U.S. Bishops' Pro-Life Spokeswoman: Catholics Oppose Taxpayer Funding of Contraception

Third update: I posted during Holy Week about Gerald Slevin's recent critical analysis of Germaine Grisez's revisionist history of the post-Vatican II papal commission on birth control.  As I noted in that posting, it strikes me as inconsistent to oppose both artificial contraception and abortion, since abundant evidence demonstrates that the majority of abortions take place because pregnancies haven't been planned or a couple or woman dealing with a pregnancy feels unable to provide for and raise a child.  

And in a Good Friday posting, I noted the recent finding of the Guttmacher Institute that some 98% of Catholic women in the U.S. have used birth control--a finding Fr. Anthony Ruff notes in his response to Cardinal Wuerl's recent statement about the teaching authority of bishops in the wake of the condemnation of Elizabeth Johnson's work.  As I noted in my discussion of Ruff's article, it's intriguing to me that we're only now discovering something that statisticians, theologians, and many others have known since the late 1960s: that an overwhelming percentage of Catholics in the developed areas of the world stoutly reject Catholic magisterial teaching about artificial contraception and sexual ethics in general.

In light of these previous discussions of the contraception issue, I find the response of the U.S. Catholic bishops' official pro-life spokeswoman to the Guttmacher Institute data fascinating.  Nancy Frazier O'Brien discusses this response in a recent article in National Catholic Reporter.

As O'Brien notes, after the Guttmacher findings were published, Deirdre McQuade, assistant director for policy and communications at USCCB's Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities, told Catholic News Service, "The way the data is presented . . . is misleading in a pretty fundamental way." McQuade's response to the Guttmacher data showing the vast majority of American Catholics reject church teaching about contraception is to reiterate the church's opposition to both abortion and contraception.

McQuade notes that "Catholics" are opposed to taxpayer funding of contraceptive services, because some contraceptives are actually abortifacients, and because "fertility is a sign of health."  Fertility should not be considered a disease to be controlled--and therefore birth control is not an area of health care that one ought  routinely to expect to be provided by health care agencies funded by tax dollars.

And again I have to say: I don't get it.  If we're really opposed to abortion and consider it one of the most heinous abuses of life to be curbed in our society, it seems to me we'd not only step back from the ban on artificial contraception, but we'd actively advocate for access to contraceptives for those who want or need them.  It's logically inconsistent to claim we're pro-life when it comes to abortion, and then to oppose contraceptives--given the clear link between preventing unwanted pregnancies and preventing abortions.

And there's another ethical issue lurking behind this debate that seems to me well worth noting: this is the desire of various groups of the religious and political right to control women and women's access to contraception, because women's ability to determine whether or when they will bear children is exceptionally threatening to the patriarchal mindset of the leaders of the religious and political right.  This is the unacknowledged goal of those trying to shut down Planned Parenthood.

What they're effectively trying to shut down is women's control over their reproductive lives.  In particular, they're effectively trying to shut down the control of poor women over their reproductive lives.  And that strikes me as morally reprehensible in the extreme, when those mounting this crusade know full well that affluent women will always have the means to obtain contraceptive devices or medications--while more and more women at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder will be deprived of those health care needs if this crusade has its way.

Pace Ms. McQuade, contraceptives most certainly are a part of any adequate health care plan for adults that seeks to provide comprehensive health care.  I grew up hearing one horror story after another about the effects of unplanned and unwanted pregnancies on many poor women in the chronically impoverished American South in the period from Reconstruction through the Great Depression.  I know from stories I heard my grandmother, mother, and aunts tell that women suffered horribly in the past when they were expected (and often forced) to bear one child after another during their years of fertility, and when food and the comforts to make life humane were scarce.

To ask that women be returned to that subjugation to biological fate and to male domination in the name of God strikes me as obscene.  The leaders of the Catholic church are on the wrong side of history and of morality with this particular crusade--and it's time they recognized that fact.  The opposition to contraceptive use undercuts what they want to teach us about the value of life and the evil of abortion.  Colluding with the religious and political right in attacks on the health care needs of poor women in the U.S. is not a morally admirable thing for Catholic bishops to do.

Two More Updates: Gays on Christian College Campuses, Virginia Attorney General Cuccinelli Blocks Access of Poor to Health Care

And two more quick follow-ups:

I blogged some days ago about the controversy that developed at Arkansas's Harding University, when gay students and alumni launched a website to create discussion about how gay members of this Church of Christ campus community are treated.  As I noted, Harding responded to the website by blocking access to it in the campus's computer network.

Today, Erik Erickholm writes at the New York Times about the growing movement of gay visibility on campuses of evangelical Christian colleges and universities.  This movement of visibility is fighting for the inclusion of LGBT people within the communities of these campuses.  

One of the interesting segments of this article--and I heard this repeatedly when the Harding situation was discussed at the blog of the Arkansas Times website some weeks ago--is the refrain, Why would the gays want to go to one of our Christian schools, anyway?  Erickholm writes,

Gay students say they are often asked why they are attending Christian colleges at all. But the question, students say, is unfair. Many were raised in intensely Christian homes with an expectation of attending a religious college and long fought their homosexuality. They arrive at school, as one of the Harding Web authors put it, “hoping that college would turn us straight, and then once we realized that this wasn’t happening, there was nothing you could do about it.” 

And, of course, what's perplexing about this question is how anyone who has even a passing acquaintance with the gospels and the teaching of Jesus would want to keep anyone on the outside looking in.  To send signals to anyone that she is not welcome, has no place, doesn't belong.  That he is not a brother with a place at the Christian table.

Is the real message here this: some Christians are demanding that their comfort levels not be challenged by having to confront real-life human beings who happen to be gay?  I suspect it is.  And I suspect that, no matter how uncomfortable the recognition happens to be that gay people do exist, and that they are right within Christian families and churches, this reality (the gays exist!) is not going to go away anytime soon for any groups of Christians--regardless of how high they build their walls and how tight they fasten their doors.

And yesterday, I wrote again about my perplexity that any Catholic informed about Catholic social teaching (or any Catholic who has read the gospels) would defend or take lightly political initiatives to block the access of socioeconomically deprived people to health care.  And today, I'm reading that the Catholic attorney general of Virginia, Ken Cuccinelli, has chosen to do precisely that.

As Tara Lohan notes at Alternet, not content to hate on the gays, attack climate scientists, and try to censor a state symbol that pictures a bare-breasted goddess, Cuccinelli issued a ruling early this year that effectively blocks non-profits providing free health care for poor people from receiving state funding.  Lohan links to an article by Bruce S. Trachtenberg at The Nonprofit Quarterly which says that among the groups affected by Cuccinelli's ruling is the Virginia Association of Free Clinics, a network of 60 medical clinics that served 72,000 patients last year.

Again, some of the Catholic church's most ardent defenders these days--notably, the Republican politicians with whom Catholic leaders seem intent on getting into bed--are, in my view, working fast and furious with the bishops to turn the church into a mean machine.  If what Cuccinelli stands for is authentic Catholic values (and spirituality and the movement of the heart to God), I want nothing to do with those values.

Last fall, Cuccinelli, who claims to be pro-life, issued the notice of Virginia's execution of a mentally retarded grandmother.

And Speaking of Money, and Health Care, and the U.S. as a Shining City on a Hill

That by-invitation-only charity banquet with the fabulous menu that featured one of the princes of the Catholic church in 2006?  I don't imagine I'd have been invited.

Because Steve is working right now on computing information for our taxes, and--yaay!--though I brought in quite a bit more income this past year than in the previous year, I still don't think it would merit an invitation to a banquet whose purpose is touching people for charitable donations.

It's vulgar to talk in specific details about money.  Suffice it to say, what I made this year is in the range somewhere below $20,000 and above $10,000.  It's a bit higher than the salary I pulled down when I started my career teaching in a Catholic school in New Orleans in 1972-73.

It's the same yearly amount Steve made for six years teaching at Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans from 1985-1991, when the seminary's rector denied him tenure (after the faculty and students voted to tenure him) on the ground that he could no longer pay a layperson's salary--between $10,000 and $20,000, and not close to the latter.  And the following year, lo and behold, that seminary rector, who is now an archbishop, suddenly found funds to hire two priests to replace Steve.

It's a few thousand below the salary at which I began teaching at Xavier University in New Orleans in 1984, and at which I continued for a number of years until I completed my dissertation.

All this and no health insurance, too, right now . . . . 

And I'm not complaining.  With Steve's fairly good salary, we meet our needs, as long as we budget carefully, keeping in mind that we're losing money monthly paying the note on the house in Florida that we bought when a friend promised us jobs there up to retirement, and then reneged on that promise.  After the Florida United Methodist Church that owns the university that she heads split on the very day we came to Florida over the question of accepting openly gay members.  And after the UMC bishop of Florida, who led the charge against including gays at the last UMC General Conference, told this university president--so she told us--that he would not have approved of hiring us if he had known we are a gay couple.

I'm not complaining.  We have it better than a lot of folks.  We have a roof over our heads, good food to eat, the opportunity to travel sometimes, books to read, good friends and family members, relatively good health.  I have time to blog that I would not have if I were gainfully employed full-time.

Even so, I'm baffled at all those folks who think that living in the U.S. is living in a land of milk and honey and streets paved with gold.  As I move into my 60s with no health insurance and a patchwork income I put together any way I can each year, with dwindling retirement savings, and wonder what retirement will be like for the two of us, when we also face the struggles any aging gay couple in this country inevitably faces: I wonder.

What we mean when we say we're a shining city on a hill.  And the new Jerusalem.  And a nation uniquely chosen and blessed by God.  And a nation with the soul of a church.

I certainly found my six years of graduate study in Canada, when I had health coverage provided at no cost by the state system though I was an American citizen, refreshing by contrast.

P.S. Just in case it's necessary, I think I should add the following comment about the graphic for this posting: I don't envy those with extraordinary wealth.  To the extent I can imagine their lives, I wouldn't want that life for myself--not at all.  I chose the graphic I did to illustrate this posting to make a point that seems obvious to me, as the U.S. (and other nations) now debate how to deal with economic downturn and budget crises.  This is that the one question never on the table, which is nonetheless the central question to be asked about where developed nations have ended up socioeconomically, is this: why are the extremely rich increasingly allowed to shrug off the burden of helping to sustain the social networks of the societies in which they gain their wealth, while that burden is increasingly transferred to the shoulders of those at the bottom of those societies?

On Catholic Social Teaching and the Common Good: Whither the U.S. Catholic Bishops?

In a posting yesterday, I linked to a recent Alternet article by David Korten summarizing the introduction to a revised edition of his book Agenda for a New Economy.  As my comments yesterday noted, Korten stresses the need for a new vision of economic life, as the perilous shortcomings of the imperfect vision now dominating our socio-economic imaginations become apparent in our current economic crisis.  I also noted that Korten thinks that a more humane, inclusive, and viable vision for the economic reorganization of our society is far more likely to come from "common" people and those on the margins than from the top of our society.  Because one of the most salient facts we have learned all over again about our political institutions during the Obama presidency is that D.C. and the beltway media that insulate and protect our central governing institutions are owned lock, stock, and barrel by Wall Street.

As Korten sketches the guiding principles of his vision for a more humane and inclusive way of organizing our economic life than the one we have now, I'm struck by his initial observation asking,  

Why should society allow such concentration of power in institutions that benefit only the already rich and powerful while placing the well-being of the larger society at grave risk?

As he notes, one of the reasons we've failed to see the extreme threat to our democratic institutions posed by the growing concentration of wealth at the top of our society and by the increasing flow of the meager resources of the underprivileged and middle classes to the hands of those at the top is this: both Keynesian and Chicago School economics assume a "market fundamentalism" that "takes institutions as a given rather than a policy choice, makes no distinction between phantom wealth and real wealth, and has nothing to say about environmental limits and the nature and distribution of ownership."

Though Keynesians differ from Chicago School economists in the amount of government intervention in the market the former will permit, both assume that the market itself is some kind of sacred cow that, left as unfettered as possible, will provide abundant milk for everyone.  More milk for the rich, who stimulate the market by channeling money into it (and creating jobs and building more producing units), means more milk for the rest of us.  Inevitably.  Magically, mystically.  Since milk does have that way of tricking down from high places to low places.

Both approaches to economic life tend to obscure (to mystify, is not too strong) the fact that economic institutions are human institutions conceived and developed to meet human needs.  They don't drop down out of heaven.  They don't incorporate a divine hidden hand that serves everyone's needs when the rich are well-served.  They don't have (or deserve) quasi-divine status.

They're human institutions built by human beings that can and should be changed by human beings when they fail to serve human ends.  One of the measures of how far American political and cultural thinking has moved away from a humane vision of social and economic life is the extent to which many of us now--but most of all, those in our governing sector, who presumably have education and information enough to know better--imagine that the market is sacrosanct.  That it and the institutions propping it up can't be touched.  Because it just is, and any meddling with its operations is dangerous interference with a mystical process that magically enriches all of us by enriching a tiny minority of us.

And here's what strikes me as I think about Korten's call for a new vision of economic life that transcends the obvious (and tragic) limitations of this way of thinking about economic life: it's not at all far from what Catholic social teaching has been talking about for over a century now, when it stresses that 1) economic life must serve the common good, 2) to be morally acceptable, it must always think first and foremost about those most excluded from economic participation, and must find ways to draw them in, 3) the rich have a strong, overriding, and constant obligation to use their wealth to serve the common good, and 4) social and economic institutions should be under the control of those these institutions serve, who have the right to shape and re-shape these institutions to more humane (that is, more inclusive) ends.

Judged from the standpoint of Catholic social teaching, neither Keynesian nor Chicago School philosophy--which is to say, the two dominant economic philosophies of the governing sector of the U.S.--is anywhere near the mark.  Both tend to overlook completely the need for economic life to serve the common good.  And both overlook the way in which all social and economic institutions have been placed in human hands to be shaped to humane ends.

This is not to say that the current leadership cadre of American Catholicism has done anywhere near an adequate job of communicating and defending these core Catholic values.  To the contrary, the majority of American Catholic bishops have, in recent years, done everything possible to bury these core principles and insights of Catholic social teaching, as they consolidate their alliance with an evangelical religious right that is actively hostile to such insights, and as they try to realign the Catholic church in the U.S. with the Republican party and the corporate leaders that party serves overtly.

And so we have the U.S. Catholic bishops in the past year opposing health care reform that promised to make it at least somewhat easier for Americans at the bottom of the economic pyramid to obtain access to basic health care, while the pope himself reiterates that access to minimal health care is a fundamental human right and that humane societies always respect that right.  We have the U.S. Catholic bishops moving in precisely the opposite direction than that charted by core principles of Catholic social teaching, for dishonorable political reasons.  And I doubt seriously that the election of Timothy Dolan and Joseph Kurtz as president and vice-president of the U.S. bishops' conference is going to change this tendency.

Meanwhile, I take heart in this development: a group of economically affluent Americans who do care about the common good of our nation and about its future have banded together to ask that the Bush tax cuts not be removed.  That they and others in their income bracket be taxed, for the good of everyone.  

This is the kind of economic analysis and behavior that the U.S. Catholic bishops should be praising and promoting.  Not the analysis and behavior of folks like culture warriors Newt Gingrich, Deal Hudson, Erik Prince, and so on.  Meanwhile, I don't look for a break anytime soon, under Timothy Dolan, in the intent, obsessive focus on abortion and same-sex marriage, and the shocking amnesia about core principles of Catholic socio-economic teaching, even as our democracy totters on the brink of collapse due to the selfishness of those who own and control the vast majority of our resources.

The graphic is artist Fritz Eichenberg's depiction of the Last Supper.

Pope Addresses Health Care, and His Most Vocal Defenders Throw His Words Over Their Shoulders

Interesting: I read the predictable, ideology-driven comments of some of my fellow Catholics at this America blog posting about Pope Benedict's support for universal healthcare, and I wonder where these folks live, who say, "I would argue that all citizens of the US do have access to this level of care."  Or who argue, "Access to minimal levels of health care has probably been around almost everywhere for centuries, if not millenia [sic]."

They certainly don't live in a state like Arkansas, which ranks 48th in the nation in the most recent Kids Count child well-being index, with an exceptionally high child death rate, a high percentage of low-birthweight babies, etc.  We're 45th in the nation among states in which parents have no jobs and 48th in the nation with children being raised in poverty.

Many of these children live in the historically impoverished, heavily African-American Delta region of our state, in which wealth has been unequally distributed for generations and in which economic disparities are compounded by harsh, seemingly intractable racism.  In many Delta communities, there is no doctor.  There are no hospitals, no clinics, no treatment centers in many communities in the eastern half of our state--no chance at all to obtain even minimal health care unless one has transportation and can reach care facilities someplace else.  Getting young medical graduates to consider establishing a practice in these communities is well-nigh impossible.

And it's not just children who lack access to basic health care in these communities.  People in substance-abuse rehabilitation programs who require on-site, long term residential treatment have to look for one or two rare programs in the urban centers of the state, where they're removed from their families and the support network of their families and communities.  And I've just helped write a grant for mammography screening equipment in this same region of the state, for areas in which even that important technology is limited and not readily available to women seeking to monitor breast cancer.

I surely do wish these folks who are convinced everyone in the world has access to minimal levels of health care, and who throw the words of the pope over their shoulders casually even as they claim to be the most orthodox Catholics of all, would spend a few years living in places like the Arkansas Delta, at the level of subsistence income many Delta residents have.  Or perhaps they could live in a barrio in Latin America or in most of Africa and then write that "access to minimal levels of health care has probably been around almost everywhere for centuries, if not millennia."  Or perhaps they could live in the many other areas of this nation that experience serious health care challenges similar to those I'm describing in my own back yard: in native American communities, in urban centers with high concentrations of poverty, in the many rural areas in which doctors and hospitals are few and far between.

I might believe that they are reporting accurately if they reported that health care provision is adequate for everyone, after walking in those folks' shoes just a tad.  (And I'm not posting at the America blog site after I found myself censored there, but nothing prevents me from talking freely on my own blog about material posted at this site.)