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You will hear a lot tomorrow and in the days ahead as to how "this important bill" could not be "held hostage" to any one issue, "it's not perfect," and how "compromises needed to be made," in order to "get things done."
<snip>
Yet the Stupak Amendment was not considered to be viable until this week when suddenly the Bishops ratcheted up the heat in Congress and through a "mass"-ive campaign in conservative parishes.
For some reason, when the Bishops pay a call, the entire House leadership shudders, and for some reason, the fact that the Bishops endorsed the bill suddenly became an important "stamp" on a bill that is about public health.
On Friday night, for example, according to several news reports, representatives of the USCCB met with House Democratic Leadership to demand that language be included or an amendment to the House health care reform bill be passed effectively banning private insurance companies from covering abortion care. And apparently as a result of these meetings, the House leadership effectively caved to these demands, jettisoned an alternative amendment offered by Congressman Brad Ellison, a pro-life Democrat from Illinois, and agreed to allow an "up or down" vote on the Stupak amendment.
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Do we live in a theocracy?
Honestly: I would like an answer. From the White House. From the House Leadership. And you should want one too.
And be assured this is not the first time women have been sold in the cause of the "greater good," whatever that is when the rights of half the population are trampled.
Last year, after literally 18 months of efforts by tens of advocacy groups to craft a reauthorization of the US Global AIDS Act that corrected failed programs by removing abstinence-only until marriage programs and ensuring that HIV positive women could get access to a full range of reproductive health care, the Bishops stepped in in the 11th hour and insisted on changes.
What were they? Banning US global funding from supporting contraceptive services for HIV-positive women in Africa who wanted to avoid another pregnancy in no small part because they likely would not be alive to support another child; reinserting language on abstinence until marriage and requiring reports to Congress wherever at least 50 percent of funds were not spent on abstinence; and ensuring conscience langauge so sweeping that groups who did not "like" gays or sex workers would not be "forced" to serve them either with prevention or treatment.
http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2009/11/07/do-catholic-bishops-run-united-states-government#comment-32182I want to know why the USCCB has so much influence over policy. Why do they get to demand changes? I didn't realize they had stepped in on the AIDS Act too. What else are they doing that we don't know about?
And riddle me this. If they are acting as a group with their obvious ties to the Vatican, shouldn't they be considered to be acting as an agent of a foreign theocracy?
They have every right to express their views. I strongly object to their obvious intrusion into the US political system.
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