Fred Clark on People Who Don't Listen to Women (and the U.S. Bishops' Real Agenda)

Fred Clark thinks that people who work themselves into an entrenched pattern of not listening to women often foolishly miscalculate that people will listen to them when they claim to be official moral voices speaking for everyone.  Clark writes: 

And let’s stop dressing this up as anything other than that. They’re [i.e., the U.S. Catholic bishops and their allies are] opposing health care coverage for women. Cloaking this opposition in religious frippery by despicably dishonest appeals to “freedom of conscience” doesn’t change the bedrock fact here: Catholic bishops want to deny health care coverage for lady parts. Period. Full stop. 

This is what the bishops have rallied behind as the core of their faith. Not the cross. Not the sacraments. But the insistence that they must never, ever be indirectly complicit in the provision of health care coverage for women’s reproductive organs. This is much ado about “nothing” in the original, raunchiest Shakespearean sense.

Clark maintains that no matter how the bishops and their "co-belligerents" try to frock up their pretend-moral crusade with noble-sounding terms like conscience and liberty, what they're really about is despicable in the extreme: it's about promoting discrimination and oppression in God's name.  It's about turning gynecology into a cardinal sin.  It's about expecting preventive health care for men, but denying women the same access to health care and expecting them to pay for it out of pocket as male employees get the free ride.

Have a look at the letter that the "Group of Five," the big poobahs among the U.S. Catholic bishops who are orchestrating the anti-Obama campaign over contraceptive coverage, circulated entre nous* as soon as the president offered a compromise, and you'll discover that what they're fighting for is the "right" of not only religious institutions but individuals to discriminate in the name of God.  When they imagine that their religious freedom demands such a right.

The five big poobahs write, 

It seems clear there is no exemption for Catholic and other individuals who work for secular employers; for such individuals who own or operate a business; or for employers who have a moral (not religious) objection to some procedures such as the abortifacient drug Ella. This presents a grave moral problem that must be addressed, and it is unclear whether this combination of policies creates a mandate for contraception, sterilization and abortion inducing drugs covering more of the U.S. population than originally proposed (my emphasis in preceding paragraph).

Individuals: in the name of defending religious freedom, the U.S. Catholic bishops are waging a war--as I have noted over and over on this blog--to create a non-existent "right" in a secular pluralistic democracy permitting those who choose to discriminate on religious grounds to exercise this "right" despite laws forbidding discrimination.  As Mark Silk notes, "in our own cultural moment, claims of religious liberty are increasingly being understood as entitling you to an exemption from secular ground rules."

And as he adds, 

What's needed is a clear enunciation of the boundaries between policies that promote the public good and the rights of religious organizations to opt out. Religious rights are not absolute. A college does not, for example, get to discriminate religiously on the basis of race and retain its tax deduction. At the same time, there are workarounds--existing in the states and newly proposed--that may safeguard principled positions on both sides. Plainly, however, depending on the "wisdom" of religious leadership to accept the politics of cultural practice isn't cutting it. It's time for one those presidential speeches.

Religious rights are not absolute.  The U.S. Catholic bishops and their co-belligerents are arguing that religious freedom is the basis for an absolute right of people who object, on grounds of conscience, to secular laws prohibiting discrimination to engage in discrimination.  Because they say so.  Because their religious views demand that they have this right.  Because their consciences trump your right to services or employment or housing or medical care--when their consciences demand that they deny you these rights.

As the preceding excerpt from the "Group of Five's" letter signaling their intent to continue their war against the Obama administration suggests, under the cloud of noble-sounding rhetoric about conscience and religious freedom, what the bishops are now asserting is that individuals who own a business that, say, sells pharmaceuticals must have the "right" to refuse to sell you condoms or birth-control pills or, conceivably, any other medications to which they object on grounds of conscience.

Or individuals who run a flower business must have the "right" to refuse to sell you flowers for your same-sex wedding.  Or, as has just happened in the Catholic diocese of Charlotte, if you are a music minister in a Catholic parish (though you happen to be Episcopalian), and you legally marry your same-sex partner, you can expect to lose your job with no recourse whatsoever.  Because Catholics say so.  Because they have the "right" to take your daily bread from your mouth, end your health care coverage, no questions asked, if you do not "live within the moral tradition of the Church," as the letter firing this music minister states.

Even if you're an Episcopalian.  And even if this stipulation about not living within the moral tradition of the Church is applied with such blatant injustice that heterosexual couples who are obviously flouting the moral commands of the Catholic church by, say, using contraceptives, are not subject to the same penalties that apply to you as a gay person.

It is this raw, unbridled discrimination that those defending the U.S. Catholic bishops have been defending in recent weeks--to their shame.  It is the naked misogyny that Fred Clark dissects so well that all those liberal Catholic men who are usually so eloquent about their defense of human rights have been defending in recent weeks--to their shame.

Clark predicts that the end result of all the nattering about conscience and religious freedom that the big boys of the elite Catholic country club for heterosexual men have been doing in recent days will be to assure that they have the Catholic church to themselves.  Because, as he rightly says, the rest of us have gotten the message very well: it's their church and not ours.  The consciences and religious freedom they're defending are theirs.  Not ours.  We don't even have a voice in their conversation.

And we're increasingly happy to relinquish the little shop of horrors that wants to pass itself off as brimful of love and Jesus and concern for human rights to the big boys who own and run the shop that has rights and privileges only for the chosen few, and not for all the rest of us who had once thought we were part of the body of Christ and the church catholic, too.

*I apologize that the spell-check feature embedded in my new program rendered entre nous as entree nous.  The blasted thing makes changes I don't even spot as I type; this one was embarrassing.

The graphic is from the U.S. Catholic bishops' meeting in 2010; the photo features His Eminence Cardinal-Elect Timothy Dolan, who was elected president of the USCCB at this meeting, and who is a leading member of the "Group of Five" who circulated the in-house (for bishops'  eyes only) letter calling for continued war against the Obama administration last Friday afternoon.