One important difference…

…between people who get their teaching from the Tribal Pieties of the Right and, you know, the Catholic Church is this:

People who parrot the talking points of the right say stupid parrot talk like “Health Care Is Not a Right“.

People who actually bother to have their thinking influenced by the Church, on the other hand, can’t help but notice that the Catechism says things like:

2211 The political community has a duty to honor the family, to assist it, and to ensure especially:
– the freedom to establish a family, have children, and bring them up in keeping with the family’s own moral and religious convictions;

– the protection of the stability of the marriage bond and the institution of the family;

– the freedom to profess one’s faith, to hand it on, and raise one’s children in it, with the necessary means and institutions;

– the right to private property, to free enterprise, to obtain work and housing, and the right to emigrate;

– in keeping with the country’s institutions, the right to medical care, assistance for the aged, and family benefits;

– the protection of security and health, especially with respect to dangers like drugs, pornography, alcoholism, etc.;

– the freedom to form associations with other families and so to have representation before civil authority.

Now given the ingenuity with which Catholic sophists have treated the Church’s obvious teaching about abortion and torture, I have little doubt that those dedicated to the proposition that Health Care is Not a Right will be able to make short work of this rather plainly worded teaching. First of all, of course, it’s not a *dogmatic* teaching, so that means all Catholics are free to ignore it and think whatever they like. Also, you will notice the qualifier about “in keeping with the country’s institutions” which obviously means “insurance companies and bean counters trump the good of the family”.

Still and all, those of us who have come under the sinister influence of Chesterton cannot help but think that when a young girl needs a liver transplant, it is every bit as much her right to have one as it is her right not to be aborted and that complex explanations about how vital it is that insurance companies put their profits above the good of this girl are an elaborate way of saying “Man was made for the Insurance Company, not the Insurance company for man”. In the end, it boils down to the claim that things are more important than persons. And if we think that, we don’t really have much right to be talking about the immorality of abortion now, do we?

Understand: I’ve got no views in particular on the particular piece of legislation currently being bandied about in Washington. If anything, I’m suspicious that it’s going to boil down to a rationing system that will be worse than what we’ve got (I speak as somebody with no health or dental insurance who will be instantaneously bankrupted the moment we have a catastrophic medical problem). I’m very concerned that the Dems will erect a system that cuts costs by killing off the old, weak, sick and expensive–as well as making us all pay for abortions.

But the knee-jerk Talk Radio junk about how health care is not a right appears to me to owe far more to maintaining a system in which money is exalted over the good of the person than to anything remotely connected with Catholic teaching or common sense. One can base a credible opposition to so-called “health care reform” on worries that it’s going to wind up killing a lot of innocent people as a cost-cutting measure. That I can respect. But basing opposition to health care reform on the parroted claim that “health care is not a right”–a claim that is demonstrably rubbish if we are paying any attention to the Church’s teaching, suggests that other agendas besides the desire to enact Catholic social teaching as public policy are the guiding principals at work in our thinking. That’s no longer really a surprise to me, given the spectacle of Faithful Catholics[TM] striving with might and main to justify torture, but it still may be worth pointing out for Catholics who may be sensing a disconnect between the Church’s actual teaching and what they are hearing from the conservative side of the blogosphere that so commonly claims adherence to the Church teaching in stark contrast to the Awful Dissenters.

Why so hard on the Right, Mark? Because I *expect* Dissenters to dissent. It’s what they do. When they tell me they think the Church’s teaching on their pelvic obsessions is wrong and antiquated and so forth, I know it’s just the usual junk spouted by people who frankly hold the Church’s teaching in contempt. They’re wrong, but at least they aren’t lying to me that they are the True Defenders of Authentic Catholic Teaching. They have the integrity to acknowledge that they are Revolutionaries. But when somebody looks me in the eye and says “Torture is compatible with Catholic teaching but the idea that Health Care is Right is not–and I’m a Faithful Conservative Catholic and not one of those Awful Dissenters over there” it makes me ill. In a weird way, it’s easier to trust the forthright Progressive Dissenter because he’s not pretending to me that “we’re really saying the same thing.”

The main thing I’m able to hold on to in the effort to keep my gorge down at the spectacle of Cafeteria Catholicism among “Faithful Conservative Catholics” who nakedly reject obvious Church teaching is that, very often, they simply have no idea that there could even *be* distinction between GOP talking points emanating from Talk Radio and the content of the Catechism. The assume that all discrepancies are due to distortions created by the MSM, the National Catholic Reporter or some nefarious Peace and Justice types working in a cubicle at the USCCB. And they also assume that the teaching of the American bishops on such matters is purely optional and can simply be rejected.

It’s only unacceptable to say “The Bishops are wrong about what is an is not a right” when the right under consideration is the right to be born. When the right to life impinges on some teenage mother and she prefers to let that kid die rather than pay for the cost of a human life, she’s monstrously selfish and a part of the culture of death. If the baby needs a heart transplant and it could somehow cost me something too, the bishops have no idea what they are talking about when they say the child has a right to health care–and my saying so is not participation in the culture of death but a courageous stand against socialism. Solidarity and regard for the common good is for unwed mothers, not for me.