User Ramona at TPMCafe reacts to Wednesday’s health care reform conference call between Pres. Obama and religious leaders:
What struck me about this entire event — these thousands of religious leaders conferring with the president about how best to use their community to do good works — is how little we’ve heard from these people, as opposed to those leaders on the Religious Right who use their names and their clout to fight any attempt to rein in insurance company profits and use taxpayer funds to give aid to the many millions of Americans who suffer because of non-existent or inadequate health, or worse — because the Insurers have had the freedom to play God with their lives.
How is it that we’ve rewarded those hateful charlatans with fame and fortune while effectively shunning those who actually minister to real people with real problems? Maybe now that change is in the air, now that unprecedented numbers of our citizens need an unprecedented amount of help, we’ll look to the real churches for real help.
Which is all very nice.
For me, though, it illustrates the pitfalls of trying to forge a coalition between various religious factions around reducing abortion. One reason we don’t hear from “those who actually minister to real people with real problems” is that conservatives have successfully defined “people of faith” as abortion opponents. (Another reason is that far too often the conversation about faith gets driven by spectators, rather than participants, but that’s a rant for another time.)
Now, setting aside the moral and policy questions of abortion reduction, the political consequence is to keep the subject alive. Every time we talk about abortion, we are not talking about health care reform, or whatever the subject at hand is.
Or, as in this case, you have to talk about [ health care reform as it affects the question of abortion. Then the subject becomes whether or not the President is doing enough to satisfy Catholics and Evangelicals, and whether certain provisions are there just to placate them or if they’re honest policy initiatives and so on and so forth until we’re not talking about the idea that health care reform is a good idea because of all the people who are getting screwed by the current regime.
Abortion reduction, a la Ryan-DeLauro, is supposed to solve this problem by taking abortion off the table, but of course, that’s not the way it works. As with other memes, the more you repeat the frame, the more power it has.
I realize that obviously these questions are not going to go away any time soon. Nor can we reasonably expect people to deny their beliefs, whatever they may be. The optimal situation is probably to break the link between “people of faith” and opposition to reproductive rights, so that the knee-jerk reaction to talking about faith in the public square isn’t immediately to ask about How It Affects The Abortion Problem.
How that can be done, I do not know. I suspect, however, that it will wind up looking a lot like the recent moves of the ELCA and ECUSA to liberalize on the question of gays and lesbians in the church: some of us is fer it, some agin, now can we please move on?
