Secular Sanity

Does separation of church and state mean nothing any more? Now we have the U.S. Dept of Health and Human Services  proposing a rule that allows employees in health care facilities to withhold information from patients that conflicts with the employees’ religious beliefs.

Freedom of religion means freedom to follow one’s beliefs in one’s own life. It does NOT mean freedom to destroy the freedom of others by imposing them on everyone else as HHS is attempting to do. This rule is not just unconstitutional; it is stupid. Given the huge variety of religious beliefs in this country, for everyone to be allowed to impose their beliefs on everyone else would sink us in social chaos, if not a revival of the religious wars the 1st Amendment was enacted to prevent.

Sent to the Strib but not likely to be printed, as usual.

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James Gaffney (Sept. 12) defends a non-religious opposition to abortion based on human reason. However, that reason has historically been formed by theological views about the ensoulment of a fetus and the status of women as its vessel—and a disposable one at that. As Pope Pius XI said in Casti Connubii: “However we may pity the mother whose health and even life is imperiled by her natural duty, there yet remains no sufficient reason for condoning the murder of the innocent.” Or, on the Protestant side, as Philip Malancthon, Martin Luther’s associate, said: “If a woman weary of bearing children, that matters not. Let her only die from bearing; she is there to do it.”

Human reason, for those of us who have abandoned religion in favor of morality, now gives women more respect and tells us that women know best what to do about a pregnancy that has serious problems. While some women may devalue their own human rights in deference to a particular church’s teachings, our reason-based secular Constitution guarantees to women that pregnancy is their private business, not the government’s. To do otherwise would be to consign women once again to being disposable vessels.

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McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin for his running mate has energized the Republican party. We should be terrified at the enthusiasm for Palin. Clearly, it is based on her solid religious-right credentials and the expectation that she will be instrumental in making fundamentalist religious views the law of the land. From abortion restrictions, to anti-gay laws, to teaching creationism, to hindering stem cell research, and on down the line, we are in danger of becoming for all practical purposes a theocracy. All it takes is a couple of Supreme Court appointments like Scalia and Thomas. The novelty of putting a soccer mom a heartbeat away from the presidency is not worth losing our First Amendment freedoms.

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McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin for vice president is the ultimate in sexism, a slap in the face to every self-respecting woman. Palin, a handmaiden of the religious right, would thumb her nose at the Constitution and do her best to make every woman in the country live by her religious beliefs about sexuality and reproductive matters. It’s as if McCain had chosen a black man who believed in reinstating Jim Crow laws. She is an insult to the generations of women who fought for the freedom to control their own destiny.

This was submitted to the Star Tribune with doubts that it will ever be printed.

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