Lydia at W4 posts on a possible means of forcing hospitals to perform evil acts like abortion. Namely, by using federal funding as leverage.
I am familiar with this in my discussions on school vouchers. Naturally, I am all for options for schooling. Especially anything that breaks the stranglehold of ideological labs that are many public school systems, but I was always suspicious of vouchers because federal money is federal money; and while a favorable administration might be able to keep their mitts off a school curriculum, it wouldn’t take long for someone to get the idea, “You take school vouchers? Then where is you Planned Parenthood-approved comprehensive sex-ed program for seventh-graders? Let’s see it or all bets are off!”
One commentor at W4 said that Christians in the medical field who refuse to do bad things should get out of the profession. Declarations like this are good news and bad news–One the one hand, Evil is moving out of its coy phase and baring its fangs. On the other hand, it is quite a monster to confront. Maximos spots it:
Such supercilious diktats should be recognized for what they are, namely, declarations that socially influential professions shall be closed to those professing the Christian religion, should they have the temerity to profess that religion as a way of life, and not as a mere personal affectation, gnostic conceit, or Soviet-style personal liberty (“between the ears alone”). It is, to put a fine point on the matter, perfectly analogous to the statutes and customs by which Christians are reduced to dhimmis in self-conscious Islamic cultures, and to statutes common in early phases of Western history by which Jews were restricted to occupations regarded as ignoble and base. It is the moral and political equivalent of subjugation and anti-Semitism. Period.
Interestingly, Hadley Arkes suggested this threat as a way of enforcing the otherwise penalty-less federal Born Alive Infants Protection Act. There was actually some talk of the Bush administration’s looking into it, but I have never been able to get confirmation that Christ Hospital (!) in Illinois, which had previously been doing induction abortions, was actually stopped from doing so by the threat of withdrawal of federal funds. I expect not.
I suspect that the pro-aborts will have much more willpower to push through the objectionable aspects of FOCA than the good guys have had to make any attempt to do anything concrete about BAIPA.
After the election and the utterly contemptible ‘lawyerly’ position from the USCCB not to excommunicate the intellectual-formal “Catholic” lawmakers of abortion (scandalously, because the surgical minions automatically are), we lay orthodox Catholics MUST FIGHT PUBLICLY, BLAMING THE HYPOCRITICAL USCCB!!!!! for what they are: servants of mammon.
St. Luke: 11: 52 “Woe to you lawyers! for you have taken away the key of knowledge; you did not enter yourselves, and you hindered those who were entering.
53 As he went away from there, the scribes and the Pharisees began to press him hard, and to provoke him to speak of many things, 54 lying in wait for him, to catch at something he might say.
16: 1313 No servant can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.”
Cordially