Mendenhall: the Politics of Contraception

By Lee Mendenhall
Wicked Local Marlboro
February 25, 2012

http://www.wickedlocal.com/marlborough/news/opinions/x1730216431/Mendenhall-The-politics-of-contraception#axzz1nIWTiVag

With many far more important issues to address, the Republican right has seized on the Obama Administration’s reasonable requirements for contraceptive coverage in health plans as another club to attack him with, and as usual, rage replaces reason in all the far-right flacks’ fulminations.

It’s taken pages of reading for me to find some of the facts, but I commend the MetroWest Daily News editors for including some calmer writers who have made the following clear: 1) 28 states already have similar requirements in place; 2) the requirements do NOT apply if all the employees share the religion which wishes to exclude the coverage; and 3) the administration has offered to lighten the requirements considerably.

Yet this isn’t enough to satisfy the U.S Conference of Catholic Bishops or the GOP opportunists who, when they think they smell Obama’s blood, are driven to pile on lies and falsifications enough to bury all truth and rational thinking.

One of the most disturbing things about this issue is the lack of judgment displayed by the Republican candidates and their backers, and by the citizens who agree with those candidates. Are Americans willing to be led by men who will turn the clock back on women’s rights? Men who don’t seem to realize that many other men and women actually care about those rights (remember the Susan B. Komen foundation vs. Planned Parenthood, or the Mississippi “life begins at conception” referendum?), and that they frequently vote? Or is it even worse — that the Republican right is confident that all the money and corruption the Citizens United decision is bringing in will overcome democracy completely?

Also greatly disturbing is how the Catholic Church, with such great potential and actual power to do good, risks squandering the opportunity given it by its founding grace and deep material, intellectual, and spiritual resources. Many parish priests are fine, upright men who sacrifice much to help others, but a significant number who rise in the hierarchy seem to have lost their way. The public face of the church as presented by the U.S. Bishops partly seems a cynical program to blame everything else (the sixties, gay culture, birth control) as a way to evade responsibility for enabling rampant child sexual abuse and then trying to cover it up. If misdirected energy hadn’t been spent on demonizing contraception and homosexuality, squabbling for decades over ecumenical liberalization, etc, etc, perhaps better attention to internal affairs could have prevented the horror of priestly pedophilia and the resulting hemorrhage of payouts and parishes.

Who am I to criticize the Catholic Church? As a husband and father, I know a few things the Church doesn’t: how to build and nourish a marriage, how to care for and raise children, and what it is to work at fulfilling those responsibilities 24/7. As long as the church is structured the way it is, it will never know those things. The Church would do a lot better sticking to what it does know — charitable and spiritual support and counsel — and humbly leaving off its prescriptions regarding marital and sexual relationships. I acknowledge that I sometimes fell short as a husband and father, and the Church could and should acknowledge its own history regarding priestly celibacy and other errors. In its first centuries, the church made the calculation that it would support priests but not assume financial responsibility for both priests and their families. It’s made equally bad calculations since — the Inquisition, cooperating with the Nazis in WWII Europe, opposing Liberation Theology in Latin America, developing dogma against practices Christ never condemned. Given Christ’s teachings about poverty and wealth, it’s against all ethical logic for the church to now politically partner with Republicans who represent wealth and greed, instead of those Democrats who, secular or not, generally sympathize with and work to help support the poor, the less-abled, children, and the aged.

For those whose opinion might still be swayed be reason, Arthur Kaplan’s recent article makes a good analogy: would we be comfortable letting a Jehovah’s Witness organization drop blood transfusion or organ transplant coverage for its employees? If that doesn’t convince you what a slippery slope letting the bishops win would put us on, I’d like to go further with some thought experiments. What would be the GOP reaction if we replaced “Catholic organization” with “Muslim organization” in these discussions of questions of conscience vs. medical coverage? If Rick Santorum believes, as he has been quoted, that women should remain at home, should his organization be allowed to drop women from work-related injury coverage? I don’t believe in genital mutilation: should I be able to drop my company plan’s coverage of circumcision?Should the Scientologists be able to drop mental health coverage since they don’t like psychiatry?

One final laugh for me was the unwitting (and unusual) sentence of truth in Jay Ambrose’s column of Feb. 18, where he said: “The idea is that there are people who know a lot more about how you should live your life than you do and should therefore give you unbending instructions you are forced to obey.” Yes, Jay, and some of those people are called “Bishops” and “Evangelical Protestants” and the “Taliban,” and their appropriate inclusion in the same list is damn chilling when you think about it.