With the advent of government-mandated health insurance, there has developed an ongoing national debate about what exactly they can mandate. Can the government force consumers to eat broccoli? Can the government force the Catholic church to pay for contraceptive coverage, which violates their principles?
There are almost 80 million Catholics in the United States, much smaller than Protestants but still almost 25 percent of the population. Many of them, like in all religions, will be a la carte members, picking and choosing what they want to accept, like endorsing abortion and then washing the feet of homeless people in photo opportunities.
So Catholics are not agreeing with each other on everything and it wouldn't matter if they did. If religious policy was not separated from national politics, unanimous Catholics would still lose out in every vote. A new national survey shows that once again. Even if 100 percent of Catholics agreed on whether or not the government can force them to pay for birth control, they would still be outvoted.
Of course, that's the downside to voting on the rights of people, tyranny of the majority is why we don't do it. If we take a secret vote in America, over 50 percent of people would vote to outlaw being gay. Not gay marriage, being gay at all, and most other countries would be even more lopsided. The newest University of Michigan Health System survey regarding what health coverage should be mandatory affirms what we all knew, just like they knew when they conducted it. It just dresses up the logical fallacy of an appeal to popularity by saying that is what the people want.
Why is lead author Michelle Moniz, M.D., OB/GYN, happy? 69
percent of America agrees with her personal beliefs.
Credit: University of Michigan
There are odd factoids that will call the results into doubt. Of the 69 percent of people who support mandatory birth control coverage, women, parents and black people are no surprise as being more in favor. What is a surprise is that Hispanics, considered overwhelmingly Catholic, are in favor of something their religion is against.
Well, they aren't as Catholic as people think. Perhaps before they moved to the US, they were, or non-Catholics move to the US, or it is just young people joining Protestant churches. Fewer than half of young Hispanics are Catholic, a drop-off that Protestants do not have.(1) And it was nowhere near as high as health issues like vaccines and colonoscopies.
And screening mammograms are quite controversial so the public is clearly not always right when it comes to knowing what health care makes sense and what doesn't, it's unclear how many are simply voting for what they think they should be voting on. The authors selectively included what questions regarding health care are important. The love fest regarding how awesome the survey results think Obamacare is come to a screeching halt when people are asked if men and post-menopausal women should be forced to buy maternity coverage. Which they are.
Catholics have reason to worry about results like this, even if we all recognize that tyranny of the majority is not how things should be done.
Whether the Supreme Court likes to believe it or not, they are activists in a way that has been the norm for the last 100 years but has led to the belief they are another political branch of government. To put that into perspective, take the Dred Scott v. Sanford decision of 1857, one of the most contentious and controversial decisions in the history of America because it upheld that slavery was legal under the Constitution.
Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, writing for the majority, was so non-activist and Constitutionally-based that he agreed with something distasteful even though he had not only freed his own slaves decades earlier, he also paid pensions to those former slaves too old to work. In 1819, he called slavery "a blot on our national character."
Folks, that is a judge separating what the Constitution says from his personal beliefs.
Let's contrast that to sitting Justice Sonia Sotamayor, who has kept no secret about her belief that the Constitution is not most important in making her judicial rulings, stating, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” Pity those of us who don't share her sex and gender and can't make good decisions.
So Catholics have to look at their minority status, and a bench full of judges who all want to be game-changers in American life, and wonder what will happen after they rule on the challenge to the Affordable Care Act's contraceptive coverage mandate.
NOTES:
(1) A switch makes some sense. America is, in the Old World way of looking at things, a Protestant country. Until the last few decades, Catholics were discriminated against just like everyone else, it was one of subtle campaign tactics used against President John F. Kennedy, that he would be taking orders from the Pope if elected. It took a whole lot of dead people voting in Chicago and Lyndon Johnson's Texas to squeak out a victory over Vice-President Richard Nixon, so clearly a lot of Democrats were worried about him also. Church is primarily a communal event, so if you like the people in a church, the name above the door is less and less relevant, outside theological debates.
'Attitudes about mandated coverage of birth control medication and other health benefits in a U.S. national sample', JAMA, April 22, 2014
