ReligionDispatches.org

After I posted about the Senate health care bill yesterday, the Democratic leadership held a press conference in which he declared that he wouldn't use the process of reconciliation to get the health care reform bill passed. But at the same time, it is unclear whether Majority Leader Harry Reid has the 60 votes he would need to bring the bill to the floor of the Senate for debate. As Greg Sargent reported at his Washington Post blog this morning, conservative Democrats are trying to use leverage their crucial vote to pressure Reid in order to get changes they want made to the bill.

Ben Nelson of Nebraska, one of the anti-choice Democrats in the Senate, said plainly that "he is not happy with the current abortion language in the Senate bill. But then he turned around and said that if his opposition to the public option is satisfied, it could help mollify him on the abortion question." (Here is a helpful comparison of the House (Stupak) and Senate versions of the abortion provisions.)

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If you haven't already read Kathryn Joyce's interview with the Rev. Kapya Kaoma, author of the new report, "Globalizing the Culture Wars," you should. It's vitally important stuff on how American evangelical leaders have succeeded in exporting -- and validating -- homophobia in Africa.

About Rick Warren, Kaoma notes: "In America Warren says 'I love gays.' In Africa, he says it's not a natural way of life. He's said, "I can't say this in America, but I can say it in Africa." In America, people will hold him responsible, and in Africa, nobody will.

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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid released the Senate's version of a health care reform bill last night, and it appears to essentially adopt a Capps rather than a Stupak approach to the abortion funding issue. That is, according to Ryan Grim at the Huffington Post, the bill "would require at least one plan within the health insurance exchange that the bill sets up to offer a plan that covers abortion and one that doesn't. It would also authorize the Health and Human Services Secretary to audit plans to make certain that abortion isn't being paid for with federal dollars."

Grim reports that Rep. Lois Capps (D-CA), who authored the abortion compromise in the House reviled by the religious right and its ally Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI), is satisfied with the language, as is Barbara Boxer (D-CA), a leading pro-choice senator.

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Former NARAL Pro-Choice America president Kate Michelman and our own Frances Kissling have an excellent op-ed in today's New York Times, arguing that the setback for womens' reproductive freedom in the Stupak amendment is a result of the Democratic Party's pandering to religion as much as it is a product of religious right lobbying. In its quest to "get religion" and build a larger majority in Congress by recruiting anti-choice candidates to run in conservative districts, the party has cravenly punted on womens' freedom and health.

They are absolutely right, and although President Obama came out on Monday against Stupak*, I wonder if he has the gumption to get serious about fixing it in either the Senate or final version of the bill. Both candidate and president Obama have a history of backpedaling on abortion rights.

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In an op-ed in Politico, Catholics for Choice president Jon O'Brien and NARAL Pro-Choice America president Nancy Keenan question whether the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has a double standard when it comes to how to segregate public funds from private funds. On the one hand, the USCCB insisted on the Stupak amendment, claiming that accounting arrangements in the Capps amendment to the health care reform bill were inadequate to ensure that public money would not be used to cover an abortion. Yet on the other hand, many of its affiliates receive federal monies and grants, which they must segregate from private funds. The federal monies cannot constitutionally be used for inherently sectarian actvities, while they are free to use their private funds as they like.

In both the case of federal funding for abortion and separation of church and state, the conservative side makes broad, moral arguments for their position, while the more progressive side makes technical ones.

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When it came down to it last weekend, the House Democratic leadership believed that it needed a handful more votes from Democrats to pass the health care reform bill, and the only way to secure them was to consent to the wishes of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB).

"At the end of the day," says Jessica Arons, Director of the Women's Health and Rights Program at the Center for American Progress and a member of its Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative, "politicians still fall back on their own conventional wisdom and tried to privilege one religious perspective over another. It's the politician's perception of who commands more power."

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Chuck Currie objects to Rep. Lynn Woolsey's call to have the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' (USCCB) tax-exempt status investigated because of its advocacy for the Stupak-Pitts amendment to the House health care bill. Currie says Woolsey's proposal infringes on religious freedom.

It's hard imagine any religious group on the right or left coming out in favor of that kind of restriction. Similar arguments have been about the LDS Church because of its politicking against gay marriage in California and the USCCB in Maine. But as Currie notes, there are First Amendment implications to restricting issue advocacy.

But churches and their affiliated organizations do receive special privileges from the government, and the case of the intervention of the USCCB in health care reform legislation highlights how they are not only exempted from paying taxes, but also from the transparency rules other tax-exempt organizations are required to follow.

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Amy Sullivan was right when she wrote Saturday that "not all pro-life Democrats are the same." Some of them represent essentially Democratic districts, and some, like Bart Stupak, represent essentially Republican ones.

Stupak, Sullivan wrote, "represents a district so Republican that as one of his pro-life colleagues once told me, 'Bart simply couldn't win without the endorsement of the National Right to Life Committee. So he has to end up taking a much harder line than the rest of us do.'" That says it all, doesn't it? It's not about religion, it's not about the Catholic bishops, it's about getting re-elected in a Republican district.

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Much has been made about how the House leadership permitted a vote on the abortion-restricting Stupak-Pitts amendment in order to get the blessing of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) for the Affordable Health Care for America Act. The USCCB, we are told, was so dedicated to the prospect of universal health care it shipped bulletin inserts to parishes across America, demanding that parishioners call upon their representatives to vote against the bill if it did not sufficiently restrict abortion.

As far as the abortion restriction, the USCCB apparently persuaded 35 Catholic Democrats to vote for its approved Stupak-Pitts amendment. Given the USCCB's teaching on the subject, you might then expect all 35 of them to go on to vote for the bill. But only 29 of them did.

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On Saturday, Fr. Frank Pavone, National Director of the virulently anti-choice Priests for Life, announced that his organization would be distributing the voting records of every member of Congress on the Stupak-Pitts amendment to every Catholic parish in the United States, "with instructions to each pastor on how to make clear to his congregation the implications of how that congregation's representative voted," according to a press release. The plan, declared a statement from Pavone, is "to inform pastors of these voting records is phase one of a year-long effort to activate Churches as never before regarding what they can legally do in preparation for next year's midterm elections. Publishing voting records in a non-partisan fashion is certainly one of those activities."

But a church-state separation watchdog questions whether Pavone's plan violates IRS rules against churches endorsing political candidates.

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Last night, the House of Representatives passed the Affordable Health Care for America Act, which included an amendment forced by Reps. Bart Stupak (D-MI) and Joseph Pitts (R-PA), one of the most vociferous opponents of legal abortion in the House. By appeasing Stupak (and the 63 other Democrats who voted for the amendment, 39 of whom 23 of whom went on to vote against the overall bill), the House leadership secured passage of the overall bill, but at a cost to womens' reproductive health.

The amendment would, according to the statement of Planned Parenthood Federation of America President Cecile Richards condemning the amendment's passage, "result in women losing health benefits they have today. Simply put, the Stupak/Pitts amendment would restrict women’s access to abortion coverage in the private health insurance market, undermining the ability of women to purchase private health plans that cover abortion, even if they pay for most of the premiums with their own money. This amendment reaches much further than the Hyde Amendment, which has prohibited public funding of abortion in most instances since 1977."

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Vision America's Rick Scarborough, a "Christian nation" warrior, Mike Huckabee endorser, and author of the book Liberalism Kills Kids, has just weighed in with a statement on the Fort Hood shootings:

We know that Dr. Hasan is a devout Muslim who once told a fellow officer that "Muslims have a right to stand up against the U.S. military." Clearly, yesterday's rampage was not motivated by love. Given Hasan's worldview, it's probable that he was motivated in part by an animus toward Christians and Jews. Assuming that murder charges are brought against him, will Hasan also be charged with a hate crime?

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Justin Elliott reports at TPM on how the author of Muslim Mafia, the WorldNetDaily-produced screed about an alleged infiltration of Capitol Hill by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), is claiming that alleged Fort Hood shooter Major Nidal Malik Hasan is taking orders from CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood.

That sort of fifth column conspiracy theory -- that Muslim extremists bent on replacing the Constitution with sharia law are frighteningly in our midst -- is the bread and butter of a cottage industry of Islamophobia found in some conservative and religious right circles.

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This morning, the lead headline on the Washington Post's web site read: "Hazy, contradictory picture of suspect emerges." That might be due to the rampant speculation and fact-free "reporting" that has dominated coverage of yesterday's tragedy at Fort Hood.

Maj. Nidal M. Hasan allegedly went on yesterday's shooting rampage that killed 13 and injured more than 30 more at the Army base in Texas. He is an Army psychiatrist born in the northern Virginia suburbs and is described in some accounts as a "devout Muslim." But even before that detail emerged, the internet was aflame with speculation -- based on Hasan's name, of course -- that the shootings had something to do with Hasan's religion.

Of course that leads many to jump to conclusions: did religion cause him to pull the trigger? Is a terrorist in our midst?

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Virginia Democrats, particularly ones in densely populated Fairfax County, had been pleased with their showings in the last few election cycles. For the first time in decades, the county had gone blue, turning out majorities for Governor Tim Kaine in 2005 and President Obama in 2008.

Last night that trend reversed course, as Republicans took not just Fairfax but the entire commonwealth, winning races for governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general by wide margins. The gubernatorial victory is particularly the apple of Pat Robertson's eye. His vision of taking over culture and politics by building an interlocking political machine, media empire, and educational system seems to have come to fruition. Bob McDonnell, a graduate of Robertson's Regent University, became governor of Virginia.

How did he win -- with a 14 percentage point margin? By not talking about the culture war his education had molded him to fight.

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As Peter Laarman noted here, and is making its way around the blogosphere, the Senate version of the health care reform bill would cover "spiritual care," at the behest of Christian Scientists.

The amendment at issue, which has no counterpart in the House version of the bill, was sponsored by Republican Orrin Hatch, with the support of Democrats John Kerry and the late Ted Kennedy. The Massachusetts connection (the Christian Scientists are headquartered in Massachusetts) goes back a way:  Kennedy played a key role in getting similar coverage in Medicare in the 1990s.

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At his Christian Broadcasting Network blog, David Brody thinks that disgraced former Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed has a promising future in mobilizing the religious right through his Faith and Freedom Coalition, launched earlier this year. Reed has his ground troops out in Virginia in support of Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell.

Common link: Pat Robertson founded the Christian Coalition. McDonnell attended Robertson's university. Brody works for Robertson's media operation. Perhaps his prediction is just a tad rosy.

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As Nick Street reported here last week, Uganda is considering passage of a bill that would, among other things, authorize sentences of life imprisonment for gay sex, the death penalty for HIV positive individuals who have sex, and criminalize LGBT rights organizing.

Political Research Associates, which researches right-wing movements, has called on Purpose-Driven Life author and megachurch pastor Rick Warren to denounce the proposed law.

In a statement to RD through a spokesperson, though, Warren said he had no position or comment on the proposed law.

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From Virginia to New York to Maine, the religious right is playing a key in tomorrow's off-year elections. The reports of its death were greatly exaggerated.

President Obama might have "turned Virginia blue" last year, but old habits die hard there. Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell, a graduate of Pat Robertson's Regent University, is holding onto a double-digit lead over the lackluster Democratic candidate Creigh Deeds. Ken Cuccinelli, the Republican candidate for Attorney General, holds a comparable lead over the Democrat Steve Shannon. Both Republicans make the religious right proud; no need in Virginia, as in New York's 23rd Congressional District, for it to back a third party candidate because the Republicans are too darn liberal.

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Democrats for Life is claiming that it now has the votes of 43 House Democrats against the House health care reform bill, unless it adopts the provisions it seeks barring the use of federal funds for abortion.

"[A]t last count, we have … commitments from about 43 members who said they would support Stupak and basically bring down the health care bill unless his amendment is offered,” DFL executive director Kristen Day told the conservative site CNSNews.com.

Day claimed that Stupak's language would "apply the Hyde Amendment" to health care [barring the use of federal funds to pay for abortions], though that has already been done through the Capps Amendment, which Stupak has called a "phony compromise." Lois Capps, a California Democrat and author of the eponymous amendment, has already laid out exactly how her amendment incorporates Hyde.

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Sojourners president and Obama advisor Jim Wallis has injected himself prominently into health care reform advocacy. But his position on whether abortion should be covered in a reform bill has generated confusion: is he as extreme as line-in-the-sand anti-choicers, who would reject any health care bill that didn't remove any remote chance of federal dollars tangentially funding abortion, and who want to require women to privately purchase a rider? Is he actually pro-choice? And what about his pro-life advocacy in the past?

I asked Wallis for his response to some of these questions, including the criticism that he won't say whether he is pro-choice. His answer perhaps reflects the time he's been spending around politicians. I'll parse that answer in a minute, but first I'll note that in his statement to RD, Wallis claims that he does not recall signing the 1996 pro-life declaration, "The America We Seek: A Statement of Pro-Life Principle and Concern," also signed by David Gushee, the evangelical scholar. Gushee told me earlier this year that the statement still reflects his views, but at the time I did not get a response from Wallis. Yesterday, Wallis said through his spokesperson, "The statement from 13 years ago is not an accurate reflection of my views, nor do I even remember it.” (Both Wallis individually and Sojourners were listed as signatories.)

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In a statement issued today, the Rev. Carlton Veazey, president of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, called on abortion foes to be satisfied with the "status quo" on abortion that is maintained by proposed health care reform bills and to stop holding up reform over the issue. The RCRC had advocated for full coverage of reproductive health services, including abortion, but now says passing reform with an abortion compromise is paramount.

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Here's the latest one world order conspiracy from the religious right: World Net Daily reports that the American Life League, "the largest grassroots Catholic pro-life group in the nation," is "warning of a perfect storm of circumstances that could set up Planned Parenthood as a quasi-governmental entity with the power to establish as law its declaration of a universal right to tax-paid abortions and autonomous rights to sexual 'pleasure' for children."

Someone please explain to World Net Daily the different meanings of the word "grant?" WND writers seem to believe that President Obama wants to "grant" Planned Parenthood a "quasi-government position." That's because in one of the health care reform bills, there are provisions for grants to go to an organization with a proven track record on teen pregnancy prevention.

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Amy Sullivan makes the provocative suggestion that Focus on the Family might be funding abortions. She's not picking on Focus on the Family in particular; she's just using the group to make a point. Anti-choice groups, including Focus on the Family, (although it hasn't been the most vocal player) protest, writes Sullivan, "that if any insurance plan that covers abortion is allowed to participate in a public exchange, then premiums paid to that plan in the form of taxpayer-funded subsidies help support that abortion coverage even if individual abortion procedures are paid for out of a separate pool of privately-paid premium dollars."

Anyone making that argument, says Sullivan, should look at their own company's insurance plan. If your company's insurer covers abortion -- even if not for your company's plan -- your premiums support the insurer that covers abortion for someone else. And Focus on the Family's insurer sells plans with abortion coverage.

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From The Nation's coverage of the Showdown in Chicago, where the American Bankers' Association meeting was the site earlier this week of protests against Wall Street greed run amok. Participants, according to the terrific reporting of Esther Kaplan, not only protested, but prayed for legislation and policy that would would regulate the banks, hold them accountable, and protect and empower consumers.

The Showdown, organized by consumer protection advocates and joined by labor unions, included prayer that reflected protesters' rage against the machine.

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