In my first posting today, I noted that several comments readers have made here in recent days (to which I haven't yet had a chance to respond on the blog) have been rattling around in my head after I read them in my email inbox. One of these is a comment Winifred Holloway made yesterday in response to my posting about the HHS controversy.
I'm highlighting Winifred's comment because it makes several observations that I think are very significant (and I hope you won't mind my giving this prominence to your comment, Winifred, and responding to it in this public way). Winifred writes,
Your use of the word "manufactured" is quite accurate. You recall when Affordable Health Care Act was being debated, the bishops opposed it b/c of some fake belief that it would allow abortions to be performed with federal funds. I commented a few times on Commonweal and America blogs, asking why the bishops were not encouraging (commanding?) Catholics to leave their private health insurance b/c many, if not most of these, actually cover abortion procedures. No one replied to my question. I think this is a political move on the part of bishops. I doubt their sincerity that this is a matter of religious liberty.
I, too, very much doubt the bishops' sincerity in this ostensibly "pro-life" but grossly partisan political controversy--a manufactured controversy. When more than half of states now have guidelines requiring the kind of contraceptive coverage the HHS guidelines would enact at a federal level, and when one of the leading Republican contenders for the presidency, Romney, supported precisely such a plan in Massachusetts, it's difficult to see what the bishops and their Republican and centrist buddies are doing as anything other than playing cynical partisan political games by making a major issue of these guidelines right now, as the 2012 elections approach.
In a posting yesterday at the Commonweal blog site, Grant Gallicho (who opposes the Obama administration's HHS guidelines, as does the editorial staff of Commonweal in general), asks why, when the administration is now signaling that it would be willing to work out a compromise, the bishops insist that there can be no compromise. As Gallicho notes, the USCCB point man on health care policy Richard Doerflinger has told the media explicitly that the bishops intend to reject a compromise akin to that worked out in Hawaii, which has been touted by many Catholic media spokespersons as a viable model for the federal health insurance guidelines which should be acceptable to the bishops. (On Doerflinger and his attempt to kill the Obama administration health care plan from the outset, see Nick Baumann at Mother Jones.)
And there's also this: read anything Michael Sean Winters writes about these and other issues having to do with the USCCB, and you can be certain you are reading unofficial press releases from the USCCB that inform the public with a kind of insider's faux scoop angle (dictated, I want to repeat, by the USCCB itself) what the bishops' official party line on an issue is. The same day that Gallicho posted the Commonweal posting to which I've just linked, and the same day the media began floating the idea that the Obama administration might compromise with the bishops about the HHS guidelines, Winters penned an article at NCR with the title, "Compromise? Not So Fast."
There have to be winners in this manufactured controversy. And there have to be losers. Sad to say, that's the underlying mentality at work in the hearts and minds of those manufacturing the controversy. It's a mentality that thrives on making some folks--notably progressive Democrats and any Catholics who don't toe the party line--into losers and grinding their defeated faces into the ground. Because showing you that you're powerless losers and grinding your faces into the ground demonstrates, you realize, that we're winners. And we're big and powerful men--q.e.d.
The bishops created the controversy with the intent of being winners, and they also created it with the intent of making the Obama administration, the progressive wing of the Democratic party, and the majority of Catholics who support the new guidelines losers. The bishops and their Republican and centrist Catholic "Democratic" allies now raising a stink about these issues also want women to be losers quite specifically in the controversy.
Some of the leading centrist Catholic "Democratic" commentators who always carry water for the bishops no matter what the issue is have persistently published nasty insinuations about women and women's rights which echo the unofficial memos that come directly from the USCCB to their journalistic desks. It is no accident that these same commentators are also former seminarians who identify strongly with the misogynistic clerical club in which their thinking and self-image has been formed.
This is a cynical political game, I want to emphasize, and it's all about informing some folks--all over again, since this is a ritual of American election cycles in recent years--that they are losers and should expect to remain losers when it comes to beltway conversations and the allocation of real power.
And this brings me to what I think is your most important comment of all, Winifred: you say, "I commented a few times on Commonweal and America blogs, asking [questions, and] . . . [n]o one replied to my question." And what I want to say in response to you here, as loudly and emphatically as possible, is this: I hear you.
This was precisely my persistent experience at both of those blog sites until I finally gave up on posting at them. I decided I was wasting my time and squandering my energy by trying to engage in conversation with my fellow Catholics of the political and intellectual center at sites such as these.
Because they did not intend to engage me, talk to me, welcome me, or even acknowledge my existence.
I've seen the same dynamics play out over and over again on both blogs, and most recently, when Jim McCrea and another poster directly challenged a commenter at Commonweal when that poster used what appeared to be an anti-gay slur. Total silence from that poster in response to Jim's questions--as if Jim was not even there (and the same poster has done the very same thing to Jim McCrea and to me as well in the past in other discussions at this blog site). He also has a history of making outrageously homophobic statements at several other Catholic blog sites, and it wouldn't be difficult for anyone participating in these conversations right now to discover that history by searching for his contributions to various Catholic blogs--if they cared. I myself have posted about this at Bilgrimage.
And when Jim McCrea challenged this commenter's apparently homophobic statement at Commonweal recently and he refused to reply, there was also total silence from the whole set of Commonweal centrists who want to be regarded as admirable defenders of human rights. This mirrors an experience I had in the past at that blog site when I mustered the courage to challenge the offensive and very obvious homophobic rhetoric of a poster whom the regular contributors to the blog kept defending until, a day or so after I challenged her and received no support at all, she self-destructed and posted some comments so offensive she was banned.
And this brings me to my concluding reflections on what you share in your comment above, Winifred: there are a number of different ways to parse what is taking place in the political arena and in the American Catholic church vis-a-vis the HHS guidelines controversy. One way I'm inclined to view the controversy, a way that is receiving very little attention in the media or at Catholic blog sites, is the following:
The winners-demand-losers mentality of tribal Catholicism that is on full and sickening display all over again in the behavior of many powerful Catholic media commentators and intellectuals vis-a-vis the HHS guidelines controversy is deeply destructive to the Catholic church in the U.S. The mentality that some people must be losers in order to turn others into winners is in and of itself antithetical to Catholic values at the most fundamental level of all, since catholicity is, in its etymological roots and basic meaning, about bringing everyone to the table.
The fact that people who claim to represent the Catholic tradition in some uniquely significant way and who use that claim to leverage power as they represent all Catholics in the public square can behave as if some fellow Catholics whom they intend to ignore are not even in the room when these fellow Catholics raise uncomfortable questions on centrist Catholic blogs: this undercuts the claims of the Catholics managing these blogs to understand and represent the Catholic tradition very well at all.
What we're seeing right now with the fierce tribalistic response to the decision of the Obama administration, and the astonishing hypocrisy that response entails when it comes to questions of what Catholics really believe and do about contraception, is a ritual enactment of insider-outsider dynamics that has become a standard feature of Catholic conversations each election cycle. It is a ritual enactment designed to let fellow Catholics who dissent in certain open and honest ways from magisterial positions know that we do not count and will not count in the public conversations of the American Catholic church. (By "open and honest," I mean to say that I see the dissent of Catholic progressives as distinct from that of many of those of the Catholic right who profess to be more Catholic than anyone else, and defenders of orthodoxy, while they totally ignore and will not engage many magisterial teachings about economic and social justice.)
It's also a ritual enactment intended to inform progressive Catholics that they do not have a real home in the Catholic church as it has presently configured itself, and that those progressive Catholics should either be silent or disappear altogether. Tribal atavism trumps informed conscientious dissent and the open, respectful exchange of dissenting viewpoints that has to be a feature of any religious community which expects to mount compelling arguments about complex moral issues in the public square. And tribal atavism trumps honesty, turning the Catholic community into a people of the lie in the minds of large numbers of citizens and increasing numbers of Catholics.
The you're-a-loser message I'm hearing these days from many of my fellow Catholics isn't a really new message for me to hear, but I'm hearing it in a newly strident way these days: it's a message that says loudly and clearly, Get lost. Your talents are not wanted.
You are not wanted. You do not count for us.
I suspect that's a message a lot of my fellow Catholics who think as I do, and, in particular, a lot of Catholic women will also be hearing more and more clearly as this ugly manufactured and highly partisan debacle plays out, and particularly if it plays out as I expect it to do, with the Obama administration caving in to the current set of bullies. Meanwhile, I look around and see that, while those within the Catholic community who claim to have the most acute insight of all about what it means to be Catholic at this point in history natter endlessly about religious freedom and bogus attacks on their religious freedom, a court in California recognizes that enacting legislation with the specific intent of stigmatizing and demeaning a targeted minority is not constitutional. And I see that the legislature of yet another state has taken a step towards recognizing the right of civil marriage for same-sex couples.
And as I look at these and other historic breakthroughs for human rights, and then listen to the exceedingly narrow, parochial, self-involved, and beside-the-point discussions within my Catholic community, I'm not entirely discontent to have been ruled out of the official conversations. Because I'm convinced that what those folks are talking about does not recognize in any way at all the trend of the moral arc of history. I remember very well that the journals at which they hold forth did not support the move to grant same-sex couples the right of civil marriage in New York. They either made editorial statements against this development, or were shamefully silent about it, as if a significant human rights victory has no importance to real Catholics. Just as they have been silent, many of these folks, for some decades now as gay and lesbian people have been driven from the Catholic church and punished in Catholic institutions . . . .
But I'm convinced that human rights do count, and that real catholicity welcomes everyone to the table and feels no need to enact these ugly insider-outsider, winners-losers rituals to reassure itself of its power and dominion. I find myself in solidarity with that courageous Catholic abuse survivor Marie Collins, who just told those gathered at the Roman conference discussing abuse issues that any respect she had for the religious leaders of her Catholic church met its "final death" when she learned that these leaders had known that the priest who sexually molested her when she was a young teen recovering from illness in a hospital was abusing children--and did nothing. (Note: these are the same leaders whose moral leadership tribal Catholics are now defending int he public square in the HHS controversy.)
And I find myself in solidarity with the young Catholics whose comments I've been reading today at the Facebook site of Catholics United who say they've finally had it with the church, after this manufactured HHS controversy. I suspect their numbers will be legion when the dust settles after this controversy.
I also suspect that the bishops and their Republican and centrist "Democratic" Catholic supporters will win this battle. But I'm also very strongly convinced that the Catholic church in the U.S. is spectacularly losing the really important war, if the goal of all of this behavior is to convince the public at large that we have something of significance to say to the public square.
We don't have. We can't have anything of significance to say to the public square when those who imagine themselves the arbiters of the very definition of Catholicism refuse to treat some of their fellow Catholics as if they aren't even in the room. And when some of the centrist media gurus most confident that they speak for all Catholics and that they are safeguarding Catholic values in the public square take such immature glee in seeing their progressive Catholic brothers and sisters (and women) made losers in winner-loser games they design to convince them of their own importance.
If anyone had told me when I chose to become Catholic at a point in history when many Catholics and many Catholic leaders courageously defended human rights in the Civil Rights movement, where the community I chose as my community of faith in the 1960s would have decided to move by the first decades of the 21st century, I'd have scoffed. But here we are, to my great chagrin.
P.S. In linking to the NCR article with Marie Collins's testimony, I don't intend at all to imply that my petty suffering at the hands of my Catholic brothers and sisters and their leaders holds a candle to the kind of suffering inflicted on those who endured abuse as youths at the hands of Catholic officials--and who have all too often told their stories to a tribal Catholic community as intent on ignoring them (or even vilifying them) as that same tribal community is intent on ignoring fellow Catholics committed to human rights for women and gay folks.
If anyone had told me when I chose to become Catholic at a point in history when many Catholics and many Catholic leaders courageously defended human rights in the Civil Rights movement, where the community I chose as my community of faith in the 1960s would have decided to move by the first decades of the 21st century, I'd have scoffed. But here we are, to my great chagrin.
P.S. In linking to the NCR article with Marie Collins's testimony, I don't intend at all to imply that my petty suffering at the hands of my Catholic brothers and sisters and their leaders holds a candle to the kind of suffering inflicted on those who endured abuse as youths at the hands of Catholic officials--and who have all too often told their stories to a tribal Catholic community as intent on ignoring them (or even vilifying them) as that same tribal community is intent on ignoring fellow Catholics committed to human rights for women and gay folks.
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