Amy Sullivan grumbles in the Atlantic:
Without the work of women like Sister Carol Keehan, president of the Catholic Health Association, and Sister Simone Campbell of the Catholic social justice group NETWORK, there would be no health reform and therefore no contraception coverage mandate to argue over — not just for the employees of Catholic hospitals and universities, but for the estimated 24 million other women who will benefit from this aspect of the law.
So, yes, a little gratitude from women’s health advocates and other liberals would be appropriate. Instead, when these Catholic sisters and others asked for some flexibility with regard to the mandate, the advocates pooh-poohed as irrelevant their concerns about religious liberty and insisted that “the bishops” were the only ones who had a problem with contraception coverage.
Well, cry me a a river.The likes of these “Catholic sisters” were happy to work for Obamacare to be imposed on the country (fair enough, that’s all part of the democratic process), but now that that law has gone through, what is good enough for everyone else is not, it seems, acceptable to them. Apparently these sensitive souls want the legislation they supported to be applied in a way that takes account of their particular ideological sensitivities.
Everyone else can just go hang.
Nauseating.
It does worry me about the possibility that issues like are the future of ALL our politics.
Remember when UHC was being debated, and a panel recommended that women only need mammograms every two years unless specific risk factors are present? So a group of congressional women passed an amendment to UHC guaranteeing that it would provide annual mammograms.
How will we ever escape health-cost demagoguery? Anytime someone makes a suggestion to make any kind of cut, we’ll just hear loud complaints about society not caring about the most-affected group.
This event isn’t exactly that issue, but it still shows how easy it is to claim everyone deserves exactly the plan they want.
If I knew that Catholic Church leaders had been lobbying Congress, whether for so-called health reform or any other cause that doesn’t directly affect the church’s own ability to operate, I would tell the IRS and ask the agency to revoke the church’s tax exemption.