Thank God For the Nuns
If I learned anything in the six years I attended Catholic school it was this: do not piss off the nuns. Ever. Under any circumstances. Even the younger, kinda-relateable nuns. The fact that, in their push to roll back women’s health and welfare back to the middle ages the Evangelicals and Catholic misogynists have done just that gives me hope, for the first time since the Inauguration, that we’ll actually get health care reform done.
It’s almost as if we gave the patriarchy enough rope and they’ve finally hung themselves.
Don’t get me wrong–I’m still pissed about the fact that my reward for pushing the Democrats into the majority is to LOSE access to health care under the auspices of reform. And trust me, there will be a reckoning. But legislation is always easier to amend than to pass and at this point I’m just looking for some start of meaningful insurance regulation, and this bill gets us there. And if what gets us there turns out to be the cracks in the dam that was the nuns breaking from the Bishops, well, all the more reason to crack a grin, even if it is a cynical and kinda defeated grin.
One of the most offensive parts of the whole Stupak-Nelson assault is the total disregard for my personhood, for the personhood of all women. I’m only half surprised that Stupak et. al didn’t try to strip away women’s legal competency while at it. And I’ve got to guess that’s how the nuns were feeling too, especially since unlike the Bishops and certain members of Congress, the nuns are actually interested in reducing abortions rather than simply re-subjugating women.
See, they understand that, the greater the access to affordable health care, the fewer the number of abortions. Don’t believe me? Check out the debate in Nebraska as just one example. But it is not a complicated idea–greater maternal health, greater fetal health. Make health care affordable and accessible in all stages of a person’s life the less likely they are to face a significant health event.
And the fact that it’s the women in the Church who have come out against the deadly Stupak rhetoric cannot be overstated. Anyone catch Stupak’s response to their statement? To call it dismissive would be unduly polite. There’s simply no way to summarize the amount of loathing Stupak holds towards women. I’ll give you a taste with this–he said when contemplating abortion policy he doesn’t talk to the nuns (many of whom actually deliver care as nurses), he talks to the political, male leaders of the Church–the Bishops. When dealing with an issue of women’s health, no need to hear from the women, right Stupak. What could they possibly add to the conversation?
So, with a vote this weekend, and the whip count looking cautiously optimistic, let me say thank you to the nuns. Their stance has helped push conservative Democrats out from under the thumb of the Bishops to vote yes on important insurance reform. I respect that we’ll likely never agree on the issue of abortion, but I do appreciate the fact that, when it comes to health care reform, at least the nuns didn’t throw me under the bus.
March 19th, 2010 | 
Tags: abortion, Catholic Church, Council of Bishops, nuns | Category: Constitution, Mommy, Supreme Court, The Patriarchy |
3 comments | 
Comments 
Good post.
The healthcare debate has exposed the ugly underbelly of the insurance industry. Interestingly, Betty McCollum in the Rules Committee was commenting on the gender inequity in the current system and when the Republicans were given a choice to rebut, the Republican Congresswoman agreed totally with McCollum — so maybe there is some good that will come from this.
Yet, once the question of abortion is raised, the staunch lines are drawn … the question that needs to be answered by Mr. Stupik and others is : Why are you willing to allow all the inequities in the current system, all the horror stories that we have heard, the rampant price increases to continue unabated, and the people that are dying because of lack of health care, versus an unproven theory that federal funds could be used by some women for abortions ? It’s not just the thousands of nuns but 600 Catholic hospitals and 1,400 Catholic nursing homes endorsing this bill. And independent analysis by groups like Polifact have called Mr. Stupik’s analysis wrong.
I hope that Mr. Stupik, Mr. Oberstar, Mr. Peterson and Mr. Walz listened very carefully to President Obama’s speech this afternoon to the Democratic House Caucus … their votes are needed.
I don’t know if you are a regular reader of Maureen Dowd’s column, but today’s took on this subject. Since there may be a firewall, here it is :
Angry nuns have been calling Congressman Bart Stupak’s office to complain about his dismissive comments on their bravura decision to make a literal Hail Mary pass, break with Catholic bishops and endorse the health care bill.
As a Catholic schoolboy, the Michigan Democrat had his share of nuns who rapped his knuckles when he misbehaved, like the time he crashed a kickball through the school window.
So, of course, he’s having some acid flashbacks, but he told me, “They’re not printable even in The New York Times.”
Like that other troublemaking Bart (Simpson), Stupak, who wants to kill the health care bill because he thinks the language on abortion funding is not restrictive enough, should have to write on the blackboard a hundred times: “I will listen closely when the nuns tell me I am wrong. I will not be an obstinate lawmaker.”
Stupak got in hot holy water when he told Fox News, “When I’m drafting right-to-life language, I don’t call up nuns.” He followed that with more scorn for sisters, telling Chris Matthews that the nuns were not influential because they rarely try to influence — which makes no sense — and because “they’re not the recognized spokesperson for the Catholic Church.” He listens to the bishops, he said, and antiabortion groups.
We might have to bang Bart’s head into a blackboard a few times before he realizes that in a moral tug-of-war between the sisters and the bishops, you have to go with the gals.
The nuns are giving the Democrats cover. As Bob Casey, an abortion opponent who helped negotiate the abortion language in the Senate bill, observed, quoting Scripture: “They care for ‘the least, the last and the lost.’ And they know health care.”
On Friday, Tim Ryan, an antiabortion Democrat from Ohio, took to the House floor to say he had been influenced by the nuns to vote for the bill.
“You say this is pro-abortion,” he said to Republicans, and yet “you have 59,000 Catholic nuns from across the country endorsing this bill, 600 Catholic hospitals, 1,400 Catholic nursing homes endorsing this bill.”
For decades, the nuns did the bidding of the priests, cleaned up their messes, and watched as their male superiors let a perverted stain spread over the entire church, a stain that has now even reached the Holy See. It seemed that the nuns were strangely silent, either because they suspected but had no proof — the “Doubt” syndrome — or because they had no one to tell but male bosses protecting one another in that repugnant and hypocritical old-boys’ network.
Their goodness was rewarded with a stunning slap from the über-conservative Pope Benedict XVI. The Vatican is conducting two inquisitions into the “quality of life” of American nuns, trying to knock any independence or modernity out of them.
The witch hunt has sparked the nuns to have a voice at last. Vulnerable children were not protected by the male hierarchy of the church, which treated sexual abuse as a failure of character rather than a crime. The men were so arrogant it never occurred to them that they should be accountable to the secular world. In their warped thinking, it was better to let children suffer than to call the authorities, embarrass the church and risk diminished power.
Now the bishops think that it’s better to deprive poor people of good health care than to let the church look like it’s going soft on abortion.
Under the semantic dodge of ideological purity, the bishops also are doing the bidding of the Republicans, trying to kill the bill and weaken the president. But the nuns are right when they say that “the Senate bill will not provide taxpayer funding for elective abortions” and that its protection of pregnant women is the “real pro-life stance.”
The nuns stepped up to support true Catholic dogma, making sure poor people get proper health care. (Which would lead to fewer abortions anyway.)
The men running the church seem oblivious to the fact that, with the ranks of priests and sisters dwindling, they can’t afford to alienate the nuns who make their schools and hospitals run smoothly.
And now, just as he’s finally issuing a pastoral letter about the Irish clerical child abuse, the pope himself has been ensnared in the international scandal, with a psychiatrist in Germany saying that an archdiocese that Benedict led at the time ignored warnings in the 1980s that a priest accused of sexually abusing boys had to be “kept away from working with children.”
Because Pope Benedict has addressed the sex scandal belatedly and sparsely, stonewalling on the skeleton in his German closet, he has lost authority to speak about the issue consuming his church.
The only internal investigation he has undertaken with alacrity, for heaven’s sake, is the one bullying American nuns.
Every nun who taught me in grade school had bigger stones than any priest. Admire their courage even more knowing that they don’t even get a pension for their lifetime labor of love unlike the priests.