I hope you all took note of the letter to Governor Nixon from the Greater Kansas City AFL-CIO urging him to veto SB749 – the latest slap at women’s reproductive freedom mounted by our state legislature. If you haven’t, Michael Bersin has posted its text here at SMP. The letter cogently outlines the basic threats posed by this legislation.

The AFL-CIO is not alone in its objections to a law that would permit religious organizations and individuals with public functions to penalize those whose beliefs do not coincide with theirs – which is exactly what SB749 would do. Planned Parenthood and the Sierra Club have mobilized against it (you can send a letter to Governor Nixon via the Sierra Club urging him to veto SB749 here). According to the Kansas City Star, as of last Saturday letters urging the Governor to veto the bill outnumbered those in support of it by two to one.

Such pressure is very important in this case since Governor Nixon has a record of letting obnoxious bills intended to restrict reproductive rights become law without his signature, evidently hoping that by not taking a stand, he’ll anger fewer people overall. The sweep of this bill is so wide and so unfair, though, that we cannot allow our leaders to ignore its consequences – particularly since the supporters of SB749 are determined to ensure that politicians take note of their ability to pack a mighty wallop. The two to one ratio of anti vs. pro letters could easily shift.

The folks who have drummed up this whole “religious freedom” frenzy, a group of politically conservative Catholic Bishops, kicked off their counter campaign, the so-called “Fortnight for Freedom,” yesterday. In Missouri the action took place at a rally at the Capitol:

More than an estimated 1,000 people, nearly all of them wearing red, crammed into the Capitol Rotunda on Tuesday in Jefferson City. Their intent was to rally for religious liberty and protest President Barack Obama’s policy requiring insurance companies to cover the costs to provide free birth control to women working at religious-affiliated institutions such as hospitals and colleges. Numerous religious leaders addressed the crowd, drawing cheers and loud applause and several “Amens” throughout the rally.

Although drawing upon the usual, crazed anti-abortion, right-wing protestants to swell their ranks, the locus for this piece of churchly agit-prop is a 12 page document, “Our First, Most Cherished Liberty,” approved by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Administrative Committee in March. While it contains a few points that might give those cooperative. right-wing protestants pause – it also singles out immigration laws such as Alabama’s that would punish religious people for sheltering the undocumented, for instance – it, for the most part, attempts to puff up the anti-sex and anti-women hysteria of the bishops into a dignified religious crusade.  

Further, this crusade has as its goal political extortion of the sort that resulted in Missouri’s SB749.  And it’s well enough funded so that it can come down on politicians with sufficient force.  Expect to see TV ads, Facebook campaigns and lots of hoopla The source of the funds to pay for all this outreach, however,  while not entirely clear has been questioned in the context of partisan politics.

Lest you doubt the motivation, just consider what it is that the Bishops are wailing so vociferously about. The source of all this angst, the Obama birth control mandate, does not extend to church affiliated bodies that are strictly religious in their activities, or that are not supported in whole or part by U.S. tax dollars. If the Catholic Bishops object to their affiliated educational, medical and charitable organizations following  the same  rules as  every other tax supported entity and wish to continue asserting their intrusive religious authority,  all they need to do is stop taking our  tax dollars. Voila! – a solution that preserves their “religious freedom,” such as it is.

But don’t wait for the bishops to give up all those dollars by taking a real stand for conscience. Nor do I expect to see anyone challenging the Church’s tax-exempt status on the basis of the overtly political nature of the bishops’ campaign. What we can do, though, is keep track of how much noise they manage to generate on the topic of SB749 with their “Fortnight for Freedom” – and make sure that we keep on making our own noise in return.

 

I recently learned that the issues page at Rick Santorum’s Website tells us that one of his top priorities is “enforcing laws against illegal pornography,” while:

…the word “tax” appears only 4 times on the issue page and “job” only 5 times – the same number as “abortion” and fewer than “pornography,” which appears 8 times

What’s this got to do with the Missouri legislature now convened in Jefferson City? Only this: Today the House is debating HCR41 and in the Senate a bill with a similar goal, SB749, was debated yesterday. Both pieces of legislation are “me-too” bills, efforts to get in on the GOP efforts to make hay out of a group of conservative Catholic Bishops’ staged efforts to thwart an Obama administration rule. The bills, like Santorum’s Website, are, of course, designed to pander to the sexually repressive legislative preferences of most right-wingers.*  

The Bishops object to contraception – despite the fact that most Catholic women have no pangs of conscience about using it – and want it excluded from the preventive care mandated by the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Consequently, they claim it violates their institutional conscience to be associated, however indirectly, with such coverage when it is mandated in church-affiliated, secular organizations like colleges, charities and hospitals – institutions, I should add, that take federal taxpayer dollars that are ponied up by non-believers like me. The GOP has, predictably, jumped to endorse the Bishops’ view that their institutional goals trump individual rights of conscience as well as individual public welfare.

The folks in Jefferson city who are running to jump on this already foundering bandwagon are the same folks who don’t seem to be able to address jobs, decaying infrastructure, tax reform or the host of other problems facing Missouri. Although they are confident that they can adjudicate rights of conscience, they can’t even address the issue of their own institutional ethics, so worried are they that they will miss out on lobbyist largess.

Nevertheless, they want us to believe that weakening the ACA’s provisions for preventive health care is of paramount importance because it involves issues of religious freedom. However, as Catholic historian Gary Wills shows, in an excellent debunking of the Bishops’ conscience and religious freedom claims, “what we are seeing is not a defense of undying principle but a stampede toward a temporarily exploitable lunacy.”

So, once more, Missouri’s real needs languish while the righteous legislative deacons of the wannabe state religion cavort in Jefferson City. If you look at HCR41, you will notice consistent themes. That particular legislation references 2010’s wasteful exercise, the anti-ACA Proposition C that has, in turn, been used as an excuse to avoid the hard work of planning for the ACA mandated insurance exchanges, exchanges that would benefit thousands of Missourians.

If nothing else, it provides an excellent  preview of what the GOP might inflict on the nation in the person of Rick Santorum – although there are signs that maybe even the Godfathers of the Grand Old Party are a little too squeamish for that particular outcome. If you’re feeling equally squeamish about the fun-and-games in Jefferson City, call your State Rep. and your Senator and let them know how you feel about their twin follies, HCR41 and SB749.

*Sentence edited slightly for clarity.