Double-Think

Once again, one of Andrew Sullivan's readers makes a good point:

As your earlier reader noted in passing, the Catholic Bishops refused to accept the "segregation" of federal funds from abortion dollars. Under that scheme, health insurance companies would separate federal money from private money and require abortion payments to come from the private pot.

The New York Times reported today that the Catholic Bishops rejected the segregation plan as an accounting gimmick. They have a point. The private pot of money can be easily subsidized by the federal pot of money. The federal pot of money will buy items that the private pot would have bought, thereby subsidizing the private pot of money.

This is the same method that is used when tax dollars go to parochial schools, many of which are Catholic. Tax money can buy pencils and desks, but not Bibles. Catholic schools do not have to spend money on books because the taxpayer chips in for those. This leaves more money to spend on religious activities.

I wonder if the Catholic Bishops even considered this point when slamming the abortion-segregation device as an accounting gimmick.

Setting aside for a moment my outrage at public policy in a secular nation being dictated by a bunch of morally bankrupt religious extremists, there's a simple answer to this one: they don't care. If they are doing it, it's OK, but if the segregation method is used in public health care, it doesn't suit their agenda and they're against it.

This is an ongoing feature of the right wing as it has come to exist in this country: they are special, and the rules that they dictate don't apply to them. Nor do anyone else's, as we saw when suddenly organizations such as the Catholic Charities and the Salvation Army became "religious" organizations, when they had existed quite peacefully for years as organizations that were associated with churches but not bound by the same doctrinal rules. In fact, Catholic Charities was founded for exactly that purpose: it was created as a separate organization specifically to enable it to receive public funding for social programs, and operating under the rules created to govern that funding, without running afoul of the separation and establishment clauses.

In the case of the Catholic bishops, I will accept that they have sincere moral qualms (although I have to note that their moral qualms seem somehow always directed toward the activities of others), but those qualms are also inextricably tied to the desire to increase the Church's secular power. Let's be perfectly honest: bishops are politicians. That's how they got to be bishops. And one of the defining characteristics of a politician is the desire to gain and maintain power. I suspect that's a fundamental motivation, maybe the fundamental motivation.

And that makes it relatively easy for them to preach "do as I say, not as I do" without any visible sign of cognitive dissonance.

Update: Here's the prior post from a reader referred to above. It shows the depths of the Church's hypocrisy on this.