Daring To Take Yes For An Answer

Don Wycliff writes:

If I understand this correctly, Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., has been cast into the outer darkness by those he once regarded as allies in the anti-abortion movement because he dared to take yes for an answer.

Seeking assurances -- beyond the wording placed in the new Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act by Senate Democrats opposed to abortion -- that no federal funds would be used to pay for abortions, Stupak wrung from President Barack Obama a promise to issue an executive order to that effect. Obama made good on that promise Wednesday, signing the executive order in the White House, in the presence of Stupak and a number of other anti-abortion legislators.

But as far as the zealots were concerned, Stupak sold out. Indeed, syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker took obvious delight in skewering Stupak in a Washington Post column, going so far as to invoke the image of Jesus being betrayed with a kiss by Judas Iscariot. After the Sunday night vote approving the health care bill, Parker said, Stupak and some other Democrats gathered in a pub to celebrate. "In a biblical moment, New York Rep. Anthony Weiner was spotted planting a big kiss on Stupak's cheek," she wrote. "To a Catholic man well-versed in the Gospel, this is not a comforting gesture."

Earlier, Tribune religion writer Manya A. Brachear reported that Stupak had been disinvited to deliver the keynote address at next month's third annual Illinois Catholic Prayer Breakfast. Brachear quoted Michael Sullivan, president of the breakfast organizing group, as saying the organizers couldn't in good conscience have Stupak as their keynoter after his actions on the health care issue.

"An executive order is kind of like a light switch," Sullivan told Brachear. "Whoever is in Washington can turn it on and turn it off. It doesn't offer adequate protection for the unborn." If the vows of congressional Republicans to repeal the health care law are any indication, a duly passed law also is "kind of like a light switch. Whoever is in Washington can turn it on and turn it off." For that matter, so is a Supreme Court decision, as was demonstrated in Roe vs. Wade in 1973 and again earlier this year in the campaign finance law case, which "turned off" decades worth of understandings of the law on that subject.

Leaving aside what "turning off" his executive order would do to Obama's legislative ambitions for the rest of his administration, there's something about this whole Stupak business -- including the stance of the Catholic bishops during the health care debate and endgame -- that rings … well, insincere. Something tells me that Barack Obama could have crossed his heart and hoped to die, sworn on a stack of Bibles, donned a hair shirt and stood in the snows at Canossa and his promise would have been found inadequate by his -- and now Stupak's -- critics.

The same something tells me that, had John McCain been sworn in on Jan. 20 last year, all those folks who sleepwalked through eight years of George W. Bush deficits would have kept on sleepwalking -- even as McCain added to the red ink by spending (necessarily) to pull the economy out of recession. The same something tells me the Secret Service wouldn't be working nearly so hard, and that invocations of antebellum concepts like interposition and nullification and states' rights would be a lot fewer, if not nonexistent, if the president were not Barack Obama.

What is it about Barack Obama that provokes these -- and other -- overblown reactions? What is it about Barack Obama that has made lunatic behavior like that of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin suddenly acceptable in polite company? More worrisome, what is it about Barack Obama that has made it impossible for sane people -- I continue to think of the Catholic bishops and, frankly, most of the people in the pro-life movement, as sane -- to credit him with any integrity at all?

For decades the bishops have campaigned for health care for all, telling us that it was a moral obligation of a decent society. And when the chance for the nation to fulfill that obligation came -- and even after Bart Stupak had won Obama's concession on the abortion issue -- the bishops could not bring themselves to accept it.

What can account for this? And what can account for the vilification now of Bart Stupak, a good and honest man who dared to take yes for an answer?

Because Obama is black? No, that's not it. Rather, the pro-life movement in America has become a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party, which has in turn become as wholly owned a subsidiary of the health insurance companies in its domestic policy as it is of the very military-industrial complex against which one of its own Presidents warned in foreign policy.

The combination of the public option and the Stupak Amendment would have made abortion pretty much impossible to obtain (the single-payer system plus Stupak would have been even better) right as the Pregnant Women Support Act was removing most or all of the reasons why anyone might seek an abortion. Even the provisions written into the Senate Bill by the PWSA's very own Bob Casey, dynast of pro-life Democrats, made the Executive Order quite unnecessary: no public funding for abortion was written in, as it had and has been ever since a Democratic Congress had passed the admittedly Republican Hyde Amendment and a Democratic President had signed it into law. But the Executive Order iced the cake and put a cherry on top.

Yet the pro-life movement, including the Catholic Bishops, still refused to eat it. The Republicans, who themselves have done absolutely nothing about abortion and would probably cease to exist if the reversal of Roe v Wade ever enabled huge numbers of historic and natural Democrats to go home (as, sick of waiting, they have started to do, anyway), had for some unknown reason assumed that the Healthcare Bill would provide for federally funded abortion, so they have decided to run that story as if everything had gone according to plan, despite its total lack of the slightest factual basis, and indeed its status as the opposite of the truth.

Shame on the pro-life movement, including the Bishops, for going along with this. America's children in the womb deserve better. Specifically, they deserve at least the public option, and very preferably the single-payer system, accompanied in either case by the Stupak Amendment, together with the Pregnant Women Support Act. The PWSA is on its way. And so are both the public option and the Stupak Amendment. Once entitled, Middle America will no more vote to end its own entitlement than Middle Britain would have done at any General Election since 1950. But Middle America will demand an end to effectively unlimited taxpayer funding of the insurance companies, and will demand an even more stringent safeguard against abortion. Step forward the public option and the Stupak Amendment, the former leading in fairly short order to single-payer as the insurance companies wither away.

In the course of this process, what will the pro-life movement, including the Catholic Bishops, say? Persistent, manifestly mendacious opposition to highly popular measures that also happen to be highly effective in protecting life will only bring the pro-life cause into disrepute. Indeed, it is already doing so.