Recently, I wrote that liberal Catholics who immediately signed onto the U.S. Catholic bishops' religious freedom crusade against the Obama administration quickly lost me, when I saw that their underlying rationale for supporting the U.S. bishops in this crusade was, in most cases, a slippery-slope pro-life argument. I noted that, for many of these liberal Catholics, the issue at stake in the argument with the Obama administration really is abortion.
They're convinced that requiring contraceptive coverage in health care plans is a first step on a slippery slope to requiring support of abortion. They have not relinquished and will not relinquish the false claim that the HHS guidelines approved by the Obama administration require Catholic organizations to collaborate with providing abortifacients through health insurance.
And they lose me with these arguments not merely because their claims about abortifacients are simply untrue (and I find it difficult to imagine they don't know this). They lose me, as well, because they are implicitly asking me to invest strong emotional energy--passion, in fact--in the defense of the life of a just-fertilized zygote, when I don't see anywhere near that same level of passion on their part when it comes to defending the lives of many of their already-born brother and sister Catholics.
In fact, when it comes to their behavior towards their brothers and sisters who are gay, I frequently encounter a callousness on the part of the same "liberal" Catholics who tell me that I must think of a just-fertilized zygote as a defenseless human being deserving of all my engagement in the defense of life which totally undercuts their claim to be concerned about the value of human life. The bishops these liberal Catholics are defending in the religious liberty crusade have said not a word about the epidemic of suicides of gay or gender-quesitoning teens in recent years--while their liberal pro-life defenders collude in the silence and inform us that the bishops are good guys and trustworthy moral guides.
And so I wrote the following:
Some of these co-belligerents have signed onto this crusade because they have long since been convinced that a just-fertilized zygote is ontologically equal to a human person, and that any technology that thwarts or even possibly thwarts the implantation of a zygote is tantamount to murder--to murdering a baby. These co-belligerents have signed onto the anti-contraception cause because they believe in a slippery-slope argument that contraception leads to a cavalier attitude towards the conceptus which leads to partial-birth abortion, which leads to the murder of the elderly and infirm, etc.
And what's rather remarkable to me as I consider these arguments is the obvious cold-heartedness of these pro-life brothers and sisters to the actual, right-in-front-of-their-noses real human lives of fellow Catholics who are increasingly alienated from our church, because we find the "pro-life" movement in key respects anything but concerned about protecting human life in all its dimensions. And we're baffled by the disproportionate weight and emotional response that the bishops' "pro-life" co-belligerents ask us to give to a just-fertilized zygote. When they so frequently show little to no concern for the real lives of post-birth human beings, from the moment of birth to the grave.
For more on these points, see also this previous posting.
And now I find the bishop who is heading the U.S. Catholic bishops' religious liberty crusade, Bishop William Lori of Bridgeport, Connecticut, writing the following in response to America's editorial supporting the accommodation that the Obama administration has offered to meet the concerns of the USCCB:
The March 5th America editorial takes the United States Bishops to task for entering too deeply into the finer points of health care policy as they ponder what the slightly revised Obama Administration mandate might mean for the Catholic Church in the United States. These details, we are told, do not impinge on religious liberty. We are also told that our recent forthright language borders on incivility.
What details are we talking about? For one thing, a government mandate to insure, one way or another, for an abortifacient drug called Ella. Here the “details” would seem to be fertilized ova, small defenseless human beings, who will likely suffer abortion within the purview of a church-run health insurance program.
But when the pastoral leader making these false claims about abortifacient drugs that are, in fact, not abortifacient, and about "small defenseless human beings" who are just-fertilized zygotes, is the very same man who willingly and deliberately stirred homophobic passion (and see also here) against two real-life brother Catholics who happen to be gay several years ago, passion that resulted in death threats against those real-life brother Catholics, what am I to do with his concern for "small defenseless human beings" who are just-fertilized zygotes?
How am I to understand that concern? How am I to read the passion to defend the life of a just-fertilized zygote, when it seems to go hand-in-hand with a total lack of any concern at all to defend the lives of brother and sister Catholics who happen to be gay?
When, in fact, it seems to go hand-in-hand with a willingness to place the lives of brother and sister Catholics who are gay in danger . . . .
My conclusion: Bishop Lori and those who line up behind him aren't really pro-life at all. Their concern for the lives of "fertilized ova, small defenseless human beings," is really concern about something else altogether.
It's concern about protecting clerical power and privilege and magisterial teachings about contraception and life beginning at conception--because to permit any critical questions about these magisterial teachings is to undermine their authority as clerics. It's to undermine their power and privilege. And so it's their clerical power and privilege that they're defending first and foremost--not the lives of tiny defenseless little ova-human beings.
I'm also convinced that a very strong underlying concern in this battle to uphold magisterial teaching reinforcing clerical power and privilege is a determination to keep women in their places. The lives of women, the health care needs of women, do not count any more than the lives of gay and lesbian human beings count, for these clerics and the cynical political games they're playing with these human lives.
Bishop Lori may well keep on yammering, but I don't intend to listen. Because my own pro-life commitments lead me to consider the lives of lay Catholics, of women, and of gay and lesbian persons every bit as meaningful and important as the life of the just-fertilized zygote.
And the fact that liberal Catholics who have lined up behind the bishops can't see the disconnect between who the bishops are and what they're doing, and their ostensible pro-life concern for just-fertilized zygotes, doesn't convince me that these liberal Catholics are any more pro-life--in any meaningful sense--than the bishops they're defending. Because they wouldn't be defending these men who freely trample on the lives of others if they were pro-life.
If any readers want to follow the long thread of my postings about Lori in the past several years, all you have to do is click on his name in the tags below this posting.
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