Now I'm A Bieberliever

This blog would not ordinarily concern itself with Justin Bieber. But not only would no one have said anything against him if he had expressed the contrary view on on abortion, but he also opines, in the course of the same interview: "Canada's the best country in the world, We go to the doctor and we don't need to worry about paying him, but here, your whole life, you're broke because of medical bills. My bodyguard's baby was premature, and now he has to pay for it. In Canada, if your baby's premature, he stays in the hospital as long as he needs to, and then you go home." A blue-collar pro-lifer whose support for social democracy in general and for universal public healthcare in particular is the basis of his patriotic allegiance to a Commonwealth Realm. That'll do nicely.

Britain acquired universal public healthcare long before abortion. Many European or Commonwealth countries, including Canada, did so. Only in Britain has Western Europe anything like the abortion on demand up to and including partial birth that exists in the United States. But everywhere in Western Europe has universal public healthcare, and has had for so long that no one can imagine life without it, a status which, admittedly, it has attained very rapidly indeed everywhere where it has ever been introduced.

America could have gone one better, with a ban on the federal funding of abortion written into what will rapidly become the sacrosanct founding document of the universal public healthcare system. But instead of those, the terms of the House Bill, the Senate Bill was enacted in order to placate Blue Dogs who voted against it anyway (and many of whom went on to lose their seats) and wavering Republicans who turned out not to exist at all. Still, the Hyde Amendment remains in force, passed by a Democratic Congress and signed into law by Jimmy Carter. And between them, the neocons and the Tea Party people have finally stopped the Republican Party, as such, from even pretending to care about abortion. Or, for that matter, about the traditional definition of marriage.

The most pro-life sections of any given European or Commonwealth society are always among the most stalwart supporters of the public healthcare system. The failings inherent in what was the Senate Bill will lead to the enactment of what was the House Bill, so the same will be the case in America very soon, and then forever thereafter. Such is Social Catholicism and the Evangelical tradition of, in American terms, William Jennings Bryan in action. The sort of thing that the Catholic Enclycists in the North, and the agrarian populists in the South and West, would have done, and would have united to do. Like avoiding wars, in fact. The only Republican vote for the House Bill was that of Anh Cao, who had an otherwise solidly Democratic district in New Orleans, and who is a community activist of the grand old school, as so many erstwhile Jesuit seminarians are. Just as they so often are, and just as he is, totally pro-life.