A Bishop Joke

Two bishops walk into a bar...

I haven't posted anything here since last November. I haven't posted on my other blog, Outdoor Poetry Season, since February. And didn't post on either blog all that much during the whole of 2011. On the one hand, about this morass of go-slow I've been in, I'm inclined to go easy on myself. I suspect long silences are a more frequent feature of the rhythms of my life than I've been inclined to recognize.

There is also this: For the last six months, I've focused my off-line efforts on creating, revising and finalizing the draft manuscript for the book of my poems that I intend to self-publish before my 65th birthday in August. The copy is now off to Ella Epton, my sister-in-law, for layout and design. By the time Ella is done with it, no amount of tiny revisions will save me from the embarrassments and mortifications that likely accompany publishing, self- or otherwise. Regardless, the book, to be titled Wild Once, and Captured, will be worth looking at if only to see the illustrations that Stacee Kalmanovsky, Ella's daughter, has produced to go with the poems.

Meanwhile, let me move on with an observation (or two) about the Catholic church and about American bishops by citing a recent article in the Wahington Post, "Nun's Vatican-condemned book shoots up on the bestseller list." According to the article, widespread news reports about official church hostility to Sister Margaret Farley's book drove it from approximately one hundred forty-two thousandth place on the Amazon best-seller list to 16th place in about 24 hours. I think it's safe to say that in resurrecting Sister Margaret's book, the Pope, and his agent, the Vatican-based Office for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, have performed a miracle.

[Interesting historical note: The Office for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith was originally established as the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition in 1542. You could look it up here.]

Of course, this miracle amounts to almost nothing by comparison to the Catholic church's greatest single accomplishment, i.e., sustaining for two millennia, more or less, belief in the one god and spreading belief in the one god during that period to more than three billion people worldwide. We may debate the point--there are substantial faith differences between Christians, Moslems and Jews, but Jews, less than 10 million people at most times in history, would be no more than an idiosyncratic cult had Catholicism (the early Christian church) failed to spread and institutionalize the Word. Islam, which accounts for more than a billion believers, itself, required the spread of Christianity before Muhammad could rework its message in a way that would capture the imagination of desert people.

Which brings us to the American bishops, currently at war with Obama the Apostate (as I suppose he is fearsomely imagined in the bishop's very private--no women or uncloseted gay men--soirees). Bishops have been policing the boundaries of the faith, keeping a sharp eye out for heretics, since Irenaeus launched multiple attacks on the Gnostics in the second century CE. (Check out Elaine Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels for a detailed account of what was lost when a few men launched a movement that would secure church power in their hands and those of their designated successors over the next two thousand years).

The bishops have responded with an aggressive counterattack to the requirements in the new health care law that most faith-based organizations must provide access to a full range of reproductive services for women (e.g., abortion and contraception) if they provide health care to their employees, at all. The bishops are further exercised by Obama administration requirements that charitable organizations providing services to female victims of human trafficking must also provide them with access to a full range of reproductive services. The bishops claim that such requirements would force Catholics to violate their own consciences and that there are no acceptable work-arounds (such as partnering with other organizations that would be comfortable providing such services).

The political stance of the bishops may make a kind of sense in light of Catholicism's near-2000 year record of success in defining the basic worldview of billions of people, but in the modern world, where billions do not share the values and attitudes of this all-male cadre of celibates, it is nonsense. However they may elbow their way into the debate, ongoing success in narrowly defining and institutionalizing the beliefs of a few men who deliberately excluded women from the original club long before STDs, orbiting space junk, and human-caused climate change do not qualify club members for a political role in the high stakes world of the 21st Century. It should, perhaps, disqualify them.

Columnist Kathleen Parker Says Stupak Was Betrayed

A bad column concludes with a loaded image

Bart Stupak, the pro-life congressman from Michigan's Upper Peninsula is taking a lot of fire for his role in passing the healthcare reform bill on Sunday. A Catholic, Stupak has been a hardliner in his opposition to the use of federal funds to pay for abortion. But, "when all the power of the moment was in his frail human hands, he dropped the baby," wrote Parker in a Washington Post column, "Stupak's original sin."

Parker goes on to argue that in becoming one of the few Democrats who originally voted against the bill to change his vote and enable passage, Stupak proved to be "weak and overwhelmed by raw political power." Worse, perhaps, he was deceived by the obvious fraud of an "utterly useless" executive order, which falsely promised "that no federal funds will be used for abortion."

Stupak, Parker says, knew he was being deceived; after all "the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops explained to him...the only way to prevent public funding for abortion was for his amendment to be added to the Senate bill." Besides, even Obama "is well aware of the uselessness of his promise," wrote the apparently omniscient Parker.

Of course, all this is actually contested terrain and Parker, a usually more reasonable, if also right-wing, observer of Washington politics, should know this. Yes, the Catholic bishops claimed that the bill would expand federal funding for abortion, but a very influential association of catholic hospitals said that the bill would not do so.

Further, executive orders do matter, as Parker likely also knows. They may not be a matter of law, but they guide how federal employees interpret and implement laws. And, in this particular instance, Obama's executive order has been blasted by pro-choice groups who feel betrayed by the president's action. In "Order on abortion angers core backers," Nancy Northrup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights is quoted blasting the executive order, which has created a new "obstacle to abortion," she said.

But Parker may very well think that Northrup is crying crocodile tears, pretending to disappointment in order to further the liberal conspiracy advancing the cause of big government against the wishes of the American people. Indeed, Parker has caught the symbolism of a gesture that the rest of us may have missed--Stupak has been betrayed.

"After the Sunday vote, a group of Democrats, including Stupak, 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.

"To a Catholic man well versed in the Gospel, this is not a comforting gesture," Parker wrote.

Though the phrase resists linear interpretation, Parker's meaning is clear. Stupak is hardly the Christ, but Parker judges him betrayed--his betrayal more properly understood if one recognizes that Weiner is the Judas figure, the betrayer in Parker's passion play. Parker has chosen here to speak directly to the good Christian commie-hunters mobilized in tea parties. Talk about original sin.

Catholic Bishop: I am pro-life

Well, duh

Earlier this week, on a motor trip to the Midwest, we passed through Pittsburgh. There, my mother-in-law's hospitality includes the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which on Wednesday ran an op-ed piece by David A. Zubik, bishop of the Pittsburgh Catholic diocese.

I really don't know if Pittsburgh is a more Catholic place than other eastern or midwestern cities with an industrial past, but because Marrianne's family is Catholic, the city seems to be filled with an awful lot of practicing Catholics, out-of-practice Catholics or definitively ex-Catholics. It followed that Zubik's column, I Am Pro-Life, was a topic of breakfast table discussion, if only briefly.

Marrianne's mom was pretty clear about her own position: Abortion should remain legal and government action should be focussed on reducing teen pregnancy and addressing the social ills (like poverty) that make choosing abortion sometimes seem like the only viable choice for young women. If one could accurately parse the voluminous polling data about abortion, it's likely that Audrey McMullen's position reflects the biggest plurality, if not the majority, of Americans. For all practical purposes, our discussion ended there.

But driving around the Midwest for 1,400 or so miles (our approximate total by the time we get back to D.C.) offers plenty of time for reflection. And I keep thinking about Zubik and wondering how he rationalized writing something so unsurprising, for a Catholic bishop, as "I Am Pro-Life." So far, the only thing I've been able to come up with is this: Zubik is rallying, or at least comforting, the troops.

After all, the recent murder of abortion provider Dr. George Tiller has provided an opportunity for some pro-choice activists to directly connect the pro-life movement with the extremists who operate on its fringes. One can only assume that some faithful Pittsburgh parishoners have expressed their own doubts and concerns.

Zubik's response is formulaic. Scott Roeder, Tiller's murderer, is a nut-case. And besides that, he hung out with anti-tax and anti-government groups. He is, therefore and quite obviously, not the right sort of pro-lifer. And, anyway, writes Zubik, "pro-life groups were quick to denounce Dr. Tiller's murder and the tragedy that someone would take a life in the name of defending innocent life."

Having carefully defined the pro-life movement to exclude the significant portion that does not condemn Tiller's murder and/or believes the government functions primarily to impose secular values and confiscate property, Zubik moves on. The pro-life movement is based on the "sacredness of life," Zubik says, but was originally marginalized as Catholic and therefore "anti-Catholic prejudice was a card to be played." The pro-life pioneers of the '70s, he seems to be suggesting, displayed uncommon courage through those dark times.

But in a we-are-the-world conclusion, Zubik arrives at the happy news:

The latest Pew research study shows that pro-life Americans make up nearly half the population. They are in every age group, every religion, every political party, every neighborhood, every part of the country, every race and every color.

If you want to know what pro-life people look like, forget the caricatures and cartoonists, the propaganda and the pundits. Just take a look at your neighbor.

Of course, if your neighbor also thinks that the government is trying to take away his gun or force him to drive a hybrid, then he's not what pro-life people look like. And, if he thinks that abortionists get what they deserve, then he's not what pro-life people look like, or so Bishop Zubik tells us.

It is also an inconvenient fact that the latest Pew research study didn't ask people if they were pro-life, so the near majority to which Zubik refers actually includes the portion of the population which thinks that abortion should be more restricted than it is now, but does not believe that it should be made illegal altogether.

Zubik never uses the phrase "pro-choice" in his piece, though given his relaxed understanding of the Pew survey, it would seem to be no stretch at all for him to discover that polling actually shows us that a good portion of the population is both pro-life and pro-choice. In the meantime, the Bishop also tells us that pro-life encompasses "opposition to capital punishment, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research, war and violence of any kind. That being the case, I eagerly await his next piece denouncing the use of violence in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service

Now fourteen years old, The Story of Jane, The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service begins this way:

“During the four years before the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion, thousands of women called Jane. Jane was the contact name for a group in Chicago officially known as The Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation. Every week desperate women of every class, race and ethnicity telephoned Jane. They were women whose husbands or boy friends forbade them to use contraceptives; women who had conceived on every method of contraception; women who had not used contraceptives. They were older women who thought they were no longer fertile; young girls who did not understand their reproductive physiology. They were women who could not care for a child and women who did not want a child. Some women agonized over the decision, while others had no doubts. Each one was making the best decision about motherhood that she could make at the time.”

My copy of “Jane,” by Laura Kaplan, is a quality paperback published in 1995 by the University of Chicago Press, which will hopefully overlook this, and any other, uses or misuses I might make of Jane’s contents.

There are any number of stimulating ideas here, beginning with the notion that there actually was an “Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation.” The phrase has echoes of the Underground Railroad. Of freedom from oppression. Of escape from servitude. Of struggle for human rights and human potential. Of all the uprisings and rebellions and revolutions that human beings must stage in order to get anywhere.

But we are never done. Never done with hoping for better or more, never done with throwing off chains, battering against limits. It’s no surprise, then, that the battle for reproductive rights didn’t end with Roe v. Wade, it moved on, morphing and flowing and raging across the plains of a seemingly endless frontier. Change only a few words in Jane’s opening paragraph and an exciting testimony to feminist struggle for reproductive rights could be a passable reproduction of a pro-life manifesto. And so it goes.

And while it goes, it seems increasingly clear that pro-life activists (to use their term for themselves) fight a fatally flawed war. Their unsuccessful effort to eliminate abortion has certainly reduced abortion availability and abortions, generally. Perhaps not surprisingly, their moral crusade ends up restricting the right to perform abortion to a few doctors, permitting those doctors to set their own, high rates for abortion services.

But in a kind of collateral damage inflicted by pro-life warriors, the near-monopolistic market for abortion services creates profit opportunity for abortion providers. This profit potential guarantees that there will always be clinic operators and doctors who see a commercial opportunity in providing abortion services to the general public. It guarantees that there will always be clinic operators and doctors who privately and quietly provide abortion services at higher prices to well-to-do women. It guarantees that pharmaceutical companies will see plenty of additional profit opportunity in efforts to develop “magic bullets” that will provide safe and hassle-free abortions. And it guarantees that unscrupulous and inadequately trained abortion providers will materialize to perform abortions at exceedingly high prices in places where they are illegal or otherwise difficult to obtain.

But if we want to reduce the number of abortions, reduce government’s role in supporting abortion, and reduce the economic and social cost of abortion, we should end monopolistic control of the existing "right" to perform abortions. We can’t do that by banning abortion. Nor can we do it by further criminalizing abortion providers. But we can begin to do it by teaching abortion techniques to nurses and nurse practitioners as we do with doctors.

Jane did it, teaching abortion techniques, as well as other skills, to women who were not medical professionals at a time when having an abortion was a punishable offense.

“The workers explained to each woman having an abortion that the group trained people the way anyone learns, by practice. Before an apprentice learned something new, she asked the woman having the abortion for permission…Including the woman having the abortion in the actual process added to the political dimension of their work. Not only were they demystifying medical practice for themselves but [also] for every woman who came to them (pg. 128).”

Today, it ought to be a simple task to train already prepared nurses and others to provide abortion services in the interests of improving and expanding medical care and reducing abortion and abortion trauma. And there are far more nurses and far more nursing schools than there are doctors and medical schools. Teaching abortion techniques to nurses and nurse practitioners would require no more than what Jane accomplished outside institutional settings and outside the law.

The obvious payoff would be in increased availability of medically safe abortions. Abortion would become much cheaper. But there is no reason to believe that abortion would become even more frequent.

If pregnant women seeking to terminate a pregnancy didn't have to travel for hundreds of miles to get access to abortion services, parental notification laws would become less onerous. Locally available and safe abortions would mean that young women, living in difficult circumstances, without reasonable parental support and without the resources to travel, would still have time to consider all reasonable alternatives to abortion, including having a child and putting it up for adoption.

Jane's story is a reminder that "we are the ones we've been waiting for." The practical impact of Jane's work, the empowerment that was one of the rewards of being part of Jane, and the organizing skills and political sophistication that members of Jane acquired seem inexhaustible and most available to those who work in direct ways for social change. Jane's history also makes clear why reproductive rights are inseparable from women's rights. And since only a very few people in power gain anything by standing in the way of the empowerment of others, Jane's story also makes clear why men ought to be placing a priority on reproductive rights, too. And in our time, those rights continue to depend significantly on access to safe, affordable abortions.