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 <\/a>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 \u201cMan was made for the Insurance Company, not the Insurance company for man\u201d. In the end, it boils down to the claim that things are more important than persons. And if we think that, we don\u2019t really have much right to be talking about the immorality of abortion now, do we?<\/p>\nUnderstand: I\u2019ve got no views in particular on the particular piece of legislation currently being bandied about in Washington. If anything, I\u2019m suspicious that it\u2019s going to boil down to a rationing system that will be worse than what we\u2019ve 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\u2019m very concerned that the Dems will erect a system that cuts costs by killing off the old, weak, sick and expensive\u2013as well as making us all pay for abortions.<\/p>\n
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 \u201chealth care reform\u201d on worries that it\u2019s 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 \u201chealth care is not a right\u201d\u2013a claim that is demonstrably rubbish if we are paying any attention to the Church\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Why so hard on the Right, Mark? Because I *expect* Dissenters to dissent. It\u2019s what they do. When they tell me they think the Church\u2019s teaching on their pelvic obsessions is wrong and antiquated and so forth, I know it\u2019s just the usual junk spouted by people who frankly hold the Church\u2019s teaching in contempt. They\u2019re wrong, but at least they aren\u2019t 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 \u201cTorture is compatible with Catholic teaching but the idea that Health Care is Right is not\u2013and I\u2019m<\/em> a Faithful Conservative Catholic and not one of those Awful Dissenters over there\u201d it makes me ill. In a weird way, it\u2019s easier to trust the forthright Progressive Dissenter because he\u2019s not pretending to me that \u201cwe\u2019re really saying the same thing.\u201d<\/p>\nThe main thing I\u2019m able to hold on to in the effort to keep my gorge down at the spectacle of Cafeteria Catholicism among \u201cFaithful Conservative Catholics\u201d 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. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s only unacceptable to say \u201cThe Bishops are wrong about what is an is not a right<\/a>\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2013and 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.<\/p>\n