The Stupak-Pitts’s amendment to the U.S. House version of
Obamacare would prevent government health plan coverage for
abortion, angering Religious Left agencies like the United
Methodist Capitol Hill lobby office.
“Our Christian faith and our Wesleyan heritage compels us
to stand with those who struggle for wholeness and peace in their
lives and believe that all people should have equal access to
comprehensive medical care,” i.e. government-funded abortion,
insisted a recent “action
alert” from the United Methodist Board of Church and
Society.
The United Methodist message to its activists hailed the
Speaker Nancy Pelosi-backed legislation in the House as a “major
milestone,” even though the church lobby prefers an even more
statist “single-payer” system. But the United Methodists lamented
that “what should have been a celebratory moment for everyone”
had been unpleasantly tarnished by Stupak-Pitts’s “restrictive
language” inserted at the “eleventh hour” that “politicized
health care and posed the possibility of a tremendous setback for
access to comprehensive reproduction health
coverage.”
Of course, United Methodists lobbyists are now imploring
U.S. Senators not to include a similar “polarizing” abortion
funding ban in their health care bill. Is government-funded
abortion now a key “Wesleyan” tenet for Methodists?
At a press conference with other Religious left
abortion-rights activists, Linda Bales Todd of the United
Methodist lobby’s “population project”
declared that her agency “acknowledges the varying views on
the issue of abortion and the emotional struggles faced by women
in situations to consider this medical procedure.” But the
“reality, however, is that abortion is legal in the United
States, and the position of The United Methodist Church supports
access to safe and legal abortion.” Actually, United Methodism’s
stance on abortion is more nuanced, recognizing “tragic conflicts
of life with life that may justify abortion,” while opposing
partial-birth abortion and abortions for gender-selection or
birth control. In 2008, the church recognized “the sanctity of
unborn human life” and the “sacredness of life and well-being of
[both] the mother and the unborn child.” But its ultra-liberal
Capitol Hill lobby office insists the church supports
unrestricted abortion rights.
“Measures like this [Stupak-Pitts] effectively limit access
and delivery of reproductive health care based on one, narrow
religious doctrine,” Todd
complained, even as she cited her own church’s supposed views
to demand government funded abortion. Her press conference was
hosted by the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC),
founded by liberal Protestants 40 years ago, with help from the
Playboy Foundation, to push for unrestricted abortion with
ostensibly religious arguments. Last year, United Methodists
narrowly upheld the church’s role in RCRC, with liberal delegates
at the church’s governing General Conference emphasizing RCRC’s
supposed work to combat AIDS, and with many pro-life African
delegates, exhausted by 10 days of debate, having already left
the convention floor.
United Methodism, with just under 8 million U.S. members
and over 3 million overseas, mostly in Africa, is represented by
a host of liberal-dominated official agencies like the Capitol
Hill lobby office that often function without accountability.
While mostly dependent on church collection plate money, the
United Methodist Board of Church and Society also gains rental
income from its prominent Capitol Hill Methodist Building, which,
along with other assets, originated with Methodism’s old
Prohibition-era Temperance Board 90 years ago. Interestingly,
current litigation is challenging the lobby office’s exploitation
of the temperance endowment fund for political lobbying. The
agency also gets funds from outside sources like Ted Turner’s
United Nations Foundation, which earlier this year granted the
board $150,000 to mobilize Methodists to lobby for greater U.S.
funding of “international family planning.”
Linda Bales Todd, of course, will preside over the
Turner-funded Methodist “family planning” lobby project, titled
“Healthy
Families, Healthy Planet.” With President Obama’s lifting of
U.S. restrictions against funding international abortionist
agencies, Todd’s initiative could facilitate more U.S. tax
dollars at least indirectly subsidizing abortions overseas. “This
year-long effort is to build a strong constituency of United
Methodists to support increased funding from the U.S. government
for international family planning,” she excitedly explained about
the Turner grant. With 200 million people reputedly lacking
“family-planning services,” Todd lamented, they are unable to
“plan families, space their children, prevent AIDS transmission,
unplanned pregnancies and, as a consequence, abortions,” though
it’s not clear why Todd would necessarily regret the
abortions.
According to their critics, the Roman Catholic bishops
virtually imposed a theocracy when backing the Stupak-Pitts
amendment, whose prohibition of abortion funding enthrones a
“narrow” religious view, Todd insisted. But statist religious
perspectives demanding U.S. government-directed health care as an
essential human right, including tax-funded abortions, evidently
are not theocratic or “narrow.” Supposedly “Wesleyan heritage”
supports abortion and represents healthy religious civic
involvement, while Roman Catholic pro-life views unacceptably
infringe on democracy. Or at least these are the views of the
purportedly “Wesleyan” lobbyists on Capitol Hill, who seem as
confused about their own heritage as they are about
democracy.
