While one can appreciate that Rome would favor an anti-contraception "more children" policy—after all, you can only use a child for so long before he needs to be replaced—that hardly seems like sound health care policy for the United States.
That might have something to do with the Church's decreasing "legitimacy" to dictate our laws and policies based on what the Church consideres "intrinsically evil." This is the same organization that now vows to protect women from birth control, just as they protected child rapists and molesters from the law.
Like Father James McGreal, who cost his archdiocese nearly $8 million to settle claims of molestation:
From 1948 to 1988, McGreal served in 10 parishes in Seattle and other parts of Washington state. He was permanently barred from the ministry in 1988 after the archdiocese made a stunning confession that it had assigned McGreal to a Federal Way parish, even though he had been removed from two parishes and a Catholic hospital after being accused of sexually molesting boys. [...]
Court documents claimed that archdiocese officials began receiving complaints about McGreal in the late 1960s and that McGreal had disclosed to a counselor that he had molested hundreds of victims.
A
Catholic hospital? The sort of religious-affiliated organization that shouldn't be sullied with something as dirty and wrong as insurance coverage for birth control?
Complaints were filed against this "man of the cloth" for two decades before the Church got around to stopping him from molesting children. Two decades. Hundreds of victims.
Of course, that's just one man. One man whose words to his parish were the word of God and could not be questioned. Perhaps he even spoke in opposition to contraception because that is wrong and evil.
As we all know, however, this was not about just one man. The global, billion-dollar operation of covering up for men who rape and molest children goes straight to the top.
And the very institution that has engaged in the criminal—and some might even say intrinsically evil—enterprise now dare to declare what God thinks our health care policies should be? Now, Catholic "leadership" is outraged? So outraged, in fact, that Catholic League head Bill Donohue is threatening, "This is going to be fought out with lawsuits, with court decisions, and, dare I say it, maybe even in the streets." Maybe they'll even occupy a park.
American bishops are contemplating a massive march on Washington, using people and school kids bused in from all over to protest the law.
At least they've found a new use for school kids.
Perhaps while the bishops are trying to preserve their "legitimacy," they could show us where in the Bible it says, "Thou shall not require insurance companies to provide contraception without co-pays, as recommended by the Institute of Medicine." While they're at it, perhaps they could also find the passage where it says God wants them to cover up for men who rape and molest children.
The fact is that the Catholic Church has no moral authority to dictate what our laws should be. None. And the attempt to hold American health care hostage with petulant demands and hysterical hyperbole about "religious liberty" is, quite transparently, nothing more than a growing desperation to assert its authority over a population that increasingly does not care what the Church has to say. Catholics have a right in this country to believe whatever they want. The Catholic Church, however, has no right to demand that our laws and policies adhere to what the Church says is right or "intrinsically evil."
After all, after a billion dollars and decades of systematically covering up the rape and molestation of thousands of children, the Church has already undermined its own "legitimacy" to dictate what is right and wrong.
Send an email to the White House and tell President Obama to stand firm on requiring all health insurers to cover contraception without co-pays.
Comments are closed on this story.