Religion Dispatches
In the wake of the Obama administration’s decision to require that insurance plans cover some non-abortion related reproductive health care, the bishops have launched a political campaign. Will US Catholics follow?
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Macho, blind, dishonest, kidnapped by aliens. In recent years, detractors have spat plenty of venomous words at Beatriz Paredes, former national director of Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).
“I abort you, Beatriz,” one editor even wrote in his takedown.
A known feminist, Paredes stood by while her PRI colleagues in various states approved constitutional reforms declaring life as the moment of conception and penalizing the practice of abortion, leading to more investigations and arrests of women. While abortion was illegal before, it was practiced clandestinely without prosecutions in most places. Since 2008, 19 states have passed similar measures—most recently in Baja and San Luis Potosi just last month.
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Jeffress thinks it’s fine to interrogate candidates’ religious beliefs. Indeed there may be times when it is legitimate to ask whether a candidate’s religious positions would have a direct impact on policy. Religious Right activist David Barton has declared that the Bible is opposed to progressive taxation, capital gains taxes, collective bargaining, and the minimum wage. It’s legitimate to ask whether candidates who praise Barton’s work—such as Michele Bachmann and Newt Gingrich—share those opinions. Similarly, when a presidential candidate like Bachmann calls a Christian Reconstructionist thinker her “mentor,” it is not religious bigotry to ask whether she shares his views about the Constitution and the roles of religion and government in society. But questioning the authenticity or soundness of a candidate’s religious views, for example to have Barton and Glenn Beck rail against what they believe are President Obama’s religious views on the nature of salvation, seems far less appropriate—or useful.
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I call this campaign “theocratic” as a Baptist minister who holds all human life to be sacred. But issues around human life are not as simple as the “personhood” proponents believe.
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Where Bush would sign something because anti-choice was his base, Perry actively instigates. A report from the frontlines of the kinder, gentler scorched-earth campaign against abortion and birth control in Texas.
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This week, a pair of anti-abortion bills were fast-tracked for passage through the Ohio legislature, drawing attention to the surprising success of Ohio’s increasingly divided anti-choice movement.
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Why are the US Catholic Bishops exerting so much energy and money and time on the matter of contraception, with no similarly public cries of outrage against the death penalty, state-sponsored torture, or the two preemptive wars in which the US has involved itself for fully a decade?
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At the end of 2011, in a sign of what’s to come, the U.S. Bishops warned the Obama administration to amend a regulation on contraception in its health care legislation or stand accused of religious discrimination.
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“There are some among you,” the pope wrote, “who conceive of and desire a Church in America different from that which is in the rest of the world.” Apparently unconcerned that on this side of the ocean the word might have a more positive ring than he intended, he used the name by which this heresy had become known in Europe: Americanism.
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The egregious breach of decency that led a Catholic parish priest to deny communion to a lesbian woman at her mother’s funeral has received widespread and well-deserved condemnation. Even the Archdiocese of Washington DC admitted that the priest had violated their policy.
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