s tireless progeny.
Some evangelical leaders take this a step further to accuse Mr. Romney of vaguely conspiratorial motives. The Baptist minister R. Philip Roberts, author of “Mormonism Unmasked,” recently said that evangelicals are concerned not about Mr. Romney promoting his faith as president, but about the great boost a Mormon presidency would give to the church’s proselytizing efforts.
There is particular worry that Mr. Romney, a wealthy, prominent figure in the church, is too close to his faith. How else to explain the concern among evangelicals when it became public that Mr. Romney had tithed some $4 million to the church over the last two years?
Interdenominational competition may also explain why the faith of Mr. Romney’s father, George Romney, went unchallenged when he ran for president in 1968. Back then Mormonism was a much smaller, and therefore less controversial, part of the religious landscape.
Amid the passions of this election season, it’s time to revive the tolerant spirit of the founding fathers. Religious competition of any kind, they believed, can breed bigotry, repression and hatred. The founders made an earnest effort to keep religion out of politics. Let’s do the same as we carry out the important work of choosing our next president.
By: David Reynolds, The New York Times Opinion Pages, January 25, 2012
Mitt Romney’s Mormon And Evangelical Divide
In the Republican nomination contest, where evangelicals represent a broader segment of the voting population than the general election, it’s widely accepted that Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith could cost him. Romney’s tax returns brought his faith back into the limelight when it was revealed that he does in fact tithe around 10 percent of his earnings to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as dictated by church rules.
Yet, in the weeks preceding the Iowa caucuses, I didn’t run across a single Republican who had ruled out Romney on the basis of his religion—or at least no voters willing to admit as such to a reporter. The worst I would get from the Iowans was concern that other people in the general election would be hesitant to cast their ballot for a Mormon, though they themselves were of course not influenced by that factor.
I arrived in Florida this week to cover the last few days of the Sunshine State’s primary, and at the very first event I attended, one voter made no qualms about why she wouldn’t be supporting Romney. “Mitt Romney is a Mormon, and therefore I have some issues with that,” said Peggy Bennett, a nurse from Cocoa. We were speaking in a crowded ballroom before Newt Gingrich’s big speech on space policy. When I asked her what specifically concerned her about the Mormon faith, Bennett said, “anything that adds to or takes away from what the bible says is not of God.” She said she was torn between Gingrich and Rick Santorum in the primary, but did clarify that she would support Romney in the general election if he wins the nomination.
I don’t want to extrapolate too much from one random voter, but many voters in the room noted that Gingrich’s tone matched evangelical interests. “From his moral standards, he pretty much thinks in the Christian and the evangelical side of things,” said Pete Bell. The central Florida corridor that might decide next Tuesday’s election is dotted with mega-churches featuring congregations with thousands of members who all share common convictions. In fact, the overflow parking for the Gingrich event was across the street from a small evangelical church.
This is the land of exurbs and subdivisions; despite high statewide unemployment and foreclosures there are still plenty of gaudy displays of wealth. When Romney campaigns in central Florida perhaps he can finally let loose among his fellow rich Americans. But while few voters may be as direct as Bennett on classifying their exact reason to oppose Romney, he’ll need to assure many that being a Mormon doesn’t threaten their evangelical faith.
By: Patrick Caldwell, The American Prospect, January 26, 2012
Church vs State: Election 2012’s Great Religious Divide
We have embarked on yet another presidential campaign in which religion will play an important role without any agreement over what the ground rules for that engagement should be.
If you think we’re talking past each other on jobs and budgets, consider the religious divide. One side says “separation of church and state” while the other speaks of “religion’s legitimate role in the public square.” Each camp then sees the question as closed and can get quite self-righteous in avoiding the other’s claims.
Anyone who enters this terrain should do so with fear and trembling. But a few things ought to be clear, and let’s start with this: The Mormon faith of Mitt Romney or Jon Huntsman should not be an issue in this campaign. Period.
In the United States, we have no religious tests for office. It’s true that this constitutional provision does not prevent a voter from casting a ballot on any basis he or she wishes to use. Nonetheless, it’s the right assumption for citizens in a pluralistic democracy.
All Americans ought to empathize with religious minorities because each of us is part of one. If Mormonism can be held against Romney and Huntsman, then everyone else’s tradition — and, for nonbelievers, their lack of religious affiliation — can be held against them, too. We have gone down this road before. Recall the ugly controversy over Catholicism when Al Smith and John F. Kennedy sought the presidency. We shouldn’t want to repeat the experiences of 1928 or 1960.
But to say this is not the same as saying that religion should be excluded from politics. The test should be: To what extent would a candidate’s religious views affect what he or she might do in office?
Many beliefs rooted in a tradition (the Virgin Birth, how an individual keeps kosher laws, precisely how someone conceives the afterlife) are not relevant in any direct way to how a candidate would govern. In the case of Mormonism, those who disagree with its religious tenets are free to do so but they should argue about them outside the confines of a political campaign.
Yet there are many questions — and not just concerning abortion — on which the ethical and moral commitments that arise from faith would have a direct impact on what candidates might do in office. Those should be argued about. My own views on poverty, equality and social justice, for example, have been strongly influenced by Catholic social thought, the Old Testament prophets and the civil rights preachers. Religious conservatives have arrived at convictions quite different in many cases from mine, after reflection on their own faith and their traditions.
Neither they nor I have a right to use the state to impose such views on religious grounds. That’s the essence of the pluralist bargain. But we can make a religious case for them if we wish.
This leads to a conclusion that the philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain reached some years ago: “Separation of church and state is one thing. Separation of religion and politics is something else altogether. Religion and politics flow back and forth in American civil society all the time — always have, always will.”
That is entirely true. It’s also not as simple as it sounds. For if religious people fairly claim that faith has a legitimate place in public life, they must accept that the public (including journalists) is fully justified in probing how that faith might influence what they would do with political power.
Religious people cannot have it both ways: to assert that their faith really matters to their public engagement, and then to insist, when it’s convenient, that religion is a matter about which no one has a right to ask questions. Voters especially have a right to know how a candidate’s philosophical leanings shape his or her attitudes toward the religious freedom of unbelievers as well as believers.
And here’s the hardest part: We all have to ask ourselves whether what we claim to be hearing as the voice of faith (or of God) may in fact be nothing more than the voice of our ideology or political party. We should also ask whether candidates are merely exploiting religion to rally some part of the electorate to their side. The difficulty of answering both questions — given the human genius for rationalization — might encourage a certain humility that comes hard to most of us, and perhaps, above all, to people who write opinion columns.
Why Perry’s Backers Won’t Lay Off Romney’s Mormonism
Mitt Romney beats Rick Perry among all Republicans — men, women, young, old — except the “very conservative,” The Wall Street Journal‘s Gerald F. Seib observes. Perhaps that’s why Perry didn’t distance himself too much from Robert Jeffress, the Dallas preacher who called Mormonism a “cult.” And why, as The Daily Beast’s McKay Coppinsreports, another important minister who’s a big backer of Perry has been emailing supporters about the need to start “juxtaposing traditional Christianity to the false God of Mormonism.”
David Lane was in charge of raising money for the national prayer meeting in early August that was the unofficial kickoff to Perry’s presidential campaign. He was among the key Christian leaders who pushed Perry to run, Time‘s Amy Sullivan reports. On October 12, Dick Bott, head of the Chrstian talk Bott Radio Network, emailed Lane that he would be interviewing Jeffress, saying Jeffress was right to question Romney’s faith: “What would anyone think if a candidate were a Scientologist? … Shouldn’t they want to know what the implications were that may flow therefrom?”
On October 13, Lane replied: “Thank you for what you are doing and for your leadership. Getting out Dr. Jeffress message, juxtaposing traditional Christianity to the false god of Mormonism, is very important in the larger scheme of things … We owe Dr. Jeffress a big thank you.”
Coppins says the emails give reason to wonder whether Jeffress’s comments were “a deliberate strategic move by the campaign.” He notes that in other emails, Lane talks about talking with a “key Perry aide” about “the creation of a clarion call to Evangelical pastors and pews is critical and from my perspective is the key to the Primary.”
Lane stood by his comments in an email to “friends” after the story was posted, Real Clear Politics’ Scott Conroy reports. Lane pointed to a story in The New York Times about Romney’s role in his church and how he counseled a young alcoholic “Are you trying to improve, are you trying to do better? And if you are, then you’re a saint.” Lane said that belief was “not Christian.” He continued in his email, “If the secular Press’ bullying over the ‘cult issue’ fails to censor those voices who are calling into question the theological legitimacy of a ‘group sharing belief’ (political correctness for Cult), Romney is going to have to defend his and the Mormon’s ‘bizarre’ Articles of Faith.”
“Polling conducted for the Washington Post and ABC News, Gallup, and the Pew Research Center in recent months has shown between 20 and 25 percent of Americans say they either won’t vote for a Mormon or would be less likely to vote for one,” The Washington Post‘s Aaron Blake writes. Social conservative voters in Iowa — where Perry needs to do well in the caucuses — aren’t likely to vote for Romney. But Mormons were a quarter of the voters in Nevada’s caucuses in 2008; 95 percent of them voted for Romney. Politico’s Maggie Haberman observes that “The surest way for Perry to get a second look is for Romney’s negatives to go up — a fact his supporters seem to realize.” After all, as The Journal’s Seib notes, “60 percent of very conservative voters still say they have overall positive feelings about Mr. Romney.”
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