In 2009, Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Ruy Teixeira argued that our nation’s “culture war” (the debates on family and religious values issues) was “coming to an end as a defining aspect of our politics.”
Teixeira’s assessment looks a little premature after two major cultural battles dominated headlines last week.
The first controversy involved the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation, the organization behind those breast cancer awareness pink ribbons you saw at yesterday’s Super Bowl, and Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider.
For years, social conservatives have been pressuring Komen to stop giving grants to Planned Parenthood. And although Komen denies abortion is the reason, the foundation recently ended grants worth almost $600,000 to 16 Planned Parenthood clinics.
Planned Parenthood could have easily shrugged this decision off since they have an annual operating budget near $1 billion, (and their president earns $900,000 a year) but they decided to declare war on Komen instead.
Planned Parenthood’s well-oiled public relations machine went to work attacking Komen’s reputation in every media space available. And when those well-reasoned pleas didn’t work, Planned Parenthood and its allies attacked Komen’s corporate sponsors as well. Finally, Komen relented, issued an apology, but did not change its funding decision.
Sounds ugly, doesn’t it? But consider the alternative. Last Sunday, priests in an estimated 70 percent of parishes nationwide, read a letter from Roman Catholic Bishops condemning the Obama administration for a new Obamacare regulation.
You may remember that just one of Obamacare’s many new expansions of government power includes a mandate on employers forcing them to provide health insurance to all of their employees.
The Catholic Church, and other religious organizations, applied for a religious freedom exemption to this rule this summer. But this January the Department of Health and Human Services denied their request.
Obama’s contraception decree means that the religious organizations — including their schools, hospitals and social service agencies — must soon provide and pay for health plans that include contraceptives, sterilizations and abortion-inducing drugs.
Since this would all be against church teaching, many Catholic organizations have said they will have no choice but to shutdown the social services they provide if the Obamacare regulation is not repealed.
In a nation of 300 million-plus people, there are always going to be big disagreements over issues like contraception and abortion. The question is, how do we go about resolving these differences.
Should we let people choose which organizations and causes they support? Or should we use the coercive power of the state to force people to do things against their religious beliefs?
One liberal activist expressed her preference for funding abortions over cancer research via Twitter, writing: “Every woman who loses a shot at early cancer detection is a big deal. Every woman who can’t obtain birth control is a big f—-g deal.”
Not everyone may agree with those priorities, but she has every right to voice that opinion and act on it. In fact, many people already have. Since the Komen controversy began, abortion supporters have given close to $2 million to Planned Parenthood.
Not to be outdone, people who believe finding a cure for breast cancer is more important have given almost $1 million to Komen. It may be that both Planned Parenthood and Komen will come out of this controversy as big winners. That’s the magic of voluntary human coordination right there.
The opposite is true of Obamacare. The coercive nature of the federal government does not allow Catholics or members of other religious groups like the Southern Baptists and Mormons an alternative way to both honor their faith and continue providing social services.
By expanding the power of the federal government into unprecedented areas, Obama has enabled the culture war to destroy a valuable and centuries old institution of civil society.
Conn Carroll is a senior editorial writer for The Washington Examiner. He can be reached at [email protected].
