Wheaton sues (abortively) to strike abortion drug mandate (which it obeyed as an Illinois state mandate)

The Southern Baptist Convention's Baptist Press and echoes like the North Carolina Biblical Reporter reported it last month when Illinois' Wheaton College joined Catholic groups in a lawsuit over an Affordable Care Act requirement that insurance plans cover birth control.

They have been silent about subsequent news that Wheaton cannot pursue this matter of evangelical conviction for a year because it has, perhaps since 2003, been providing insurance to faculty and staff that includes the contraceptive coverage over which it is in high legal dudgeon.

As Grant Gallico summarized it:

In order to qualify for safe harbor, a religious employer must not cover — or have recently covered — services it now wants to be exempt from covering. Duncan didn’t explain this on the call, but in paragraph 120 of Wheaton’s legal complaint (.pdf), you find this: “They currently provide coverage for certain contraceptives and inadvertently provided coverage for a short period after February 10, 2012 for other now-excluded contraceptives, making it impossible for Wheaton to make the required Safe Harbor certification.”

Sounds like Wheaton was paying for emergency contraception coverage for its employees — for how short a period it doesn’t say.

That brings us right up against the moral reasoning for Wheaton's thus far abortive legal action. When President Philip Ryken rejected the Obama administration's proposed accommodation exempting religious employers from paying for contraception coverage, while allowing employees to receive the coverage separately from the insurer, he said, “Any accommodation that still involves us in connection with an insurer that provides abortion services still, though indirectly, nevertheless implicates us morally in that action.”

But Wheaton's insurance coverage history apparently doesn't rise to that standard.

Gallico dug out the current source of Wheaton's coverage for faculty and staff and It's Blue Cross/BlueShield of Illinois:

And while Blue Cross pays for emergency contraception for thousands of enrollees who don’t work for Wheaton, it also covers an actual abortion drug — Mifeprex — which, the drug maker’s website points out, Blue Cross covers “to the same extent as surgical abortions.”

None of that fits neatly into the Southern Baptist narrative of Wheaton et al heroically resisting reduction of their freedom (although they are actually attacking their employees' freedom to make those decisions) of religion, but it still deserves to be reported.

'Pro-life Rep. Tom Perriello backs Senate bill’s abortion safeguards' [Update]

David Gibson reports pro-life Democrat Virginia Democratic Rep. Tom Perriello says the Senate bill's abortion funding safeguards are as good as the House's.

The take away:

“As health care experts and pro-life leaders agree, the abortion language in the Senate bill upholds the Hyde Amendment standard. The Senate health care bill prevents federal taxpayer dollars from funding abortions, as the Catholic Hospital Association and legal experts have recently stated and as my own research has confirmed.”

Read the rest here.

Update

CNS reported:

U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, [correctly] contradicting both the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and [misguided] members of Congress, said Monday that the Senate health-care bill uses no federal money to pay for health care plans which cover elective abortions.

Archbishop Fisichella stands his ground

Archbishop Salvatore (Rino) Fisichella is standing his ground against an eruption of U.S. "hyper-partisanship" into Vatican affairs. He isn't going to resign, apologize or lend further ink to his critics.

Five members of the 145-member Pontifical Academy for Life, which Fisichella heads, circulated a letter calling for his resignation.

Their campaign was supported by Judie Brown, president of the American Life League and in an essay by Monsignor Michel Schooyans, an academy member and emeritus professor at Belgium's Louvain University. Schooyans argued that Fisischella had fallen into a trap of "bogus compassion."

The letter was greeted with surprise by the Vatican spokesman, Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi. CNS reported:

"It's a bit strange that persons who are members of an academy address a request of this kind without addressing it to the competent authorities," Father Lombardi said. "It's astounding and seems incorrect that such a document be given public circulation."

At issue is the March, 2009, case of a nine-year-old Brazilian girl, about whom Allison Hantschell wrote:

I had an Easy-Bake Oven, when I was 9. It made tiny cupcakes and itty-bitty cookies, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since I read about the girl in Brazil.

I don't know her name, but she's 9 years old, living in Brazil. Brutally raped by her stepfather, multiple times over a period of years, and finally impregnated with twins.

Nine years old. And instead of playing baseball, or learning numbers, or baking tiny cupcakes and itty-bitty cookies, this little girl is at the center of a worldwide controversy over the Roman Catholic Church, its views on abortion, and, above all, the role of mercy and the incoherence of men.

In response to the abortion, the Archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Brazil, Jose Cardoso Sobrinho announced that he was excommunicating the doctors and the young girl’s mother. When that was not received well, the response was recast.

Anyone (with certain exemptions) who consciously worked to stop a birth excommunicated himself/herself, so:

Brazil’s Catholic bishops conference denied that the archbishop of Recife and Olinda, Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, excommunicated the mother and doctors who practiced a legal abortion on a nine-year-old girl that was pregnant with twins after being raped by her stepfather. . . . The secretary general of the bishops conference, Dimas Lara Barbosa, said that the prelate “at no time excommunicated anyone."

Archbishop Fisichella's alleged sin was to write in the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, that the public declaration of the already automatic excommunications was "hasty" and the nine-year-old girl, whose life was saved by the abortion of twins she was physically unequipped to have, "should have been above all defended, embraced, treated with sweetness to make her feel that we were all on her side, all of us, without distinction."

For this, he was accused of "pseudo-compassion" - no idle charge. And one he has rejected. For good reason. Indeed, the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a clarification in July, reiterating the Catholic Church's unwavering opposition to abortion and observing that Fisichella's words had been "manipulated and exploited."

Health reform

Robert Pear wrote

The Senate voted Thursday to reinvent the nation’s health care system, passing a bill to guarantee access to health insurance for tens of millions of Americans and to rein in health costs as proposed by President Obama.

The 60-to-39 party-line vote, on the 25th straight day of debate on the legislation, brings Democrats a step closer to a goal they have pursued for decades.

Bishops are a staple from approving health reform

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops says the Senate version of health reform does not go far enough in limiting abortion.

Howard M. Friedman explains why. He writes:

The Bishops' concern seems to be that under [the current version as amended], abortion coverage will still be in some policies that receive government subsidies, so long as a separate check is written for the part of the premium applicable to that coverage. Instead, according to a Dec. 14 letter from the Bishops, they want language in the House bill that was proposed as an amendment by Sen. Ben Nelson, but was defeated by the Senate. That language provides that no federal funds could be used "to cover any part of the costs of any health plan that includes abortion coverage." After that loss, Sen. Nelson negotiated the language in the Manager's Amendment and according to AP argued that the differences were "about a staple." By that he means that the disagreement is over whether abortion coverage -- which would be paid for separately in either case -- would be a part of the subsidized policy (not acceptable to the Bishops) or in a separate rider stapled to it (acceptable to the Bishops).

Anti-abortion politics and pregnant children

Brazil's Archbishop Emeritus Jose Cardoso Sobrinho -- best known for his efforts to prevent a raped nine-year-old pregnant with her stepfather's twins from receiving an abortion and his immediate public declaration of the excommunication of her mother and others involved in the abortion -- proclaimed last week that pro-abortion candidates "cannot represent honest citizens."

That's a long public step beyond the private denial of communion to pro-choice Catholic political figures in this country -- a practice Randall Terry would like to see in widespread use.

Agree or disagree, it is nonetheless an honest expression of the doctrine which underlay the conflict over the nine-year-old Brazilian girl's abortion.

Catholic figures have since protested that there was no medical necessity involved. But it is not clear that for Catholic clergy the debate was fundamentally over medical necessity, as senior Vatican official was quoted as saying at the time:

"We have laws, we have a discipline, we have a doctrine of the faith," the official says. "This is not just theory. And you can't start backpedaling just because the real-life situation carries a certain human weight."

Remember that the Vatican's top bioethics official, Archbishop Rino Fisichella, who argued in the Vatican newspaper that human and theological "mercy" should have been applied to those involved in the abortion, saw his view rejected in a "clarification."

Right-wing politics, not theology, drives anti-abortion opposition to health reform

Sara Posner explores the inescapable:

... Democrats, who claim to be pro-life, are playing politics with health care reform, aligning themselves more closely with the anti-choice hard right and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) than their own party. They insist that efforts to ensure that no public funds will be used to cover abortion services are insufficient. This game-playing is not about public funding of abortion, already outlawed in the Hyde Amendment (which bars federal funding from being used to pay for abortions for low-income women under Medicaid and other programs). Indeed, the House bill already incorporates Hyde through its own amendment authored by pro-choice California Democrat, Rep. Lois Capps.


Instead, these Democrats, led by Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan, are pushing for an amendment to restrict womens’ access to abortion. And that’s not theology, it's politics.

Read the entire piece here.

eBay says 'no' to the Roeder auction

Attempting to raise money for the defense of Scott Roeder, who is charged with first-degree murder in George Tiller's death, supporters planned an eBay auction. Planned, and written about by the Kansas City Star. And eBay says "no:"

"Based on the details we know about the anticipated listings, we believe these would violate our policy regarding offensive material," the company said in a statement issued to The Kansas City Star. "eBay will not permit the items in question to be posted to the eBay site, and they will be removed if they are posted."

How offensive?

Mark Silk explains:

Among the items they planned to auction is a prison drawing by Roeder of David and Goliath depicting David holding the head of Goliath with the name "Tiller" inscribed on Goliath's forehead. On the corpse are the words "child-murdering industry."

Perhaps it was not a flatly stated point of the overall effort to both rationalize and glorify violence. But that drawing. And calls for Roeder to use a "necessity defense," saying that Tiller's killing on May 31 was an act of justifiable homicide.

Accusing eBay of violating someone's First Amendment rights, and auction proponents are doing that, is a red herring.

H/T: Mark Silk

Health reform abortion complexities [Addendum]

While Steven Ertelt of LifeNews.com argues that there is a single-shot, pro-abortion health care reform bill before the U.S. House of Representatives, the situation is actually so complex that Ezra Klein of the Washington Post offers a guide to public option compromises.

With regard to abortion alone, the matter is so complex and hotly debated that PolitiFact.com has an entire page devoted to Abortion statements.

Among House Democrats, the Associated Press reports, what the legislation means to abortion rights is a matter of debate. Clarifying matters, Catholic Anthony Stevens-Arroyo argues at On Faith in a painstaking analysis that the muddle of legislative opinions does not translate into support for "abortion on demand."

The matter has been and remains, complex, nuanced, shifting.

Addendum:

Mark Silk explains how ant-abortion logic for opposing health-care reform would lead to a call for abolition of Medicaid.

Unsafe abortion is still a matter of conscience for some pro-life evangelicals

Legalization of abortion was not a radical goal, as Susannah Clark reminds us, reminding us in the British Guardian--not in 1967 when the British abortion act was passed. "Significant numbers of evangelicals, including high profile leaders," supported passage of the act. One reason, also commonplace in that era among otherwise conservative Southern newspaper editorialists in the U.S., was concern about the dangers backstreet abortions and often deadly self-induced abortions to which the poor were prey. Although that was in the era before "life begins at conception" became something of a mantra.

She is responding to the Guttmacher Institute report, Abortion Worldwide: A Decade of Uneven Progress [Download .pdf ]. It finds that the number of abortions has fallen "from an estimated 45.5 million procedures in 1995 to 41.6 million in 2003." Moreover, "abortion occurs at roughly equal rates in regions where it is broadly legal and in regions where it is highly restricted [40% of the world’s women live in countries with highly restrictive abortion laws]. The key difference is safety—illegal, clandestine abortions cause significant harm to women, especially in developing countries."

The result is 5 million women treated for complications, 3 million women who suffer untreated complications and 70,000 deaths a year. Guttmacher's solution is better access to contraception, better after-abortion care and expansion of legal access to abortion.

Clark, a researcher for the conservative, London-based Evangelical Alliance, writes:

I find myself agreeing with the evangelicals of 1967 and the evangelicals of today: I long to see a reduction in the number of abortions carried out each year, both in the UK and globally, but I am glad that there are safe services women can access if they do chose abortion. I may protest about the 200,000 abortions a year in the UK, but I'm glad there are also people speaking up for the 70,000 women who die each year, mainly in developing countries, from unsafe abortions – just as people spoke up for the impoverished women in England in 1967. Compassion lies at the heart of both concern for the mother's safety, and a desire to see the number of abortions reduced.

Abortion vs. Miscarriage

With 20 percent to a 40 percent of all pregnancies ending in miscarriage (depending upon how it is measured), there are more miscarriages than abortions in the U.S. now, as Mark Silk observed recently.

Perhaps 900,000 miscarriages and just over 800,000 abortions. Which creates something of a puzzle, as Silk goes on to explain:

Those who believe that there is a live person from the moment of conception presumably struggle from time to time with the theodicy question: Why does a just God permit such destruction of innocent life?

There is debate, often attended by the grief of loss.

Read Silk's brief blog in its entirety here.

A death every 12 minutes from lack of health insurance

While Baptist Press promoted Kelly Bloggs' shrill, CounterFactual, anti-abortion attack on health care reform, Eduardo Peñalver of Cornell Law School struggled with the daily human-life cost of U.S. health policies. Writing for the Catholic site dotCommonweal, Peñalver cited a new Harvard Medical School study which says:

Nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year — one every 12 minutes — in large part because they lack health insurance and can not get good care, Harvard Medical School researchers found in an analysis released on Thursday. “We’re losing more Americans every day because of inaction … than drunk driving and homicide combined,” Dr. David Himmelstein, a co-author of the study and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard, said in an interview with Reuters

Those were not concerns for Florida Baptist Witness editor James Smith, who was consumed with a conjectural cost in unborn lives, with fantasies of rationed health care and with attempting to prove Obama dishonest in his abortion reduction policies. On that last point, Smith's arguments finally relied so heavily on arguments made by the National Right to Life Committee that they become almost identical to them. And he closes with a risible reference to "the danger inherent to the elderly" of rationed health care, as if health care were not already rationed. FactCheck.org tells us, and PolitiFact.com agrees, that no version of the health reform legislation proposes new health care rationing.

Peñalvers focused instead on the overarching life issue posed by the deaths of the uninsured and by abortion deaths. Both. He acknowledged the argument that those newly insured via health reform might use resources thus freed up to help pay for an abortion. What he further considers, but Boggs and Smith do not, is the larger issue:

... wouldn’t this abortion-facilitating argument be equally true for any government subsidy of the poor? How, for example, is it different from saying that we should not give the poor food stamps because (for some undetermined number of people) that will free up money from their personal budgets that they will then use to go out and procure an abortion that they otherwise would not have been able to afford? Should we require food-stamp recipients to sign some pledge that they won’t use their private money to procure abortions? Given the various positions that Obama has taken to try to defuse the abortion issue in the health care context, that it may nonetheless indirectly subsidize abortions strikes me as a very odd argument against Catholics supporting health care reform.

It is similarly odd for Southern Baptists to lose themselves in sweeping claims that the president "and his base supporters in Congress" have an unacknowledged abortion agenda.

If the core issue is preservation of life, the Harvard study tells us there is a death every few minutes which suggests that it is not enough to seek fewer abortions.

CounterFactual: Kelly Boggs re Obama & mercenary doctors (abortion)

"President Obama recently expressed his concern over mercenary medical professionals," editor Kelly Boggs wrote in a Sept. 3 Louisiana Baptist Message editorial.

Boggs' logic moved quickly to judgment of the presidents July 22 news conference:

The President offered no evidence to support his claim that dollar-drunk docs are performing all manner of unnecessary medical procedures. There were no statistics supporting his claim that patients are mere prey for money-grubbing physicians; not even an anecdote was offered.

Thus Boggs implied that no such statistics and anecdotes were readily available.

Before implying that the president was misleading us, Boggs had a journalistic obligation to look for statistics and anecdotes. Failure to do so is, among professional journalists, a form of disregard for the truth.

Looking just a little would have showed Boggs that his argument was not exactly right.

The Congressional Budget office estimates 16% of the Gross Domestic Product -- about $700 billion a year -- "goes to healthcare spending that can't be shown to improve health outcomes."

One readily discovered anecdote is Consumer Reports' account of Ron Spurgeon's unnecessary cardiac bypass surgery at Redding Medical Center in northern California. Spurgeon "and 344 others sued the hospital and eight cardiologists and surgeons for performing unnecessary procedures. The defendants ultimately paid $442 million to settle the suit."

Neither the CBO numberss nor the availability of anecdotes should surprise anyone.

The problem to which Obama alluded is so commonplace that CBS had on June 10 ran a consumer-information feature warning that as many as 40% of all medical procedures are unnecessary and explaining how consumers can protect themselves.

But Boggs was in a hurry. The reality or lack thereof of greedy doctors wasn't his primary concern. Abortion was. Having castigated Obama for lack of statistics and anecdotes, Boggs wrote:

But let’s assume for the sake of argument the president is correct and mercenary medicine is indeed out of control in America. The one area he needs to set his sights on cleaning up first is those physicians who perform abortions.

Boggs argues that "85 to 90 percent, and more, of all abortions are carried out as a result of convenience" and fuel "a lucrative industry." Apparently to illustrate how lucrative, he wrote:

Planned Parenthood, America’s largest abortion provider, rakes in more than a billion dollars every year. And while PP is the largest peddler of elective abortions, it is by no means the only one. Needless to say, there is a lot of money available to greedy doctors willing to perform an unnecessary medical procedure.

Not exactly.

It is true Planned Parenthood is a nonprofit corporation with a total budget of about $1 billion a year.

Yet as Wikipedia makes clear, Planned Parenthood's budget isn't the result of "raking in" abortion profits:

In 2007, contraception constituted 36% of total services, STI/STD testing and treatment constituted 31%, cancer testing and screening constituted 17%; other women's health services, including pregnancy, prenatal, midlife, and infertility were 11%, and approximately 3% of total services involved surgical and medical abortions.
. . .
Planned Parenthood receives about a third of its money in government grants and contracts ($349.6 million in FY 2008). In the 2007–08 Annual Report, clinic income totaled $374.7 million and miscellaneous operating revenues $68.9 million. Planned Parenthood is also heavily sponsored by private individuals, with over 700,000 active individual contributors [.pdf] Large donors such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation contribute a substantial part of the organization's budget.

Undeterred by reality, Boggs charges on to his central point:

So, if President Obama is really serious about reforming health care by reducing the number of medically unnecessary procedures he will certainly call for the end of elective abortions, right?

That's the first in a series of rhetorical questions with which Boggs hectors his readers. It's rhetorical because Obama's pro-choice views are well-known.

Boggs' questions do bring us to his concluding erroneous argument -- that health reform will use government funds to pay for abortion. His proof is an Aug. 5 news story:

In fact, the Associated Press recently reported, “Health care legislation before Congress would allow a new government-sponsored insurance plan to cover abortions...”

The ellipses are his, BTW, and the AP story is not exactly the final word .

On August 7 PolitiFact.com examined the same issue. It did so by way of evaluating a claim by Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) that "The Democrat-backed health care reform plan "will require (Americans) to subsidize abortion with their hard-earned tax dollars."

After exploring the matter in detail, PolitiFact concluded that "things could change as the health reform package works its way through Congress, but for now, we don't see anything to support Boehner's claim that taxpayers would subsidize abortions. And so we rule his statement False."

Also not exactly right is Boggs' conclusion that "If the president has his way, not only will medically unnecessary, elective abortion on demand continue unabated in America, it will be underwritten by the government and will likely only increase."

Obama's campaign commitment was to abortion reduction, an issue covered in detail by in a Sept. 14 Associated Baptist Press article by David Gushee, Joel Hunter and Ronald Sider.

The three wrote in rebuttal to a Baptist Press article, which they argue misportrayed the recently introduced Preventing Unintended Pregnancies, Reducing the Need for Abortion, and Supporting Parents Act (H.R. 3312, referred to as the Ryan-DeLauro Bill).

Gushee, Hunter and Sider aren't counterfactual. They don't hector their readers with rhetorical questions. They do conclude:

Common-ground efforts to reduce abortion by addressing the circumstances that lead to it are consistent with the conviction that all life -- the unborn, pregnant women, infants and children -- is sacred. Honest dialogue about this innovative approach is imperative for those of us who aspire to protect life in concrete ways.
Plainly misrepresenting the content of the Ryan-DeLauro bill, and asserting in defiance of logic and evidence that it will increase rather than reduce abortion, does nothing to protect life. In fact, it does the opposite.

Likewise abortion reduction is President Obama's clearly stated goal. Not Boggs' summary.

Mourn yes but inflame, no [Update]

Let us mourn the untimely death of anti-abortion activist James Pouillon, without creating the illusion of a war where there isn't one.

The man arrested for Pouillon's murder reportedly told Owosso, Mich., police he was also involved in the death that day of Mike Fouss, a gravel pit owner.

As of this writing, nothing actually explaining the motive for the killings available.

Randall Terry's rush to declare Pouillon a martyr is heat without light.

Update:

AP reports Harlan James Drake, 33, has been charged with first-degree murder in association with a grudge-killing spree. Pouillon and Fouss were killed and there would apparently have been a third death had police not apprehended Drake after the second killing.

Drake "didn't like the activist [Pouillon] holding a sign with graphic images of a fetus in front of students," AP reported. The story goes on to say:

The gunman drove next to a gravel pit business and shot and killed the owner, who apparently also upset him, police said. Authorities believe they stopped a third slaying by catching up with the gunman before he could kill again. ''The defendant had ill will toward these three individuals -- not for the same reason necessarily, but had a grudge,'' said Shiawassee County Prosecutor Randy Colbry.

Read the entire story here.

Peacemaker Obama separates abortion from health reform

An unfazed President Barack Obama laid down the law on the role of abortion in health-care reform, immediately after S.C. Rep. Joe Wilson's factually wrong and possibly censurable "lie" outburst.

There will be no federal funding of abortions or abolition of conscience laws.

From the transcript of Obama's presentation:

THE PRESIDENT: ... There are also those who claim that our reform efforts would insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false. The reforms -- the reforms I'm proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: You lie! (Boos.)
THE PRESIDENT: It's not true. And one more misunderstanding I want to clear up -- under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions, and federal conscience laws will remain in place.
(Applause.)

Convoluted struggle over the issue will continue, as pro-life blogger Jill Stanek demonstrated today with her argument that Obama is merely attempting to create a myth. That view isn't taking hold. Two big Catholic health care organizations were persuaded by Obama's speech, as was the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Judging from the post-speech CNN poll and the Democracy Corps during-speech dial testing, so were Americans in general.

Catholic bishops push for health care reform

With gathering force Bishops across the country are calling for a united Catholic voice for health care reform legislation, reports Catholic News Service. Access to care and respect for life are the unifying themes of the Bishops' messages.

How abortion is handled is a pivotal issue for those whose voices were amplified by the National Catholic Register.

The Labor Day Statement of the Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) also reflected those values, saying "the dignity of work and “the contributions and rights” of the American worker, the importance of health care reform, and recent collaboration between the Catholic Church, unions, and health care workers."

The Consortium of Jesuit Bioethics Programs issued a clear, concise statement of The Moral Case for Insuring the Uninsured [.pdf] which said:

Each year, according to a report of the prestigious Institute of Medicine, approximately 18,000 Americans die prematurely because they lack health insurance. Persons who lack insurance typically do not seek medical care until their illnesses have progressed to the point when they can no longer be ignored. Then the illness is far more difficult (and expensive) to treat.
This simple fact of the death toll from lack of insurance should provide the moral will to treat this situation as we treat any national emergency that threatens large numbers of Americans whether that emergency is from an aggressor such as terrorists, a natural disaster such as Katrina, or a communicable disease such as swine flu. In national emergencies, we require our representatives to determine what needs to be done to alleviate the threat and to appropriate the resources to do it. In such situations we would be very surprised to hear our representatives or members of the media talking about whether this was the right time for action, arguing to slow down the momentum toward action, or debating whether we can afford to act.

Minority dissent on the right cannot reasonably be seen as negating the calls for reform.

Catholic Right drifts away from Papal Encyclical toward Protestant Conservatives

Today's NYT piece by David Kirkpatrick led both Grant Gallicho and Mark Silk to note how the Catholic right has put itself at odds with the church's social justice position.

Gallicho, himself Catholic, analyzed the comments of Bishop Nickless of Sioux City. Nickless told the NYT:

Preserving patient choice (through a flourishing private sector) is the only way to prevent a health care monopoly from denying care arbitrarily, as we learned from HMOs in the recent past. While a government monopoly would not be motivated by profit, it would be motivated by such bureaucratic standards as quotas and defined ‘best procedures,’ which are equally beyond the influence of most citizens. The proper role of the government is to regulate the private sector, in order to foster healthy competition and to curtail abuses.

Gallicho responded:

Government monopoly?
Patient choice?
Does the bishop understand that in several states insurers operate virtual monopolies?
Or that many Americans have no choice when it comes to health insurance? That they take what they can get or else they go broke–or they can’t get it, suffer a catastrophic illness, and break the rest of us?
Are we to believe that the profit motive is better than “bureaucratic standards”?
Is that church teaching too?

Silk summarizes church teaching as recently reflected in Pope Benedict's encyclical, Caritas in Veritate. Silk writes:

As I've pointed out here, the pope's encyclical teaches that food, drinkable water, "basic instruction and elementary health care" are all "elementary and basic rights." Sure there's politics and prudential judgment involved in determining the best way to provide people with health care, but so is there in determining the best way to provide people with food and drinkable water and breathable air.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has a Web site where it takes a stand for the broad, generous health care reform which church social policy implies. And against abortion. Which the Christian Right is attempting to use as a wedge issue by arguing there is unequivocal support for abortion in the various health reform proposals.

Carefully sorting abortion out produces equivocal results that do not support towering rhetoric from either side of the health reform debate. Consider the recent work of Beliefnet’s Steve Waldman on that issue.

As a result, Conservative Catholic bishops who are joining the Christian right on that may find themselves at odds with both church policy and reality.

Both extremes of the is-abortion-covered argument are wrong

Beliefnet's Steve Waldman digs deep into the facts of this debate and returns agreeing with us:

To understand requires us to take a journey into the legislative weeds but here's my bottom line: those who claim abortion clearly is covered and those who say it clearly isn't are both wrong.

His conclusion, fully stated, is:

We often think of abortion as a black and white issue. But when it comes to the question of whether health care reform bills "cover" or provide "taxpayer support for" abortion, there are many shades of gray. As of now, neither side is entirely telling the truth about what the bills do; on some aspects, Obama and his allies have misled, on others pro-lifers have. More important, some of this does not involve matters of "fact" or "truth" or "lies" but rather subjective judgment calls, a land where ideologues don't function well but legislators must.

The entire column deserves a careful reading here.

Progressive evangelical and conservative have a civil dialog

Amid the manufactured uproar, some do still manage to share their differences in public, and on some points, politely agree to disagree.

Randall Terry has a bishop problem

Randall Terry got himself in trouble by using an interview (below) with the Vatican's Archbishop Raymond L. Burke, in an attempt to pressure U.S. Catholic bishops:

Burke rebuked Terry and apologized for the use of his comments to attack Washington Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl and Arlington Diocese Bishop Paul S. Loverde. Terry was using the interview to push more U.S. Catholic bishops to deny Communion to politicians who support abortion rights, and as a result of our national political geography, those two were in the cross hairs.

Catholic Online has Burke's entire statement about the matter.

Michael Sean Winters of America magazine writes that Burke’s failure to defend his brother bishops during the interview with Terry “was the Vatican equivalent of throwing them under the bus.”

The Rev. Thomas Reese, senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University, told the Washington Post that Burke "violated the episcopal etiquette. You don't criticize other bishops in public and you don't tell other bishops how to run their diocese."

Terry shoots back that Burke has been "deceived" about how the videotape is being use. Uh huh.