Evangelicals
Wednesday, September 9 2009
The Washington Post has an article by Jacqueline Salmon arguing that health care reform is driving a resurgence in evangelical political organizations. As far as the article goes, this seems to be the entirety of evangelicals’ objection to reform:
After seeing their bread-and-butter issue of abortion take a back seat during the election last year, the Christian right has been a prime force in moving it back to the front row by focusing on it as a potential part of health-care reform.
Alas, the article leaves a lot of questions unanswered: what exactly are these organizations telling their supporters? How does that match up to what’s actually being proposed? My guess is, not very well.
For example, the Family Research Council claims that in the Senate HELP Committee bill, “Of particular concern are the provisions for ‘reproductive health services,’ which is code language for federally funded abortion.” The phrase ‘reproductive health services’ doesn’t appear anywhere in the HELP bill (.pdf), nor in the House bill. As far as I can tell, this is an invention of the FRC, and a fairly cynical strategy for building its own organization. Meanwhile, Christian groups like Sojourners, mainline denominations in the National Council of Churches, and even the Conference of Catholic Bishops are all advocating for health care reform.
As a practicing Christian, I have a really hard time understanding how organizations like FRC and Focus on the Family can justify and get away with lying to their membership in the name of God – especially when the consequence of their goals could be so much suffering and death. I am convinced that the Christian case for massive health care reform is airtight; if there’s any real objection along Christian lines – ie, not the mere specter of abortions – I haven’t yet heard it.
