(Father Charles Coughlin Bishop William Lori)
$26,000,000 in bribes, fees paid by the USCCB, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, is a lot of chump change, a lot of little old ladies’ dollar bills in the collection plate on Sunday, to lobby Congress with in the ongoing discriminatory war on women and war on gays.
Recently, I took note of a back-and-forth between Michael Sean Winters and Tom Roberts at National Catholic Reporter, in which Roberts calls into question a persistent meme of Winters' reporting on behalf of the U.S. Catholic bishops. Roberts notes that Winters's defense of the bishops depends on asserting and re-asserting that Catholics are under "attack" today in secular culture, and that anti-Catholicism in American culture lingers on and feeds the "attacks" Catholics are experiencing.
Roberts doubts the viability of this meme of anti-Catholic attack when, as he notes, Catholics are "liberally sprinkled" all through "the most powerful quarters" of the nation's political and economic life. And when the Supreme Court is dominated by (conservative) Catholics.
And now this piece of information comes down the pike, and I think it's going to be even harder for the U.S. Catholic bishops and their centrist spokespersons to keep the victim meme alive: the Pew Forum has just released a report showing that the USCCB ranks number two of all faith-based lobbying groups in D.C., with $26,662,111 (and see Kevin Clarke at America on the Pew report) spent on lobbying activities in 2009. That's a hefty chunk of change for a victimized little old minority group suffering societal persecution to have at its disposal to try to wheedle and cajole legislators to do its faith-based bidding.
Men Behind the War on Women
A group of men with no real background in law or medicine, but blessed with a strong personal interest in women’s bodies, have quietly influenced all of the major anti-abortion legislation over the past several years. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops may be one of the quietest, yet most powerful lobbies on Capitol Hill, with political allies that have enabled them to roll back decades of law and precedent.
Over the past two years the GOP-controlled House of Representatives has launched one of the most extreme assaults on women's choice the U.S. has seen in decades. Republicans voted twice to slash federal family planning funds for low-income women, moved to prevent women from using their own money to buy insurance plans that cover abortion, introduced legislation that would force women to have ultrasounds before receiving an abortion and, most recently, passed a bill that will allow hospitals to refuse to perform emergency abortions for women with life-threatening pregnancy complications.
But the erosion of women's rights didn't begin with the GOP takeover. President Barack Obama's health care reform law contained some of the most restrictive abortion language seen in decades.
Lift the curtain, and behind the assault was the conference of bishops.In the 1930s, Catholic demagogue Father Charles Coughlin never dreamed of the power that the RCC in America now has, can acquire simply by buying it, here in the future.
But beware bishops:
(Bishop William Lori Father Charles Coughlin)
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