Obamacare and the American Conscience

Let's Go There Again

From the WSJ: what I meant, but expressed more competently.

The political furor over President Obama's birth-control mandate continues to grow, even among those for whom contraception poses no moral qualms, and one needn't be a theologian to understand why. The country is being exposed to the raw political control that is the core of the Obama health-care plan, and Americans are seeing clearly for the first time how this will violate pluralism and liberty.

Right. As this thing unfolds and we "find out what is in it," we're going to see that it violates many aspects of our self-determination, not just our religious conscience.

Any one-size-fits-all code in a culturally pluralistic country must violate most everyone's freedom of choice in one way or another, or it would have to have so many exemptions carved out of it that it would eventually not be a uniform code at all, being full of contradictions and unfairness, and therefore unequally prosecuted. See: US Tax Code.

Mr. Obama's allies among Catholic liberals are also professing shock—even the Catholic Health Association's Sister Carol Keehan, who lobbied for ObamaCare, and Notre Dame's Father John Jenkins, who invited Mr. Obama to speak on campus in 2009. But if they now claim they were taken for a ride by the secular left, the truth is that they wanted to be deceived in the name of their grander goal of government-enforced equity. The Catholic left was one of ObamaCare's great enablers.

The Catholic left absolutely did lobby for Obamacare, and they absolutely did agitate for the radical socialist agenda underpinning it.

They only turned against HRC in the early months of 2010 when the rug was pulled out from under them vis-a-vis the conscientious exemption.

In yesterday's post I assumed and therefore also implied that the exemption was meant only for Catholic organizations, but I was in error.

Apparently the bishops (and Catholic organization heads) lobbying for this exemption were intending it would be available to all employers who have moral objections to providing abortifacients, and not just Catholic or other religious organizations (seems unlikely to work as a practical matter, but nevertheless, I was wrong).

In last night's post I also did not think to specify 'Catholic left,' as the WSJ does, which is the proper formulation. That error led to a lot of rancor and hurt feelings from the Catholics who frequent this site.

I absolutely did intend to criticize the Catholic bishops and organizations who pressed for the socialization of health care in this country. I did not intend to criticize Catholicism or Catholics as a whole, which I did not make clear enough. Please accept my sincere apologies for my poor wording and lack of thoughtful expression.

This is a left/right thing. It just so happens that the bishops and clergy referenced in this story are of the left.

If they were not, then the market-based reforms suggested by Republicans would have been more attractive, no?

After all, you don't need any exemptions from an intrusive government mandate, when there is no government mandate violating your freedom of conscience to begin with.

Thanks to Andy for the WSJ link.

posted by Laura. at 12:01 PM

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