RANT - COUNTER RANT: A WHOLE LOT OF RANTING GOING ON

First an apology for all of the ranting going on here lately.

BUT I CAN’T HELP IT!

Angela DelBrocco wrote last week in the Akron Beacon Journal’s letters to the editor that “it is not respectable or professional” for Catholic institutions to be Catholic. She then dictates what the Catholic Church is supposed to do. They are “supposed to employ and serve many individuals from different background and faiths.” This is true enough. But then to make the leap that Catholic institutions such as hospitals MUST provide services that are directly contradictory to what it stands for as an institution by mandate of law. This forcing the Church to go against what it stands for is not only anti-Catholic, it is singularly un-American. She makes the assertion that if somebody goes to a Catholic institution that simply does not offer services such as the killing of her baby in her womb that those Catholics are “imposing” their “religious beliefs” on her but apparently it does not matter that she in turn is forcing her beliefs on Catholics. Catholics offer services and you can accept them or no. She, however, would force Catholics to, in essence, worship at her altar.

Wrapping the issue up in the cloak of “essential preventative health care” (another debate) she would demand Catholic institutions to teach, offer, and pay for things that it holds as abhorrent. This may actually seem Okay to her UNTIL the same tactic would be thrown back on her to force her to do something that goes against something she deeply believes in. It is a dangerous slope to begin sliding down and once it is in motion it is almost impossible to stop. Lost will be our ideal United States. This is an example of an unthinking mentality that wants to get what it wants now and however it can without thinking of the consequences down the road.

PART 2

Today Denise Woods writes in the same paper against the so called heart-beat bill. It would restrict abortions to that period before a heart beat is detected so all of the “morning after” treatments to “cure” pregnancy could still be used such as in the case of rape victims and so forth. That the state would impose this law on women is “the most egregious violations of individual rights imaginable.” I wonder if she would agree with Angela above who would, however, not think it an egregious violation at all to force everyone around her to not only recognize her right, but also to protect it, promote it, and pay for it? I will admit that this purely speculation on my part.

Missing from this equation is the belief of Christianity for almost all of its history and continues to be so in the Catholic, Orthodox, and a portion of the Protestant Churches that abortion is the most egregious violation of individual rights imaginable; that a mother would actively seek to have her child done away with. Somehow seeing that person as someone with dignity, worth, and having certain unalienable rights is forcing religion on others but being able to declare life that is singularly human and will be nothing but human is nothing – a life that can be snuffed out with no more moral concern that having a wart removed - is not somehow forcing belief on anybody. Indeed she accuses anybody of supporting life as having “ideological blindness,” but I would suggest that she cannot see the value of life past what she can see and touch.