The LuLac Edition #2141, July 29th, 2012

Health Care-Not Scare Care logo 

HEALTH CARE AND RELIGION

Again much thanks to Pittston Politics.com’s Joe Valenti for curing my writer’s block this week. After a very intense week on the work and personal front, I was pretty much tapped out until I saw this on Joe’s site. Joe wrote about how he thinks the Affordable Care Act is going to infringe on our freedom of religion. 
Does Obama Care infringe on your religious freedoms? The Catholic Church along with other religious institutions have taken a stand and have drawn a line in the sand. It is quite clear. The Catholic Church refuses to be mandated to provide birth control or other forms of birth control also known as the “morning after pill.” 
The Affordable Health Care Act, exempts religious groups from providing contraceptives. President Obama reaffirmed that.  So did Joe Biden who pushed the issue.
The HHS mandate clearly violates their religious conscious. And, the Catholic Church has made it clear, before it spends one penny to fund an abortion or on birth control, it will close every Catholic charity, hospital, homeless shelter…which provides more charitable services than all the federal government programs combined. 
Like a spoiled child not getting their way, this church that protected child molesters and has treated women as second class citizens will threaten to close institutions of health and well being. Surprised? They shut down churches. Wiped out entire ethnic histories of parishes. They erased grand church names like St. Joseph the Worker, St. Boniface, St. Anthony’s and St. Mary’s. Don’t be surprised if the next Catholic Church merged parish you see is “Saints Sonny and Cher in the community of St. Franco of American at the Congregational Community of the Church of What’s Happening How?” You think it’s a threat, they’re most likely looking for an excuse to close those places down. Again, the people who are against the Affordable Health Care Act are going through their scare tactics again. Catholics will not have their birth control paid for by their church entity by mandate. All Catholics who risk eternal damnation and get their birth control at the drug store or from a doctor to keep the U.S.A. from becoming Biafra will get it somewhere else. And to be sure, Catholics must be using birth control because the Church uses as its justification for closing churches declining populations. While we’re at it, let’s also think about this: how hypocritical is it for the Catholic Church to discourage converts in underdeveloped poor countries to have as many babies as they can because it is “God’s way”. A just God would not bring babies into the world where they die of malnutrition because their parents have to dig for scraps of food in dirt. 
Here’s what really bothers me about these arguments. This debate happened back in April. The church screamed and yelled and the White House made it clear that religious groups were exempt. So maybe by bringing this up, the right wing hopes that people forgot there was an exception. The second thing is thing, how can an entity, founded on charity and love, leave 30 million of its brethren without affordable health care? Has the church stopped practicing what it preached? This is of course decidedly un Christian but maybe the Church is proving my point. For many years I said I wasn’t a Christian but a Roman Catholic. Legions of posters and e mailers took me to task because they said you had to be one in the same, a Christian and a Roman Catholic. With these obvious unchristian attitudes toward the uninsured, maybe they’re like me. Not Christians, but Roman Catholics. 
And finally, Valenti poses the question: Are your religious beliefs more important than your political convictions? 
Thankfully we live in a country that was formed on religious freedom. The Constitution that every card carrying conservative swears they carry around with them defines a clear line between the separation of church and state. The Founding Fathers might have included God in the Declaration of Independence but did not want any deity to be the word of law for this nation. So we as voters can vote on what we are supposed to. What exactly is that? The best people to run our affairs (foreign and domestic) in this representative Republic, the best person who will protect our economic interests and the best individuals who will give us the choice unfettered to either vote for our religious convictions or not. This complex world we live in demands nothing less. Once more this is still another example of how this law has been mischaracterized by the right. 
  

HEALTH CARE GETS A SHOUT OUT

So I’m watching the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games the other night and I see a ten minute salute to National Health Care. The opening program featured a significant amount of British history. And one of those segments were dedicated to the National Health Service. This is the most maligned foreign program in America. We hear our people in England die because the health care stinks. We hear our awful the care is and if we adopt a change in Health Care, we will become Health Care captives like England and France. (By the way in France, after you have a baby, you get visits from a Health care provider who makes sure the mother is healthy, the baby well taken care and everything is in order). In the U.S. which according to the GOP has the greatest health care in the world, mom gets the baby and is on her own as soon as her fanny lifts up from the wheelchair on the curb of the hospital. If the health care is sooooooooooo bad, why would a country like Britain promote it to the entire world as one of their national accomplishments? How awful could it be. Maybe if the Democrats started to fight back when people lie about the Affordable Health Care Act and maybe promote the good things in it, maybe, just maybe people will understand it. The Obama administration need not have dancing doctors and nurses jumping up and down on hospital beds, but damn it, don’t run away from the biggest legislative accomplishment since the Civil Rights bills of the 1960s. As the venerable Professor would say, “Something to think about this morning!”