Church Wants Government To Do What It Can't

Centuries after Jesus walked this earth, the Catholic church made a rule enforcing celebacy on its all-male clergy. Then it made another rule that prohibited its female parishioners from using contraceptives.

According to current statistics, 98% of those female parishioners have defied the dictum imposed upon them. I haven't seen any stats on the rate of clergy compliance with its rule, but the decades-old and ongoing scandal of clergy pedophilia might provide a clue.

So now comes the Catholic hierarchy demanding that the government do what it has so utterly and miserably failed to do.

After weeks of rancorous debate and vitriol about whether or not employers or their insurers should have to include contraceptives in their healhcare benefits, one of the highest ranking Catholic officials, Timothy Dolan, a cardinal who is New York archbishop, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and a former Milwaukee WI archbishop, weighs in with an opinion piece that was published recently in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel newspaper arguing that his church has a First Amendment right to impose its will on everyone. http://www.jsonline.com/news/opinion/it-is-a-matter-of-religious-liberty-3s4ipri-143003455.html

Even more galling than Dolan's contentions, which are not surprising, was that his piece was stripped across the top of the front page of the paper's Sunday opinion section with a half-inch headline and no countervailing voice anywhere in the four-page section, much less in an equally visible space.

There are many hypotheses about the purpose of the Catholic church's rules. Among the suppositions about mandatory clergy celebacy that has a lot of credibility with me is that it better enables the church to control the wealth amassed by the clerics through their various religious activities, particularly since celebate clercs have no families to support or heirs to lay claim to any assets or support.

Given the great wealth the church has amassed, it looks like that rule has worked. And, of course, the objective of banning contraception is to control women.

It's bad enough that a bunch of old men who, ostensibly, have no experience with or stake in the consequences of their own or anyone else's sexual activities are dictating the bodily functions, health decisions and reproductive destinies of woman. Far more insidious is trying to get the govenment to enforce Catholic rules, not only on its own flock, in the perverted guise of religious freedom and First Amendment rights, but to insinuate the church's rules on everyone else.

What is never mentioned in this discussion is that most if not all of the Catholic-affiliated institutions that oppose including contraception coverage in their employees’ benefits receive federal funding in one form or another. That includes indirect funding via use of government-provided infrastructure and public-safety services that they don’t pay for, thanks to being tax-exempt, and more direct funding via grants and programmatic subsidies.

Doesn’t that trample the liberties of those who morally, religiously and otherwise object to funding of the church’s ideology and practices?

What’s the saying? One person’s rights end where another’s begin.

It’s important to clear the smoke that is clouding this debate. The Catholic church needs to:

• understand that the views and rights of non-Catholics are equally as valid as the Catholic stance,
• focus on enforcing its own rules internally,
• quit trying to get the government to do its work for it, and
• stop trying to impose its version of morality on the rest of us.

That's being truly conservative.