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| A Cardinal's Couture |
At Religion Dispatches today, Louis Ruprecht takes a careful look at the U.S. Catholic bishops' demands for conscience exemptions from mandates and laws requiring Catholic institutions to provide contraceptive coverage. He notes the curiously selective focus of the bishops, the role of clerical hysteria in their reaction to the gains of the women's movement, and the theatrics of their behavior.
And he concludes:
The question that should be asked is why the US Catholic Bishops are exerting so much energy and money and time on the matter of contraception, with no similarly public cries of outrage against the death penalty, state-sponsored torture, or the two preemptive wars in which the US has involved itself for fully a decade.
Clearly there is a lot more to this debate than the First Amendment. It has to do with one of the most powerful patriarchal religious organizations in the world—be sure to recall that the Bishops are all men, every last one of them—placing itself squarely in opposition to women’s sexual equality and autonomy.
A good question to ask, it seems to me. And a very sound conclusion to reach.
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