Tag Archives: Affordable Care Act

A Growing Rift Between Religious Groups And The GOP

The Wing-nut Takeover Of the GOP Continues

I’ve never understood how people who call themselves Christians can belong to the Republican Party. I read the Bible many years ago and seem to remember lessons that taught me to care for my fellow humans, to show compassion, to turn the other cheek and to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

That doesn’t exactly describe the modern Republican Party now does it?

With the craziness happening in the political world over contraception, the following story from ThinkProgress makes me think that the GOP is overcompensating in their reaction to the contraceptive issue.

Earlier this month, the nation was barraged with media coverage of the Catholic Bishops’ opposition to regulations promulgated under the Affordable Care Act protecting working women’s access to contraception. The loudness of the bishops’ complaints, which were echoed by conservative luminaries ranging from Speaker John Boehner to GOP presidential frontrunners Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney, easily could have conveyed the misimpression that churches and other religious groups are at odds with the Affordable Care Act.

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The Democratic Party Finds a Spine in Obama

When the Republican Party’s promiscuity police stood toe-to-toe with science—arguing, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that contraception increases sexual indiscrimination—they won. Democrats sat on their unprotected thumbs as “abstinence only” replaced “sex education” in our nation’s schools.

It was not realistic or pragmatic. It wasn’t even remotely effective, despite the millions of taxpayer dollars spent teaching it. It was faith-based advocacy, the imposition of one’s religious views on an entire populace. And it was made into law via legislation supported and funded by Democrats. (Hence the common “spineless” prefix used when referencing the Democratic Party.)

And then there was Barack.

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The Catholic Church's weird ideas about conscience and contraception

In August 1996, 250 people watched as Kenya’s highest Catholic cleric, Cardinal Maurice Otunga, ceremonially set fire to boxes full of condoms and copies of “safe sex” pamphlets. In the face of the rapidly-mounting African AIDS crisis, the Vatican had responded by saying basically that while HIV and AIDS might be bad, the use of contraceptives was worse — and it will always be impossible to know how many were condemned to die miserable, wasting deaths as a result.

The Catholic Church, which I was baptized into during an event I cannot be expected to remember, is rarely stranger than when it takes up arms against contraceptives. Since Pope Paul VI’s controversial 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae especially, the Catholic hierarchy has been intransigent on the subject of artificial prophylaxis, even when it is clearly the much lesser of two (granting this momentarily for the sake of argument) “evils.”

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