This morning an interesting three-way OpEd showed up in the Journal from Shaheen, Boxer and Murray, all Democratic Senators.
It managed, in a few column inches, to show exactly what's wrong with America when it comes to Health Care, and how the Catholic Church's decision to sleep with Satan led it to where it is now.
It was a historic victory for women's health when the Obama administration changed the law to require private health plans to provide preventive services including breast exams, HIV screening and contraception for free. This new policy will help millions of women get the affordable care they need.
Right there, in the first sentence, our three esteemed Senators show exactly how stupid they are, and where the root of the problem lies.
Nothing is ever free and when everyone is forced to buy a thing then everyone is forced to pay for it, which means that all this "mandate" has done is "spread the cost" to those who don't use such services. As a consequence not even the intended users gets their contraceptives, breast exams and HIV screenings "for free" -- they simply get to force others to pay for them.
Now, sadly, there is an aggressive and misleading campaign to deny this benefit to women.
Why shouldn't women pay for the services they wish to consume on their own? There is no "denial" of this "benefit"; since Obamacare contains an individual mandate there is no benefit at all since all are forced to pay, whether they will use it or not (or whether they even have the approprirate biological components to have a use for such things.)
It is being waged in the name of religious liberty. But the real forces behind it are the same ones that sought to shut down the federal government last year over funding for women's health care. They are the same forces that just tried to pressure the Susan G. Komen Foundation into cutting off funding to Planned Parenthood for breast-cancer screenings. Once again, they are trying to force their politics on women's personal health-care decisions.
The Komen Foundation is a private charity. It should thus be free to allocate its money as it sees fit. Only in the world of government force does such an argument arise; free speech cuts all ways, and those who fund that private charity have a right to demand that if the charity wishes to continue to receive their funding that it change its policies. The charity has a right to say no, and the donors have a right to stop donating.
Of course in the world of government none of these rights exist. This is, in fact, the trap the Catholic Church fell into originally, but it wasn't an accident. It was in fact their intentional throwing off of obligations that the Church has maintained for hundreds of years onto the State that led to this problem.
The Church loved this when it all worked their way. Rather than being the source of beneficience and charity, it has shoved off that onto state programs, thereby taking what was a voluntary act of donation and turning into a compulsion enforced by government with literal guns-up-the-nose through the power of taxation.
Turning tithing into taxation was the literal Holy Grail for the Church -- it was able to codify as a matter of law what was religious dogma. This, when it worked their way, was praised from the pulpit on Sunday and not one word was breathed about Establishment and its problems.
Of course that sort of tricksterism is the hallmark of Satan.
When you sleep with the Devil it rarely works out well.
The Church has never given a damn about the First Amendment's establishment clause when willfully ignoring it was to their benefit! By tossing off literal billions of dollars of annual expense in the United States alone that used to be allocated to charity works, from feeding the poor to running charity hospitals that provided care to people who had no money, The Church successfully avoided what was the historic source of these good works for the poor, funded entirely from voluntary donations.
Supporting the welfare state that has become built up in the western world has allowed The Church to slough off that obligation and maintain its wealth by substituting the power of government force for the power of persuasion from the pulpit.
There is also the hypocrisy of the Church's position, specifically:
Nationwide, 1.5 million women use contraceptives only as treatment for serious medical conditions.
True. Birth control pills are in fact prescribed for various menstrual disorders; in that use they are not intended as a "birth control" at all, but are instead a therapeutic drug. The Church's position of course is that women should suffer dysmenorrhea and related disorders in silence, as they believe that all drugs or devices that might interfere with conception are "intrinsically evil." Of course it is all men who make these decisions; I recognize that as a man I seem to lack the ability to comprehend in full the decisions involved here, as God did not grant me a uterus or ovaries. The Bishops, of course, have no problem arrogating medical decisions for others -- decisions they will never personally face in their own lives -- to themselves.
And now the punchline:
Consistent with other federal policies, churches and other groups dedicated to teaching religious doctrine are exempted from providing this coverage under a "conscience clause." But the law does include institutions that have historic religious ties but also have a broader mission, such as hospitals and universities. That's also consistent with federal policy—and with laws that already exist in many states.
Those now attacking the new health-coverage requirement claim it is an assault on religious liberty, but the opposite is true. Religious freedom means that Catholic women who want to follow their church's doctrine can do so, avoiding the use of contraception in any form. But the millions of American women who choose to use contraception should not be forced to follow religious doctrine, whether Catholic or non-Catholic.
Catholic hospitals and charities are woven into the fabric of our broader society. They serve the public, receive government funds, and get special tax benefits. We have a long history of asking these institutions to play by the same rules as all our other public institutions.
Yep.
The Church in fact took what was a uniquely private institution -- provision of charity through hospitals (run by the Church), food banks (ditto), soup kitchens and provision of shelter for homeless people and others in dire straights and preached for literal decades that the forced taking of money from the congregation, along with non-believers, was not only justified but a moral imperative, thereby relieving what was a consensual act of charity performed for The Lord and turning it into a legal obligation.
This burst of authoritarian jackboot application in fact met with the Church's explicit approval, not just silent assent. That same approval was voiced at the time EMTALA was passed in the 1980s when forced provision of care for the indigent came into law in the United States, taking what was a voluntary act and turning it into a legal imperative. The very same position -- that of forced provision of cost-shifted care, has been considered a laudable goal for literal decades by The Church when it comes to Medicaid and Medicare, both of which effectively force private payers and working people to subsidize medical care for those who are either indigent or retired and have saved nothing of their own.
Then, having championed this organized theft from the citizens at literal gunpoint The Church stepped up to the trough and lapped up its share of hard-wrought blood from the people, attaching itself to the federal tit and drawing mightily upon tax benefits and transfer payments for its institutions (such as hospitals) that were once funded instead by the generosity of those who decided to tithe on Sunday.
In short the Church has, for decades, supported the entirety of the legal framework and the Democratic Left's position that the provision of charity, which was once provided for through voluntary tithe, was "best" provided instead in large part through mandatory taxation.
The very same Church that now bleats about the chains imposed by government, in short, was more than happy to help that very same government apply the chains of both fiscal and moral bondage to your neck, establishment be damned.
The Bishops all need to drink a great big chalice of Shut-The-****-Up until and unless they reverse, in public, their explicit endorsement of Medicaid, Medicare, EMTALA and the rest of the blatantly unconstitutional and outrageous cost-shifting and forced charity that they have all supported for the last 50 years.
The author is a Libertarian Catholic.
