John F. Kennedy was America’s first Catholic president. But in order to become that, he had to reassure people that the White House wouldn’t be taking orders from the Vatican.
Rick Santorum hopes to become the second Catholic president. Although he’s far more Catholic than Kennedy pretended to be, he won’t have to reassure anyone.
In recent years, Catholics have become very vocal in American politics. Catholics are one fourth of the US population, but five of the nine Supreme Court justices are Catholic, and the evangelical Protestant wing of the Republican Party has found Catholics to be useful allies when it comes to “moral issues”.
In 2005, Santorum very publicly acted to prevent doctors from removing feeding tubes from a Florida woman, Terri Schiavo, who had been lying in a coma for 15 years. Santorum argued that Schiavo had a right to live. The doctors argued that she couldn’t live — her brain had turned to liquid.
Now, in 2012, we’ve seen another firestorm of rhetoric over matters of “reproductive health”. This month, Congress was working through Barack Obama’s health-care plan (the Affordable Care Act) in order to clarify who should pay for what services. The law emphasizes preventive care, and what do women sometimes prevent? Pregnancies. In other words, health-insurance coverage offered by employers should include contraception at no extra cost. These employers would include hospitals, universities and other institutions that are owned by churches.
“Destroying religious institutions”
According to a New York Times/CBS News poll, 65 percent of US voters support the idea, including 59 percent of those working for a religiously affiliated institution. But Santorum is not one of them. He spent several days giving angry speeches about how Obama is “deliberately undermining religious liberty in this country”, “systematically destroying religious institutions”, “systematically going after the church” and “fundamentally undermining the family”.
Never mind that similar laws already exist in 28 of the 50 states. Never mind that Obama’s plan — accepted by the majority of Catholic institutions affected — has the insurance companies, not the church, picking up the tab for birth control. Never mind the statement by Obama’s press secretary, Jay Carney, that “decisions about medical care should be made by a woman and her doctor, not a woman and her boss.” Never mind that most Catholics actually use contraception. Santorum’s face turned red as he defended the right of human eggs to be fertilized.
That’s not the only right he says they should have, either. Santorum says that human embryos should be given the same rights as people under the constitution.
The rights of a person?
Mississippi tried to pass exactly that kind of law this past November. Virginia, Iowa and Oklahoma have their own “personhood bills” that may be voted on this year.
Such laws would have far-reaching consequences: the return of unsafe abortions, the banning of in vitro fertilization, the possibility that during complications in pregnancy, doctors might act to save the zygote and not the mother.
In Catholic school, the nuns told us the church forbade abortion because the fetus might be Jesus trying to return. I don’t know if that’s the church’s official reason, but I’m wondering whether this isn’t all about something else: power. You see, all the presidential candidates, and all the members of all the committees who have been discussing all these issues, are men. Women, I guess, will have to wait until election day to offer their opinions.
In response to a reader’s comment, I wrote:
The rhetoric on all this is fascinating.
First, when speaking to supporters on moral issues, Santorum complains about “the intolerance of the secular Left”. Is it possible to be liberal and intolerant at the same time? Radio commentator Cenk Uygur, a self-described liberal, said, “In other words, we’re intolerant of his intolerance.”
Second, Santorum connects the idea of unborn personhood to the concept of liberty by quoting the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men [sic] are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…” Because the Catholic church says human life begins at conception, it follows that human embryos have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Third, the two issues of birth control and abortion are often spoken of together, even though they are not the same thing.
Fourth, federal law does protect fetuses that have developed to the point where they could survive outside the womb, except when the mother’s life is in danger. Santorum refers to all abortion, from conception onwards, as “the taking of innocent life”. Newt Gingrich, who became Catholic after his second divorce, refers to it as “baby-killing” and “infanticide”.
At the debates, however, Santorum usually tries to step back from statements like these. Asked about birth control last night at a debate in Arizona, he said, “Just because I’m talking about it doesn’t mean I want a government program to fix it.” Well, then, why talk about it so much during your campaign?
The land of opportunity and the right to forge your own destiny still exist — very much so. America is there for all its citizens, as it should be. Rick Santorum has the freedom to have as many kids as he wants (seven at last count) and his wife is allowed to carry to term a fetus that has a chromosomal disorder (as she has done). Other people of lesser means and differing attitudes are free not to do those things. At at earlier debate, Mitt Romney stopped a discussion on birth control by saying contraception “is working fine”. “Don’t change it,” he said.
