Today’s Cleveland Plain Dealer’s front page carries two stories about life and death.
The top headline is “Trayvon’s death stirs responses from Cavs, other NBA players.” A picture of a hooded Miami Heat team accompanies the story.
The headline below that picture reads, “Protesters blast birth-control rule.” That story’s picture prominently displays the bottom half of a placard expressing something about “Freedom of Religion.”
The first story probably needs less explanation from me than does the second. Everyone knows about the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin by Sanford, FL, “neighborhood crime-watch volunteer George Zimmerman,” and about the protests and outrage that have ensued because Zimmerman is still free and still has a gun.
The second story grows out of the Obama administration’s interpretation of last year’s Affordable Health Care Act that would require “faith-based organizations like hospitals, universities and charities that employ and serve people of all faiths as well as nonbelievers” to offer “health insurance plans that cover contraception and sterilization without charging co-payments.” The rule “exempts health plans carried by churches and some religious organizations.”
The administration has since backed off a bit from its initial rule, now requiring the insurance companies themselves to pick up the cost of contraception. I admit I don’t understand how that is supposed to work, but it did not satisfy the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, which is why this demonstration was held yesterday at Cleveland’s St. John’s Cathedral, Bishop Richard Lennon preaching. The Catholic Church has cast the health care rule it opposes as an assault on “Freedom of Religion,” hence, the pictured placard.
When it comes to contraception the Catholic Church has not been very successful with its own constituency, which makes its wider political machinations even more interesting. The Plain Dealer article ends by reporting that “a number of recent surveys show that as high as 98 percent of Catholic women support and use contraception.” If that number is anywhere near close to accurate, it may mean the Church is exercising its political clout upon society as a whole to try to deny its own members access to contraception. It is willing to deny the nation’s non-Catholic population the freedom to follow its religious convictions in order to force the Catholic population to acquiesce to the Church’s moral teachings.
So, whose “freedom of religion” are we talking about? Shades of the early pilgrims who came to these shores for “freedom of religion” - their religion, not mine, or yours, or someone else’s. “Freedom of religion” stops where it impedes another’s “freedom of religion,” and justification for limiting anyone’s freedom must be based upon the guaranteed rights of each individual, not upon that particular religion’s own theological dogma.
Women should be free in this country to have access to whatever health care they need, including contraception and (dare I take the next step?) safe abortions. And the wonderful thing is that the more access to contraception women have the less likely it will be that they will get pregnant, and a woman who is not pregnant sure won’t need an abortion.
What does the above have to do with the shooting death of an unarmed teenager in Florida? Just this: if the Roman Catholic Church gave a tenth of the energy it devotes to fighting contraception and abortion to advocating reasonable control of handguns, its advocacy for stricter gun control might save far more lives than its resistance to birth control is creating. I believe the bishops have some fairly progressive positions on a number of social issues, including racism, poverty, and capital punishment. For a time they mounted impressive street campaigns supporting paths to citizenship and the like for undocumented aliens, but that’s about in recent years, as far as I know.
What if the Roman Catholic Church led the way onto our streets to protest our becoming a vigilante society, where “neighborhood watch volunteers” carry guns they think they are justified in firing to “Stand Their Ground” when they see a black teen-ager in a “suspicious-acting” hoody? What if the Church bought billboard space to carry gory images of bodies riddled with bullets? What if it lobbied against “concealed carry” laws with the same vehemence it gives to trying keep unthinking cells from getting together deep inside human bodies to make new babies?
What if the leadership and people of the United States of America faced the incontrovertible truth that we suffer under the highest rate of gun violence in the civilized world because we have and allow too many guns, not too few? What if my freedom to do or be anything is threatened by a guy walking behind me who doesn’t like me in my freedom and who pulls a gun out of his pocket simply because who I am threatens him?
And, just to get it off my chest, any fool (except a few Supreme Court justices) has to admit the Second Amendment has nothing to do with the chaos in our gun laws today. Where is a “well-regulated militia” when we need it?
On page 4 of the very same Plain Dealer that I started with this morning, there’s an article about Rick Santorum, a very, very good Catholic. While campaigning at a shooting range (So cool!) in Louisiana, Santorum “fired a pistol at a target (What a man he is!), and as he did so a woman in the crowd shouted, ‘Pretend it’s Obama!’”
The story reports that Santorum was wearing ear protectors, so he didn’t hear the remark. Later, when told of it, he called it “absurd” and “horrible and terrible,” and then said he was glad he “didn’t hear it.” His strong Catholic faith should have led him to call her comment “immoral.” Presidential candidate that he is, he certainly told the Secret Service guy keeping watch over him, didn’t he?
Maybe if Santorum and other Republican politicians listened to more of what’s being shouted by the people they are wooing they’d hear their rhetoric taking us all down to a place where there will be no real freedom of religion or anything else for any but the most favored few...corporations.
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