Trayvon and Zimmerman: A “good faith” breakdown?

March 24, 2012 By Elizabeth Scalia

In the comboxes, someone wondered earlier today why I had not written anything about the killing of Trayvon Martin by a “neighborhood watch” volunteer named George Zimmerman. Since I don’t watch the news or read papers anymore, I only became aware of it yesterday, and it seems the political world was slow to come to it, too.

It’s a dreadful story; my heart cannot help but go out to the family of Trayvon Martin, and my prayer is that this case gets a thorough and honest investigation which will result in justice being done.

Much is being assumed of this case, when not everything is yet known, and some are flinging about rumors, and half-truths very easily. Justice for Trayvon Martin must be rooted in truth, or it can never be just. The reading I’ve done around the web these last few hours makes me worry if truth is going to be one of those stretchable things, if the case is permitted to be politicized.

Neighborhood watches can be good things — everyone wants to feel like they are secure in their houses — but I also think it’s possible that some people involved in them can fall into a trap of becoming too suspicious, too quickly. I have no idea if this is true in Zimmerman’s case; I’m not sure anyone else knows it with absolute certainty, at this point, either.

The other day in First Things, I asked whether assumptions of “good faith” are things Americans are willing to make, anymore. Is that what is at the root of this story — the inability of people to give the benefit of a doubt to each other? Was Zimmerman unable to make a good faith assumption that a “hoody-wearing” Trayvon was just hanging out?

If so, why not? Was he too gung-ho, too willing to believe the worst, incapable of assuming good faith?

Now, as this tragedy becomes more widely known and Zimmerman’s family attempts to defend him, is it impossible to give them the benefit of a doubt, at least until a thorough investigation is concluded?

These are serious questions. If society has devolved to the point where we can no longer extend an assumption of good faith to each other, to someone walking home from a convenience store, or knocking on our door; to our neighbors, or our police, or our civic leadership and so forth, then our entire society will inevitably and wholly break down. Indeed, I worry that this story may well be a micro-illustration of the macro-misery toward which our society — and our nation — is headed, if we cannot find a way to pull back from our growing (and sadly, often justified) instinct to distrust, and our unwillingness to extend to each other the benefits-of-a-doubt we all require, sometimes.

I am not sure we can do it; it may be too late — all too far gone. That’s a very disturbing thought.

One would have to be foolish to believe that racism is not still a problem in America. But I think one would have to be equally foolish to insist, as I heard on the radio this afternoon, that “American blacks are under attack.” That seems, to me, to be a dishonest and unhelpful idea to promote. As someone is quote as saying here, “this is not a black and white thing; it’s a right and wrong thing.”

Meanwhile, Ace is wondering why some things are so clear, to the press, while other things are so murky; a question that may also be connected with our inability to assume good faith.

Max Lindenman takes a look at two instances in his life that might have illustrated “white boy privilege” and writes:

In his short story “Sonny’s Blues,” James Baldwin has a black woman tell her son how a car full of white men ran over his uncle, killing him, with no other motive than they were drunk, bored, and assured of getting away with it. “I’m telling you this,” she explains to the young man, “because you got a brother. And because the world ain’t changed.”

Baldwin set that scene during World War Two. Nowadays, in Mississippi, running over a black man with racial malice aforethought will get you life in prison, as 19-year-old Deryl Dedmon just discovered to his sorrow. Interracial marriages among blacks, whites and Latinos have increased tenfold since the 1960s. The product of one such marriage is in the White House, his black authenticity publicly challenged by a black man who would unseat him. Where race relations are concerned, the world really does appear to have changed, at least a little.

That’s all great. I do wish, though, that things would change a little more, to the point where basically good black kids could expect to be sent home with a lecture when they’re acting like morons, or a friendly ride home if they find themselves caught in a nasty neighborhood. Maybe that kind of thing does happen, but not, apparently, with enough regularity to sooth the fears of Michelle Johnson. I’ll welcome the day she feels free to tell her kids what my mother told me, which was basically, “Close the door quietly when you come in.”

Attorney William Jacobson is hoping that justice will be thorough in its questions and answers:

Let’s allow the facts to come in before we opine on the legal significance of the facts. Did Zimmerman hunt Martin down, or did the two come into unexpected contact with deadly results? It could be important.

Given the high political profile the case already has taken, we owe it to the victim and the accused for there to be a professional investigation free from politics.

We owe it to the nation, too, I think.

Meanwhile, Bookworm, who is also a lawyer, is meanwhile disturbed by the way the media is reporting the story before everything is known. I don’t know if I agree with her re Obama’s remarks, today. Yes, they could have been politically motivated, of course — Obama has certainly proved himself capable of cynical maneuvering and it was his campaign that said no crisis should ever go to waste. But they could simply be his feelings, too. I’m going to give a benefit of a doubt.

Related:
This cannot be an easy thing for Zimmerman’s parents, either.

Sent in by reader Kate: I’d forgotten about this story — which, I guess, is what happens when a story does not become politicized.

Filed Under: Race in America, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Who loves abortion more than Obama and Sebelius? UPDATED

March 23, 2012 By Elizabeth Scalia

It’s a serious question: is there a politician alive who loves abortion more than Barack Obama? Is there a bureaucrat alive who serves it more faithfully than Kathleen Sebelius?

They both put fealty to abortion access before health care for poor women.

President Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services has withdrawn $30 million worth of funding from a Texas Medicaid program that provides health care services for low-income women.

It did so because Texas recently passed a law that said its Women’s Health Program could not disperse funds to abortion and contraception providers such as Planned Parenthood.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius personally traveled to Houston to make the announcement that the Obama administration would cut funding of the program and would no longer continue the waiver that Texas had previously been given to continue funding of the program temporarily.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has issued an opinion declaring that federal law allows states to exclude abortion providers and their affiliated organizations from Medicaid. In a letter to Obama, Texas Gov. Perry accused the administration of trying to violate states’ rights “by mandating which health providers the state of Texas must use.”

They both put it before the long-standing, effective and well-regarded assistance to victims of human trafficking:

. . .six organizations applied for anti-trafficking grants from HHS’s Office for Refugee Resettlement (ORR). Four scored so low they did not make the cutoff when evaluated by an independent review board. Two applicants scored well. Heartland Human Care Services scored highest and MRS came in second, very close to Heartland, even after losing points for not being willing to refer for contraceptives and abortions. Yet, after finagling by Sharon Parrott, one of three politically-appointed counselors to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, ORR awarded $4.5 million, spread across Heartland, which earned the award, and United States Committee for Refugees and Immigrants and Tapestri, groups that hadn’t made the grade according to the independent review board.

HHS denies any hanky-panky. Show me the data.

Obama has put abortion before the life of a baby born alive during the procedure.

But even this is not the most important part of his argument. That would be his first sentence — the one about “caring for fetuses or children who were delivered in this fashion.” He seems open to this idea. And he does not state explicitly that a pre-viable, premature baby is not a “person.” Rather, he is arguing that the question of their personhood is a moot point. Even if the state should perhaps provide care for these babies, any recognition of their personhood might threaten someone’s right to an abortion somewhere down the road. That made the bill unacceptable to him.

People are always entitled to their opinions, — decent people can disagree and still be decent people — and many people evolve on this subject. I certainly have; I used to call myself pro-choice. I know pro-life people who cannot find themselves wholly sold on the idea of overturning Roe v Wade because it does nothing to change people’s hearts, and I can respect their arguments, even as I now believe that the ruling was inappropriate.

I also know pro-choice folk who are perfectly sincere when they say that since women have always sought abortions. it ought to be “legal, safe and rare” but are troubled by the excessive number of abortions, the marketing of it and particularly the practice of late-term and partial birth abortions.

But I think it’s a peculiar person who is so enthralled to abortion that he/she is willing to assault the consciences of others (or insist that they jump aboard the abortion train or be excluded from the privilege of providing their well-established assistance and health care to people in need.)

I mean, think about that mindset: no, you’re not allowed to help these women and children who have been trafficked, because you won’t serve abortion; no, you’re not allowed to help these poor women with their health needs, because you won’t serve abortion; no, you’re not allowed to offer your own insurance policy to your employees unless it serves abortion, sterilization and more.

No, you’re not allowed to serve the living, unless you first pay your obeisances toward death, sterility and emptiness.

This seems extreme to me. I can’t trust people who love death so much that they make sure access to it comes before access to healthcare, human safety or free consciences.

How can anyone love death that much, without it somehow demonstrating a hatred for life, a desire to over-control — which is really a desire to play at being God?

How is it a healthy mindset? Whole economies are being allowed to dry up and die in order to protect the Delta Smelt. But for the unborn (and the accidentally unslain) no protections?

UPDATE: Over at the USCCB’s media blog, Sr. Mary Ann Walsh writes:

Until now the federal government has respected the church’s role in defining its ministries and has not tinkered with doctrine. Despite this history, however, HHS and the rest of the Administration now are digging in their heels on the neuralgic point. They stick to the ACLU definition unreasonably, even while saying it’s only for this health care regulation and won’t apply to others. They turn a blind eye on those of us who shudder at Caesar’s defining what constitutes a church ministry.

Why President Obama seems to have chosen this moment to become theologian-in-chief is a mystery. Why should Caesar weigh in on theological questions such as what ministry is religious enough? Distributing Holy Communion at the altar? Yes. Distributing bread in the soup kitchen? No. He might have to meditate on where the loaves and fishes on the hillside would fit, in this theological framework.

You’ll want to read the whole thing

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,

If there is no more “good faith”. . .

March 20, 2012 By Elizabeth Scalia

…then how do we proceed as a nation?

That’s essentially the question I am posing in my column at First Things:

Perhaps projecting their passions on to me, both sides assumed that whatever I was writing about Palin was meant as a political manipulation against them. If I tried to offer balanced criticism, Palin fans accused me of “hating her from the first.” When I—because I detest bullies—defended her from an unconscionable assault by supposedly “liberal” people and the press after the Gabrielle Giffords shooting, I was derided, even by progressives whom I considered real friends, as being a “secret Palin lover.”

A good-faith assumption that I simply meant the exact words I wrote, in either case, and nothing more, was not permitted. It was deemed not possible.

Ms. Noonan’s dictum that people could disagree and still be “decent people” began to take a real beating, and things have only gotten worse, since then. Lately, I admit, my willingness to assume good-faith of others, particularly of the administration, has collapsed, mostly thanks to the HHS mandate and the shameful willingness of some to mischaracterize the church’s opposition as being about something other than a genuine concern for first-amendment freedoms, and to play along with the utterly false, media-contrived, so-called “war on women” narrative.

I don’t like feeling like this; I don’t like surrendering that “good faith” instinct—and I most certainly do not like being in discord with fellow Catholics, many of whom I have long liked and respected, over a matter of policy.

We are at each other’s throats, both in the church and secular venues; in government neither side knows can tell if they are dealing with honest brokers who are working in good faith.

I think what is becoming a true sticking-stone for many is the sense that the administration, and the press that supports it, have not displayed much evidence of “good faith” themselves—not last November when Nancy Pelosi groused about Catholics having “this conscience thing”; not in January when George Stephanopoulos pretended that someone, somewhere was suddenly scheming to “ban contraceptives”; not when President Obama told then-Archbishop Timothy Dolan that he considered the conscience “a sacred thing” and then actively moved against it.

I would like to believe that Obama spoke to Dolan in good faith. In fact, a progressive friend insists that Obama did mean it, but that he was swayed against his own best instincts by HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and others.

You can read the rest here.

If good-faith assumptions cannot be well-founded, what does “civility” serve beyond the preservation of polite fiction?

Perhaps it becomes a branch we cling to, so we may not be completely washed away in our storms?

Filed Under: "Remaking" Ourselves, 'Remaking' America, Timothy Dolan Tagged With: , , , ,

Bristol to Prez: Have a Sister Souljah Moment

March 19, 2012 By Elizabeth Scalia

Bristol Palin, starts her new blog with a bang. She’s challenging the president to take on his own Sister Souljah Moment, but this time against the misogynist left:

Your $1,000,000 donor Bill Maher has said reprehensible things about my family. He’s made fun of my brother because of his Down’s Syndrome. He’s said I was “f—-d so hard a baby fell out.” (In a classy move, he did this while his producers put up the cover of my book, which tells about the forgiveness and redemption I’ve found in God after my past – very public — mistakes.)

If Maher talked about Malia and Sasha that way, you’d return his dirty money and the Secret Service would probably have to restrain you. After all, I’ve always felt you understood my plight more than most because your mom was a teenager. That’s why you stood up for me when you were campaigning against Sen. McCain and my mom — you said vicious attacks on me should be off limits.

Yet I wonder if the Presidency has changed you. Now that you’re in office, it seems you’re only willing to defend certain women. You’re only willing to take a moral stand when you know your liberal supporters will stand behind you.

But…

What if you did something radical and wildly unpopular with your base and took a stand against the denigration of all women… even if they’re just single moms? Even if they’re Republicans?

Peggy Noonan has made a similar suggestion. I think they’re on to something. A president who feels too constrained by his base must also feel like he has fewer options than he should. Who knows? By talking straight to his base, Obama might find it freeing.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,

Lies, Cynicism and the Spin Cycle – UPDATED

March 12, 2012 By Elizabeth Scalia

The intellectual dishonesty of the hysterical and adolescent tract below is staggering. It is a full-page ad in the NY Times.

In a transparent (and largely successful) bid to keep the electorate distracted and the conversation off his numerous dubious policies and practices, January’s cynical move by the Obama Administration, helped along by an equally cynical and mostly-surrendered press, has delivered two profound lies — the first is that the HHS mandate battle being waged by the churches is “about birth control”, not about a perversion of the first amendment; the second: that what is being threatened here is contraception (!) and not the right of a church to be who it is and to define its mission.

Or, for that matter, the right of a small business owner to do choose whether or not to offer health insurance at all, what it can afford, and what its insurance policy might cover.

This is what constant spinning does — it flings you into a state of disorientation, where things no longer look like what they are.

My favorite part is this: “a church that has repeatedly engaged in a crusade to ban contraception, abortion and sterilization…”. In fact, the church is not trying to “ban” contraception or sterilization, but at least the writer acknowledges that abortifacients are part of what the HHS Mandate wants covered.

I wonder if the Skinner-box-trained authors of this thing, so capable of spitting out the evidences of their own indoctrinations, would be able to accurately relate, on any level, why the church teaches as it does, or to articulate how and why the constitution gives a church the right to its teachings and to its conscience. Silly me, they (and similarly incurious bigots) don’t really care why a thing is taught. They have no curiosity for anything that does not promise more pellets. I wonder if they even understand the concept of “freedom of religion” the exercise thereof.

The most depressing thing about it all, for me, has been the realization that so many women are exactly as stupid, incurious, easily-led and addicted to victim-narratives as the administration and press calculated them to be. Cynicism, validated.



Ann Althouse — Obama voter, not a Catholic, asks an interesting question

UPDATE:
Frank Weathers looks to Martin Luther King.

Meanwhile, Sr. Mary Ann Walsh notes:

The Amish are exempt from the entire health care reform law. So are members of Medi-Share, a program of Christian Care Ministry. Yet, when the Catholic Church asks for a religious exemption from just one regulation issued under the law – the mandate that all employers, including religious institutions, must pay for sterilization and contraceptives, including abortion-inducing drugs – the Administration balks.

They’re doing more than balking, they’re trying to win an election based on their lies. But, as Dr. King said, “a lie doesn’t last…” And it’s a stinking thing to build anything upon.

Kathryn Jean Lopez: Miserable Women

Dr. Gerard Nadler: If Bishops Fight Last War, They Lose

“I’ll choose my faith over the mandate if it means my life”

Would the Times publish a similar ad about Islam?

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,

Dear Press: The Seniors Don’t Believe You Anymore

March 5, 2012 By Elizabeth Scalia

Yesterday we talked a little about the dialogue between David Gregory and Newt Gingrich, and I wrote:

Our “free press” is no longer free. It’s becoming more like Pravda — the house organ for the party to which it is enthralled — every day. If you look at the Gingrich/Gregory exchange from that perspective, then that was a pretty remarkable segment. Sometimes, what someone in the press does not say, or where they do not interrupt is as telling as what they bellow.

I don’t know if the press even realizes (or cares) how much of their credibility they used up in the election of 2008, and basically every day since then. But no one believed and trusted in the press more than the senior citizens, and — if remarks from our parents this weekend were any indication — they now see the press very differently. They believed and got fooled into voting for Obama in 2008. They won’t be doing it again. And they are absolutely disgusted by the press’ willingness to take the HHS Mandate story and try to turn it into a sob-oomp fest over birth control.

The Democrats and the press are accustomed to being able to scare the older people into line — the GOP is going to take away your Social Security! You’ll be eating dog food! You’ll freeze to death for lack of home heating oil!

But the seniors have heard enough, and they’ve seen enough. These folks still believe in freedom of speech and freedom of religion and freedom of the press, and they can see with their own lying eyes that this administration (and its lackeys in the press) are straight-out manufacturing a “contraception crisis” that is really a “constitutional crisis”; that the White-House-Media tag-team is attempting to both manipulate them against their church and distract them from the truth that their grandchildren will not have the chance to live as they did — in broad freedom, with opportunities to work hard and make their own way.

They’re not having any of that.

This piece, written last September after a family celebration where many frustrations were aired by the seniors who felt snookered, seems worth pointing you toward:

. . .The general consensus was that our president is a failure, the congress is a wreck, and there is no authenticity or originality in our leadership, nor in our press. A majority in attendance—both Democrats and Republicans—had voted for Barack Obama (a few grudgingly, as they had supported Clinton) but while everyone expressed disappointment (there was not a single voice raised in support of the president) the senior citizens confided a deep sense of betrayal—of their trust being shattered. When I asked one of them, a former “Reagan Democrat” who had voted for Dole, then Bush, then Kerry why she had pulled the lever for Obama, she threw up her hands helplessly, “all I knew was what I heard! That other guy seemed too hot-headed and that Sarah Palin; she just wanted to play dress-up!”

And that was the general response from that side of the room: “I paid attention; I read all the papers—they all loved this guy!”

“He was new! We needed change!”

But not, as it turns out, the kind of change we are currently experiencing. Asked if they regretted their vote, to a one they said “yes.” Most of them said they wished, in retrospect, that they had voted for Hillary Clinton who “at least understood that the economy…it’s the economy, right? Stupid?”

None of them will be cast a second vote for this president, nor will they be so quick to listen to a press that—absenting an Obama abdication—will cast the flop-sweat from its brow and once again lift him to their shoulders, chanting new slogans and dire warnings about the opposition, but no longer singing songs from The Student Prince.

Anecdotal, sure, but the genie is out of the bottle and it’s not going back in. Once you’ve given up your credibility in order to work an agenda, it’s over.

You can read the rest here

Filed Under: 'Remaking' America, The Fourth Estate Tagged With: , , , ,

WH to Dolan: We’re not listening but you should!

March 1, 2012 By Elizabeth Scalia

Timothy Cardinal Dolan of New York, who is president of the USCCB, brings an update on the HHS Mandate battle and he is being realistic and, it seems to me, trying to tell us all to gird our loins.

All links and emphases are mine:

The President invited us to “work out the wrinkles,” and we have been taking him seriously. Unfortunately, this seems to be going nowhere: the White House Press Secretary, for instance, informed the nation that the mandates are a fait accompli (and, embarrassingly for him, commented that we bishops have always opposed Health Care anyway, a charge that is simply scurrilous and insulting). The White House already notified Congress that the dreaded mandates are now published in the Federal Registry “without change.” The Secretary of HHS is widely quoted as saying, “Religious insurance companies don’t really design the plans they sell based on their own religious tenets,” which doesn’t bode well for a truly acceptable “accommodation.” And a recent meeting between staff of the bishops’ conference and the White House staff ended with the President’s people informing us that the broader concerns of religious freedom — that is, revisiting the straight-jacketing mandates, or broadening the maligned exemption—are all off the table. Instead, they advised the bishops’ conference that we should listen to the “enlightened” voices of accommodation, such as the recent hardly-surprising but terribly unfortunate editorial in America.

The White House seems to think we bishops are hopelessly out of touch with our people, and with those whom the White House now has nominated as official Catholic teachers.

So, I don’t know if we’ll get anywhere with the executive branch.

Congress offers more hope, with thoughtful elected officials proposing promising legislation to protect what should be so obvious: religious freedom. As is clear from the current debate in the senate, our opponents are marketing this as a “woman’s health issue.” Of course, it cannot be reduced to that. It’s about religious freedom. (By the way, the Church hardly needs to be lectured about health care for women. Thanks mostly to our Sisters, the Church is the largest private provider of health care for women and their babies in the country. Here in New York State, Fidelis, the Medicare/Medicaid insurance provider, owned by the Church, consistently receives top ratings for its quality of service to women and children.)

And the courts offer the most light. In the recent Hosanna-Tabor ruling, the Supreme Court unanimously and enthusiastically defended the right of a Church to define its own ministry and services, a dramatic rebuff to the administration, but one apparently unheeded by the White House. Thus, our bishops’ conference and many individual religious entities are working with some top-notch law firms who have told us they feel so strongly about this that they will represent us pro-bono.

So, we have to be realistic and prepare for tough times. Some, like America magazine, want us to cave-in and stop fighting, saying this is simply a policy issue; some want us to close everything down rather than comply (In an excellent article, Cardinal Francis George wrote that the administration apparently wants us to “give up for Lent” our schools, hospitals, and charitable ministries); some want us to engage in civil disobedience and be fined; some worry that we’ll have to face a decision between two ethically repugnant choices: subsidizing immoral services or no longer offering insurance coverage, a road none of us wants to travel.

Read it all. Someone asked me recently what I thought of the editorial in America magazine and I said I was sad about it, because there are so many Jesuits I admire greatly, but on this issue, they’re just wrong. I think they’re working through a very destructive conceit about their own intellectualism, and its leading them to a worldly and cynical alliance that will eventually — because this is about a government power-grab, not contraception, and they know it — end up marginalizing believers or creating a schismatic state church. I was disappointed that these exceedingly smart men were unable to see a simple truth, because it was “too” simple. I think sometimes this is the danger for very smart, well-educated folks. They miss the fact that sometimes, the truth is not complicated, at all.

The USCCB, by the way, is PhD heavy — our bishops are not bumpkins. But I suppose the bishops intellectual take on this issue, informed only by history, political science, philosophy and 2,000 years of reasoning is the wrong kind of smarts, or something. Not enlightened enough. The White House is (sadly, typically) as arrogant and disrespectful as ever.

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey does some numbers crunching regarding the impact of closing Catholic Hospitals:

Compared to their competition, Catholic hospitals take a leading role in providing less-profitable services to patients. They lead the sector in breast cancer screenings, nutrition programs, trauma, geriatric services, and social work. In most of these areas, other non-profits come close, but hospitals run by state and local governments fall significantly off the pace. Where patients have trouble paying for care, Catholic hospitals cover more of the costs. For instance, Catholic Health Services in Florida provides free care to families below 200 percent of federal poverty line, accepting Medicaid reimbursements as payment in full, and caps costs at 20 percent of household income for families that fall between 200 percent and 400 percent of the federal poverty line.

Imagine the impact if these hospitals shut down, discounting the other 400-plus health centers and 1,500 specialized homes that the Catholic Church operates as part of its mission that would also disappear. Thanks to the economic models of these hospitals, no one will rush to buy them. One in six patients in the current system would have to vie for service in the remaining system, which would have to absorb almost $100 billion in costs each year to treat them. Over 120,000 beds would disappear from an already-stressed system.

The poor and working class families that get assistance from Catholic benefactors would end up having to pay more for their care than they do under the current system. Rural patients would have to travel farther for medical care, and services like social work and breast-cancer screenings would fall to the less-efficient government-run institutions. That would not only impact the poor and working class patients, but would create much longer wait times for everyone else in the system. Finally, over a half-million people employed by Catholic hospitals now would lose their jobs almost overnight, which would have a big impact on the economy as well as on health care.

And of course, we’re not just talking about hospitals.

Then again, if Catholic hospitals close, perhaps the government plans to acquire them, creating itself as the “be-all-and-end-all” — a false Christ, gathering all things to itself.

UPDATE II: Get Religion is watching the press get fed and digest the WH talking points

UPDATE III:
At Egregious Twaddle:

Yesterday’s New York Times, for example, brought this completely unsurprising editorial attempt to wedge the attack on Catholic conscience even deeper into the health care battlefield. “Women’s Health Care at Risk,” reads the headline over the earning that “a wave of mergers between Catholic and secular hospitals is threatening to deprive women of access to important reproductive services.” So now we’re not just making women sick by refusing to pay for free contraceptives for our employees; we’re withholding critical care. That these “important reproductive services”–”Catholic hospitals have refused to terminate pregnancies, provide contraceptive services, offer a standard treatment for ectopic pregnancies, or allow sterilization after caesarean sections,” all of which violate Catholic teaching on the sanctity of life–are in actual fact nonreproductive services is something nobody seems to be willing to discuss. (Is it just me?)

Read it all. Nope, it’s not just you, Joanne. The new narrative is that the church — which has never argued a ban on contraception — is trying to keep women from getting at it. It’s egregious, it’s false, and the promulgation of the lie is intensely cynical. But the press will promoted it, and people will buy it.

Related:
We Don’t Need No Stinking Bishops

Message received: Battle is its

Filed Under: Timothy Dolan, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
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