Betty Clermont on Real Goal of Catholic Bishops' "Religious Freedom" Campaign, Michelangelo Signorile on Need for Pope to Apologize for His Own Statements about Gays

As the U.S. Catholic bishops threw their 2016 "Fortnight for Freedom" shindig several days ago, Betty Clermont issued the following valuable reminder of what the "religious freedom" crusade of the bishops has been all about all along: not religion, but money, power, and politicking: she writes,

When Republican governor Mitt Romney instituted Romneycare which provided insurance coverage not only for contraception but also for abortion, there was no organized opposition from the bishops. In fact, Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley "has said that Romney was a better friend to the Catholic Church than any other Massachusetts governor in decades, and he was about the only one that wasn’t Catholic." 

Like the GOP establishment, the bishops were committed to denying Pres. Obama any successes. So they used any means possible to block enactment of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, even falsely asserting that it provided coverage for abortion, already barred by the Hyde Amendment. Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI), who failed to construct an accommodation that would please the USCCB, finally admitted "that people tried to use abortion as a tool to stop health-care reform, even after [unnecessary] protections were added."

Betty ends by noting that the mainstream media persistently look away from reporting anything unfavorable about Pope Francis, in a way that parallels how they have treated Donald Trump with kid gloves in this election cycle. Here's Michelangelo Signorile writing today about how the media keep giving Francis a pass, most recently, in reporting on his remark about the need for the church to apologize to the gay community — while the media kept silent and still keep silent about Francis' own less than admirable track record vis-a-vis the LGBTQ community:

Last week the media gave a lot of attention to Pope Francis agreeing that the Catholic Church owed an apology to gays. But his statement, while positive on its face, deflected from horrendous remarks Francis himself made in the past and which he can and should personally apologize for right now.  . . .  

Rather than wait for "the church" to make the apology for which he called — which could take eons — he could still make that personal apology himself right now.

It will be interesting to see if any such apology is ever forthcoming, won't it?