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Editorial See other Editorial Articles Title: Top Ten Catholic Teachings Santorum Rejects while Obsessing about Birth Control Omar Khayyam (27) Posted on 02/12/2012 by Juan That priceless ruby is from a different mine, and that unique pearl is from a different shop. Thinking about this and that is just your imagination, and mine; the story of passionate love is from a different tongue. trans. by Juan Cole From Whinfield 27. 0 Retweet 0 Share 9 StumbleUpon 0 Printer Friendly Send via email Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment Top Ten Catholic Teachings Santorum Rejects while Obsessing about Birth Control Posted on 02/12/2012 by Juan The right wing Republican politicians who have been denouncing the requirement that female employees have access to birth control as part of their health benefits as an attack on religious freedom completely ignore the church teachings they don’t agree with. Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich are both Catholics, and wear their faith on their sleeves, but they are hypocritical in picking and choosing when they wish to listen to the bishops. 1. So for instance, Pope John Paul II was against anyone going to war against Iraq I think you’ll find that Rick Santorum managed to ignore that Catholic teaching. 2.The Conference of Catholic Bishops requires that health care be provided to all Americans. I.e., Rick Santorum’s opposition to universal health care is a betrayal of the Catholic faith he is always trumpeting. 3. The Catholic Church opposes the death penalty for criminals in almost all situations. (Santorum largely supports executions.) 4. The US Conference of Bishops has urged that the federal minimum wage be increased, for the working poor. Santorum in the Senate repeatedly voted against the minimum wage. 5. The bishops want welfare for all needy families, saying “We reiterate our call for a minimum national welfare benefit that will permit children and their parents to live in dignity. A decent society will not balance its budget on the backs of poor children.” Santorum is a critic of welfare. 6. The US bishops say that “the basic rights of workers must be respected–the right to productive work, to decent and fair wages, to the organization and joining of unions…”. Santorum, who used to be supportive of unions in the 1990s, has now, predictably, turned against them. 7. Catholic bishops demand the withdrawal of Israel from Palestinian territories occupied in 1967. Rick Santorum denies that there are any Palestinians, so I guess he doesn’t agree with the bishops on that one. 8. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops ripped into Arizona’s law on treatment of immigrants, Cardinal Roger Mahony characterized Arizona’s S.B. 1070 as “the country’s most retrogressive, mean-spirited, and useless anti-immigrant law,” saying it is based on “totally flawed reasoning: that immigrants come to our country to rob, plunder, and consume public resources.” He even suggested that the law is a harbinger of an American Nazism! Santorum attacks ‘anchor babies’ or the provision of any services to children of illegal immigrants born and brought up in the US. 9. The Bishops have urged that illegal immigrants not be treated as criminals and that their contribution to this country be recognized. 10. The US Conference of Bishops has denounced, as has the Pope, the Bush idea of ‘preventive war’, and has come out against an attack on Iran in the absence of a real and present threat of an Iranian assault on the US. In contrast, Santorum wants to play Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove and ride the rocket down on Isfahan himself. The conflict is between Federal authorities and the US Catholic bishops over rules requiring employees of Catholic institutions such as universities and hospitals to have birth control pills supplied to them as part of their health insurance. Because of Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae, the contemporary Roman Catholic church has taken the stand that artificial birth control is immoral. The bishops therefore object to having the church be forced to supply it as part of their employees’ health care packages. The problem is that birth control is legal in the United States, and birth control pills are used for other purposes than contraception (in fact, contraception may not even be the purpose of the majority of prescriptions). Contrary to what Santorum alleges, the prescriptions are relatively expensive for poor and working class families. Religious practices in the United States are trumped by secular law all the time when there is a conflict. Thus, Native Americans who believe in using peyote as part of their religious rituals were fired from their government jobs for doing so, and the US Supreme Court upheld it in 1990. Likewise, traditionalist members of the Sikh religion believe that a man should avoid cutting his hair, and should bind it up in a turban. So what if an orthodox Sikh gets a job as a construction worker? He can’t get a hard hat on over the turban. Does he have the right to forgo the hard hat on the construction site, so as to retain his turban? The question went to the US courts, and they said Sikhs have to wear hard hats. If a brick fell on the turban and killed the Sikh worker, his family could after all sue the construction company for negligence since it did not require him to wear a hard hat. Or there are many instances in which Muslim religious laws and practices have been over-ruled in the United States by the courts. American law forbids Muslim-American men to take a second wife, something legal to them in many of their home countries. State law tends to award community property in cases of divorce instead of the much smaller payments men can make to divorced women in Islamic law, even if the couple have specified in their marriage contract that Muslim law (sharia) will govern these issues. I don’t think there is any question that Federal law, and state law, can trump Roman Catholic religious sentiments, just as they trump the religious sentiments and practices of other religious communities where issues of secular justice and equity are at stake. The tradition of American progressive thought is tolerant of religion even while usually not being religious itself. In my view this attitude of tolerance is rooted in James Madison’s theory of democracy, which is that it is best preserved by lively arguments among groups in the body politic that disagree with one another. Thus, while the Roman Catholic church authorities adopted a negative stance toward modernity, cultural pluralism, and democracy in the nineteenth century, the Catholic community in the United States nevertheless contributed in important ways to modernity, cultural pluralism and democracy. Arguably, had the US been entirely Protestant, its law and practice would have evolved in a less pluralistic and tolerant direction. A flourishing Catholic community contributed to social debates and so improved American democracy– witness Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement. And, the reformist theologians of the twentieth century, most of them European or Latin American, cultivated by American Catholics, made important contributions to our understanding– Karl Rahner, Edward Schillebeeckx, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hans Kueng, Paulo Freire, and Gustavo Gutierrez. I would argue that Vatican II was an important event in American religious life across the board, not just for American Catholics. It is lack of appreciation of Madisonian conceptions of democracy of pluralism and checks and balances that led the late Christopher Hitchens to disregard altogether the enormous positive contribution of the Church, whether to the education of the poor and working classes or to teaching social justice. (By the way, the argument for democracy depending on diverse voices and vigorous debate is also an argument for the benefits for the US of the advent of Islam in American public life). So, the arguments the bishops are making about the balance between conscience and the obligations of civil law should be welcomed by all Americans as part of our national dialectic. President Obama is to be applauded for at least trying to find a compromise that doesn’t dragoon Catholic institutions into betraying that conscience. In the end, of course, civil law must uphold equitable treatment of all women, and a satisfactory compromise may not be possible. We will be the better for having the debate, and attempting to find a modus vivendi. What isn’t helpful is to have loud-mouthed hypocrites who reject all the humane principles for which the Catholic Church stands getting on a high horse about a third-order teaching such as artificial birth control (on which the position of the church has changed over time, and may change again). 0 Retweet 42 Share 190 StumbleUpon 3 Printer Friendly Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 4.
#1. To: tom007 (#0)
We have here an odd political/religious situation. Back when JFK was running, in 1960, he practically had to promise to be a bad Catholic. Some other candidates since then actually kept a lid on their religious enthusiasms (or lack thereof). But here we have supposedly conservative candidates pledging to follow Catholic preferences against all others. The Catholic Bishops are used to beat up on Obamacare (with a speed and energy they never showed about ferreting out child molesting in the churches) with a complaint about birth control coverage that ... ... contradicts the fact that 98% of Catholic women have used birth control, ... that 28 states require some sort of birth control availability at all hospitals, even those claiming religious affiliation, ... that Mitt Romney's version of Obamacare required birth control availability from all institutions, without offering religious exemptions, ... that vast majority of Catholic-affiliated colleges and law schools offer birth control via their student health facilities, ... that Barry Goldwater and his wife were members of Planned Parenthood, etc.etc. To some extent, these politicians are imposing Catholic teachings on birth control -- teachings that the congregants of Catholic Churches largely ignore -- on all of us regardless of our own attitudes/teachings on birth control. Not to worry, the politicians can still afford to get birth control from their high-priced private physicians and even get abortions by sending their wives, daughters and girlfriends to Catholic countries like France and Mexico where their cash will open clinic doors.
Might be cheaper to go to Israel... A 1977 law ensures a low-cost, and in some cases free, legal abortion to any woman who fills one of four criteria: She is under 18 or over 40 (cost to those in between: 1,500 shekels [$370]). or She is carrying a fetus with a serious mental or physical defect (free). or She claims that the fetus results from forbidden relations such as rape or incest (free) or, in the case of a married woman, that the baby is not her husband's She shows that by continuing the pregnancy, her physical or mental health would be damaged
'Forbidden relations' leading cause of abortion in Israel Health Ministry report shows 55% of abortions result of incest, out of wedlock conception and pregnancies conceived under illegal circumstances
The high number of abortions in Israel are delaying the arrival of the Messiah, Israel's two chief rabbis have said. In a letter to Israel's faithful, Yona Metzger, the Ashkenazi chief rabbi, and his Sephardic colleague Shlomo Amar, said the country's high rate of terminations cause a "delay [of] the messianic redemption," according to a report on the Ynetnews website. The letter condemned what the rabbis called "a veritable epidemic, which every year claims the lives of tens of thousands of Jews". They said there are about 50,000 abortions a year in Israel, 20,000 of which are performed illegally.
#5. To: All (#4)
Messianic Pro-Life Group Saves Israeli Babies Abortion. When one thinks of the many dangers and threats facing Israel, abortion is not usually on the list. But it should be. Since Israel's rebirth as a nation state 63 years ago, 40,000 Israeli babies have been lost to abortion on average every year. That's well over two million unborn children terminated, more than the number of Jewish children killed in the Nazi Holocaust. Considering population growth rates over the past six decades, had those two million unborn babies been given a chance at life, there would be an additional 10 million Israelis today. The moral argument against abortion aside, in light of the perceived demographic threat to the Jewish state it is not difficult to see why abortion is such a danger to this tiny nation. One of the very few organizations working to reverse this trend is Messianic-run Be'ad Chaim (Hebrew for "Pro Life"). Despite the fact that those running Be'ad Chaim are unreserved believers in Yeshua, the organization enjoys a considerable level of cooperation with state authorities, enabling it to help young women with unplanned pregnancies across Israel.
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