And (drawing on what I just posted about the alienation of many Catholics these days): here is one quite specific reason that some Catholics--and I include myself in their number--are outraged by the partisan political behavior of the U.S. Catholic bishops vis-a-vis the HHS guidelines re: contraceptive coverage:
As Bill Boyarsky notes at Truthdig today, there is an orchestrated, powerful movement among conservative super PAC donors and Republican candidates to attack the current administration's healthcare reform act in order to place the White House and Congress in Republican hands this fall. As Boyarsky notes, right-wing strategists are zeroing in on Obamacare because they think public support for the Affordable Health Care for America Act is weak.
As Boyarsky also indicates, the act has both strengths and weaknesses. Its strengths include its attempt to draw more Americans lacking access into healthcare coverage. These include minors, the working poor, and those with pre-existing conditions who have been denied coverage due to those conditions. They also include the many Americans with no healthcare coverage at all.
The act also disappoints progressives because many of us had hoped, as Boyarsky maintains, for "something resembling Medicare for all." Instead, we watched the current administration produce a watered-down, compromise-riddled act based on closed-door deals cut with powerful medical provision and insurance industries. As Boyarsky also points out, the current act is labyrinthine in its complexity and byzantine in its technical language, and most of us outside the political-managerial loops that produce such documents can readily fathom its intricacies.
But despite the act's shortcomings, in the view of many of us, the Affordable Health Care for America Act is a step in the right direction. For many of us steeped in the social teachings of particular faith communities (the Catholic community included), the current healthcare plan is a step in the right direction because we have an overriding moral obligation to draw those on the margins into social participation, and to assure that basic healthcare is available to everyone as a human right.
And so to watch the leaders of our own church colluding with a highly partisan political attack on a healthcare act which, though highly flawed, nonetheless begins to draw more citizens into healthcare coverage deeply alienates some American Catholics who are tracking the bishops' activities closely. It is impossible to imagine that, in their attack on the HHS guidelines, the bishops are not deliberately working with the super-rich donors and Republican leaders who have identified Obamacare as a chink in the current administration's armor, as they seek to bring the administration down in the fall elections.
When this is done by bishops of a church--by pastoral leaders--which teaches that every human being has a right to basic healthcare and that societies have an overriding moral obligation to draws the marginalized into social participation including healthcare coverage, a severe kind of moral cognitive dissonance can ensue, which drives people away from the church. In many parts of the country including my region, what the bishops and their co-belligerents are accomplishing with their "religious liberty" crusade is something like the following:
Angry men (almost all white) who claim to be the standard-bearers of religious freedom have become convinced that socialist, anti-Christian Dictator Obama wants to ride roughshod over their consciences to force them to pay for the sexual promiscuity of sluts. Their rage about being forced to buy birth control pills for every slut who wants to have sex without paying the price of her sinfulness then ties into a broader rage about being forced to pay for healthcare coverage for all those despised Others who want to ride on the coattails of the white men who carry everyone's burdens and produce the bulk of the nation's wealth.
Dictator Obama wants all of us to pay--I read this on a daily basis on blogs in my own local area, and I read versions of it on Catholic blogs--for the healthcare needs of spongers/system-gamers/the immoral and lazy poor who need to get jobs/immigrants/people with brown and black faces (which is to say, all of the above). We need to get out of government subvention of the system of healthcare provision, because Dictator Obama is using healthcare carrots to get masses to stupid to know otherwise to vote for him.
The healthcare system will be run more efficiently and equitably if we 1) privatize it and let the market purify it in that objective way the market has of purifying anything, and/or 2) place it under the combined aegis of church and family, where the immoral and lazy will have less success at gaming the system because church and family know how to sort the sheep from the goats and keep the goats out of the sheepfold.
Not a bit of this has even the most tenuous connection to Catholic social teaching or to the social teachings of many mainline Christian churches. It not only distorts, it actively militates against the primary emphases of the social teaching of the Catholic church and many mainline Christian churches.
And the Catholic bishops are front and center as this anti-communitarian, pro-ruthless capitalism, exploitative understanding of how government works and of the role of government in healthcare provision is disseminated far and wide by propagandists hoping to score political points in the fall elections. So that for some of us, it begins to appear that the only moral position left for us as Catholics is at a decided (and oppositional) distance from the moral teachers and pastors of our church . . . .
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