Feminist Looking Glass

Last week in The Nation, Katha Pollitt (a favorite columnist of mine) hits it out of the park with her ruminations on the Stupak Amendment and the Democratic party. She describes how it feels for women to always have to ‘take one for the team,’ and have fellow Democrats brush it off, like protecting reproductive rights is really just of tangential importance. Then she writes about the Catholic church’s involvement, and she pulls out this paragraph that really resonates with me:

…the blatant politicking of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops on abortion violates the spirit of the ban on electoral meddling by tax-exempt religious institutions. Why should antichoicers be the only people who get to refuse to let their taxes support something they dislike? You don’t want your tax dollars to pay, even in the most notional way, for women’s abortion care, a legal medical procedure that one in three American women will have in her lifetime? I don’t want to pay for your misogynist fairy tales and sour-old-man hierarchies.

Seriously, a religious denomination having such a stronghold on politics on such an important issue as health reform is really not a good thing– for anyone other than Catholic hierarchy. Its disappointing that their religious agenda is so entangled with US politics. Just last week news came that social services offered by Catholics in Washington, DC will be cut off if DC goes through with the same-sex marriage/anti-discrimination bill. These services will be removed for thousands of homeless or low-income people, even though the bill would NOT require any religious organization to perform or assist with any same-sex marriages.