Pact with the Devil

Paul Rahe a professor of political history at Hillsdale College has a blistering critique of the Catholic Church at Ricochet.com. It's a long piece, but it will be of great interest to anyone who cares about American Catholicism.

The gist of it is that the current troubles the Catholic Church faces regarding the Obama administration's mandate requiring them to provide insurance for contraceptives and abortifacients are really their own doing and are the outcome of their longstanding complicity in the expansion of the welfare state.

This passage perhaps best sums up his essay:

This is what the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church forgot. In the 1930s, the majority of the bishops, priests, and nuns sold their souls to the devil, and they did so with the best of intentions. In their concern for the suffering of those out of work and destitute, they wholeheartedly embraced the New Deal. They gloried in the fact that Franklin Delano Roosevelt made Frances Perkins – a devout Anglo-Catholic laywoman who belonged to the Episcopalian Church but retreated on occasion to a Catholic convent – Secretary of Labor and the first member of her sex to be awarded a cabinet post. And they welcomed Social Security – which was her handiwork.

They did not stop to ponder whether public provision in this regard would subvert the moral principle that children are responsible for the well-being of their parents. They did not stop to consider whether this measure would reduce the incentives for procreation and nourish the temptation to think of sexual intercourse as an indoor sport. They did not stop to think.

In the process, the leaders of the American Catholic Church fell prey to a conceit that had long before ensnared a great many mainstream Protestants in the United States – the notion that public provision is somehow akin to charity – and so they fostered state paternalism and undermined what they professed to teach: that charity is an individual responsibility and that it is appropriate that the laity join together under the leadership of the Church to alleviate the suffering of the poor. In its place, they helped establish the Machiavellian principle that underpins modern liberalism – the notion that it is our Christian duty to confiscate other people’s money and redistribute it.

At every turn in American politics since that time, you will find the [Church] hierarchy assisting the Democratic Party and promoting the growth of the administrative entitlements state. At no point have its members evidenced any concern for sustaining limited government and protecting the rights of individuals. It did not cross the minds of these prelates that the liberty of conscience which they had grown to cherish is part of a larger package – that the paternalistic state, which recognizes no legitimate limits on its power and scope, that they had embraced would someday turn on the Church and seek to dictate whom it chose to teach its doctrines and how, more generally, it would conduct its affairs.

I would submit that the bishops, nuns, and priests now screaming bloody murder have gotten what they asked for. The weapon that Barack Obama has directed at the Church was fashioned to a considerable degree by Catholic churchmen. They welcomed Obamacare. They encouraged Senators and Congressmen who professed to be Catholics to vote for it.

I do not mean to say that I would prefer that the bishops, nuns, and priests sit down and shut up. Barack Obama has once again done the friends of liberty a favor by forcing the friends of the administrative entitlements state to contemplate what they have wrought. Whether those brought up on the heresy that public provision is akin to charity will prove capable of thinking through what they have done remains unclear.

Rahe doesn't mention it, but the administration's attempt to tell insurers what they will cover and what they won't is disturbing as well on grounds other than religious freedom. Suppose down the road the government decides to mandate that insurers not cover the costs of having more than two children, or they mandate that insurers raise the premiums for anyone owning a firearm. The Obama administration is putting itself in position to control a vast swath of behavior simply by controlling what the insurance industry will cover and how much we'll pay for that coverage.

This way lies the road to serfdom, to borrow the title of Friedrich von Hayek's famous book, and it's another reason why Obamacare strikes many Americans as a very dangerous idea.

Hooking Kids on Sex

One of the reasons Planned Parenthood has incurred the wrath of so many Americans has nothing to do with abortion, nor birth control, nor the racist eugenics that animated their founding. Rather it has to do with the way they seek to expose young people to, and indoctrinate them in, a squalid pornographic view of human sexuality.

Tina Korbe at Hot Air discusses a video put out by the American Life League that reveals exactly how perverse are the PP "educational" materials they distribute to elementary and older kids. The video is at the end of her post. I didn't want to put it here because, frankly, although I think it's important and I have no qualms over its pull-no-punches style, the stuff it presents about PP is just too sleazy and disgusting for Viewpoint.

Instead I'll just recommend that if you want to know what your kids will be exposed to in many public schools and other venues in the name of "family planning" go to the link, scroll down, and watch the six minute video. And then marvel that the organization that puts this stuff out is subsidized by your tax dollars. UPDATE: The video has been taken down after someone claimed "copyright infringement."