Seriously, this has now come down to wanting cheese with their whine?

The archbishop of Washington on Sunday accused the network news programs of  having "missed the boat" by largely ignoring lawsuits filed this past week by  Catholic institutions challenging the Obama administration's so-called  contraception mandate.

Cardinal Donald Wuerl, speaking on "Fox News Sunday," was responding to an  analysis by the conservative Media Research Center of how the networks' evening  newscasts treated coverage of the dozen federal lawsuits filed Monday. According  to the center, CBS spent 19 seconds on the story after it broke, while the other  networks gave it no coverage.

"It is puzzling, particularly since they're focusing so much attention right  now on the pope's butler," Wuerl said, in reference the scandal in which the  pope's butler Paolo Gabriele was charged with stealing sensitive documents and  is suspected of leaking them.

Whah.

Look, for those who seem to have forgotten reality, let's refresh.

Over the space of the last three decades (and in fact more, but we'll confine it here) the Church has knowingly and intentionally thrown off its Christian Mandate (that is, given by Christ) to provide for the poor who are in such a position by virtue of being less-fortunate (that is, who would prefer not to be.)

I draw this distinction because under canon law all prelates take a vow of poverty; they place their life in the hands of the Church and while they are due a modest salary for ordinary living expenses their living quarters and means of life are supposed to be modest and unassuming.  Some other people choose to live in what we call poverty as well; while most are not in that state out of free choice, some are, and it's important to draw the distinction.

The point here, my friends, is that The Church willfully, intentionally and maliciously violated the very First Amendment they now claim to want to use under the rubric of "religious freedom."

But for the Church lobbying for, demanding, backing, urging people to vote for candidates who support a "government safety net" and in fact preaching sermons for thirty years about how our government has a duty to do that which Christ says is The Church's mandate this situation would not have arisen at all.

You cannot spend thirty years constructing, fueling and putting in place a corrupt and evil version of what you are supposed to be doing, evading and avoiding your responsibility the entire time and by doing so failing to spend the resources you claim to have a mandate from God to expend, not just through sitting in silence but through activism and political promotion, all the time willfully and intentionally violating the First Amendment itself, and then be surprised when the viper who you have fed with your own hand turns and bites you.

Had the Church not undertaken these evil and outrageous acts there would be no EMTALA, there would be no monstrous ramp in health care costs in the first instance as the government protection racket that made it possible would not have existed, there would be no Medicaid or Medicare, the 600 (more than ten per State!) charity hospitals in this nation alone run by the Catholic Church would still be providing free medical services to the indigent out of their voluntarily-donated funds in the form of tithe from the congregation, our Federal Government would be half the size it is today, our Federal Debt would be half the size it is today and none of the laws or events that gave rise to the Bishop's complaints would have happened. 

This is self-inflicted harm exactly as the person who drags off the crack pipe and then has a heart attack has little room to blame the drugs -- he willingly and intentionally consumed the substance and therefore put his health at risk.

The Catholic Church has a simple means by which it can extricate itself from its own self-inflicted mess.  It can withdraw from all such endeavors, it can fund on an an entirely-private basis those 600 Catholic Hospitals, it can provide charity care to the indigent as it claims is its mission without one thin dime of Federal or State monies, and by doing so it can choose what care it provides and to whom it provides it.  In those hospitals it need not stock or dispense any drug or device it finds abhorrent, nor provide any such procedure since they will be entirely-private enterprises run solely with the Church's money -- not one dime of federal or state funds will be accepted.

At the same time the Church can demand that the government get the hell out of both the bedrooms of Americans and their medical decisions, putting its money where its mouth is by returning to providing for the indigent in America as it claims it has a mandate to do, rather than foisting off this alleged responsibility on government and then trying to make the argument that government must accede to its religious views.

The Bishop's argument is both intellectually and theologically bankrupt.

These guys strutting around with what looks like a post-hole digger on their heads ought to apply same to their ass and dig their brain out far enough that it receives some oxygen.