Obamacare will destroy our Republic if it isn't stopped.
Thread by NYer.
It is a well-known phenomenon that generals have a tendency to “Fight the Last War,” meaning that they tend to use the tactics that brought them victory in the last war they fought. The problem is that the enemy usually shows up with new weapons and new tactics. Either the generals adapt, or go down to defeat.
In the war over the HHS Mandate, it seems that the bishops have shown up with Cardinal O’Connor’s playbook from the 1980′s. It won’t work, and they had better grasp that reality today, and with all due urgency.
This past week, Francis Cardinal George of Chicago issued a letter to his faithful warning that the archdiocese will need to get out of the hospital and healthcare business, as well as education, social services, etc., if the Obama administration does not back down. Some excerpts:
Catholic hospitals, universities and social services have an institutional conscience, a conscience shaped by Catholic moral and social teaching. The HHS regulations now before our society will make it impossible for Catholic institutions to follow their conscience.
What will happen if the HHS regulations are not rescinded? A Catholic institution, so far as I can see right now, will have one of four choices: 1) secularize itself, breaking its connection to the church, her moral and social teachings and the oversight of its ministry by the local bishop. This is a form of theft. It means the church will not be permitted to have an institutional voice in public life. 2) Pay exorbitant annual fines to avoid paying for insurance policies that cover abortifacient drugs, artificial contraception and sterilization. This is not economically sustainable. 3) Sell the institution to a non-Catholic group or to a local government. 4) Close down.
The state is making itself into a church. The bishops didn’t begin this dismaying conflict nor choose its timing. We would love to have it ended as quickly as possible. It’s up to the government to stop the attack.
If you haven’t already purchased the Archdiocesan Directory for 2012, I would suggest you get one as a souvenir. On page L-3, there is a complete list of Catholic hospitals and health care institutions in Cook and Lake counties. Each entry represents much sacrifice on the part of medical personnel, administrators and religious sponsors. Each name signifies the love of Christ to people of all classes and races and religions. Two Lents from now, unless something changes, that page will be blank.
There’s much more in the letter. Read it here.
Cardinal George’s tactic here was that of Cardinal O’Connor in the 1980′s, when Mayor Ed Koch passed Executive Order 50 that would have forced the Catholic Church to hire homosexuals in all of our institutions. From Wiki:
O’Connor actively opposed Executive Order 50, a mayoral order issued in 1980 by Mayor Ed Koch, which required all City contractors, including religious entities, to provide services on a non-discriminatory basis with respect to race, creed, age, sex, handicap, as well as “sexual orientation or affectational preference”.[25] After the Salvation Army received a warning from the City that its contracts for child care services would be canceled for refusing to comply with the executive order’s provisions regarding sexual orientation,[26] the Archdiocese of New York and Agudath Israel, an Orthodox Jewish organization, threatened to cancel their contracts with the City if forced to comply.[26] O’Connor maintained that the executive order would cause the Church to appear to condone homosexual practices and lifestyle.[27][27] Writing in Catholic New York in January 1985, O’Connor characterized the order as “an exceedingly dangerous precedent [that would] invite unacceptable governmental intrusion into and excessive entanglement with the Church’s conducting of its own internal affairs.” Drawing the traditional Catholic distinction between homosexual “inclinations” and “behavior”, he stated that “we do not believe that homosexual behavior … should be elevated to a protected category.”[28]
The Church won its case in court, but O’Connor was willing to close our schools and child care agencies if we lost, forcing a city just inching back from bankruptcy to pick up the cost.
Different times.
Back then, I was in my early 20′s. The bulk of voters were the Greatest Generation, then in their 50′s, and the generations who preceded them. In other words, most voters actually had education in civics, and most men came from a generation when military service was regarded as a rite of passage into manhood. They valued the Constitution, and a thug such as Barak Obama never would have made it past being a city councilman from a radical district. Back then, voters understood the need for fiscal responsibility and Ed Koch would have had his goose cooked if he threatened the fragile economic recovery of the city, or if he incurred a threat made good by Cardinal O’Connor.
Different times.
Today the bishops are in contention with a Democrat Party headed by a president who wants them to abandon the field in every sector: education, social services, healthcare…
Today the bishops are in contention with a Democrat Party headed by a president who have added ten trillion dollars of debt to the nation in two years. That they don’t care at all about fiscal responsibility is an understatement.
Today the bishops are in contention with a Democrat Party headed by a president who understand that the bulk of the voters who stood behind Cardinal O’Connor almost thirty years ago are dead. In their place are the Baby Boomers, the children and grandchildren of the Boomers who are largely ignorant of American History, civics, or the Constitution.
Today the bishops are in contention with a Democrat Party headed by a president who are catering to the pervasive narcissism and hedoniosm of a society that stands in shameful contrast with the Greatest Generation that backed O’Connor. That’s why the HHS mandate has a good chance of prevailing.
Cardinal George is no fool, and he understands what he’s up against with the Democrats and Obama:
The provision of health care should not demand “giving up” religious liberty. Liberty of religion is more than freedom of worship. Freedom of worship was guaranteed in the Constitution of the former Soviet Union. You could go to church, if you could find one. The church, however, could do nothing except conduct religious rites in places of worship-no schools, religious publications, health care institutions, organized charity, ministry for justice and the works of mercy that flow naturally from a living faith. All of these were co-opted by the government. We fought a long cold war to defeat that vision of society.
He’s right. However, the tactics need to change. We do not have a half-century to fight this one as we did the Cold War. We have until November. If Obama is reelected, we’ll lose our tax-exempt status and be stripped of all our agencies by a president who hates who we are and what we stand for. This is no longer a fight over a facet of Obamacare.
It never was, and the bishops need to awaken to that reality. This is a new Marxism, as Cardinal George alluded to. If Obama backs down and the bishops claim victory they will live to regret being duped in so monumental a manner. A Marxist has declared war on the only Church with enough institutional infrastructure to pose a threat to his party’s agenda.
The Catholic vision of human anthropology, who we are, is lived out in our healthcare and social services, and is inculcated through our educational institutions.
Obama gets that.
Cardinal George left out the fifth, and only viable option. The Church has had war declared on her by the government. She must now rally her faithful to vote out this wicked administration in November. She must coordinate strategy with all people of faith from other religions and Christian denominations. If she doesn’t, we lose everything. If she does, a new administration will not permit her to lose the tax-exempt status for having been forced into political organizing to fight an existential threat from the government. (And there are hundreds of videos of Democrat politicians campaigning in Protestant church pulpits).
The plan as laid out by Cardinal George is yesterday’s strategy. It worked for Cardinal O’Connor in a different age, with a different electorate. It’s time for our normally quiet and pastoral bishops to gird their loins.
This one’s for all the marbles.
Many of us knew seven years ago that Terri's murder was nothing more than a "dress rehearsal" for the next plank of the death mongers' agenda.
Thread by me.
Radical bioethics–and that constitutes much of the mainstream, in my view–continues to push for a wider death agenda. Last week, we discussed an article in the Journal of Bioethics that promoted the propriety of infanticide for even healthy babies if that best served the desires or needs of actual “people.” Today, let’s discuss an article just published in Bioethics urging a dehydrate-them-to-death default position for people diagnosed as persistently unconscious. From “Withdrawal of Artificial Nutrition and Hydration for Patients in a Permanent Vegetative State: Changing Tack,” by a medical resident at New York School of Medicine named Catherine Constable (Abstract only link available):
Several arguments are commonly offered in defense of continuing ANH for patients in PVS, where no preference is known. These include: (1) human life has intrinsic value; therefore, when in doubt as to a patient’s wishes, the ethically more sound position is to err on the side of preserving life; (2) if we withdraw life-sustaining care, we run the risk of violating a patient’s unknown but autonomous prior wish to be kept alive in PVS; therefore it is better to continue to provide care; (3) there is a chance of mistaken diagnosis; thus, we should continue to provide life-sustaining care. In addressing each point, I will argue either that the opposite is true, or, at least, that the argument can be neutralized.
Why the need for a default dehydration medical “ethic?” Saving medical resources, a belief that dehydration is a “neutral” act, and a disagreement that human life has intrinsic value.
In typical bioethics style, Constable then puts in a hedge:
[F]amilies or other surrogates, who should be educated about the condition, should ultimately be given the last word. To advocate the termination of life-sustaining treatment against the directive of a grieving family would be to cast the medical profession in a somewhat more threatening light than most of us would want. Families of these patients in fact deserve our sincere regard during a period in which no one can be said to suffer more than them.
But most cases involve family decision making now. So, this would allow us to eliminate the homeless unconscious and a few other categories. But the real push here seems to me to be make families believe dehydration is right:
Yet we should discontinue the practice of putting families in the position of having to justify a decision to withdraw ANH by making assertions about what the patient would have wanted. Where there is no advance directive, the family should instead be encouraged to consider whatever factors that they deem useful…Surrogates are not typically eager to withdraw life-sustaining treatment from their loved-ones. To put the onus on a family to justify the decision to withdraw ANH is to effectively treat them as would-be executioners who need to be checked. If the withdrawal of care in this situation was indeed an act that required moral justification, one might defend a need for such safeguards. However, I have argued here that the onus is rather on those who would continue (excepting the family) to justify the decision. In the case of PVS, when in doubt as to a patient’s wishes, it is better to discontinue life-sustaining treatment.
But if it is true that families now have to justify choosing to dehydrate, this radical shift toward a duty to die would put the family in the position of having to justify the continuance of food and fluids in the face of nay-saying doctors, bioethicists, and the public policy of society. Families often already face such pressure. Imagine if they had to justify continued life!
By the way, Constable studied ethics at Oxford. No wonder.
"We will not be silent.
We are your bad conscience.
The White Rose will give you no rest."