A Catholic Question? Why, yes, in fact, it is!

The firestorm of controversy over HHS head, Kathleen Sebelius’, requirement that Roman Catholic health care institutions be required to offer contraception because of Obamacare should be a CATHOLIC CONCERN to anyone advocating for the civil liberties of individuals, and the First Amendment rights to conduct one’s affairs in accordance with one’s beliefs.  I say CATHOLIC because I recall checking a dictionary and it means UNIVERSAL.  Every individual that values his/her rights to think and act freely in society, as long as no harm is done to others, should be joining with the Roman Catholic Church against this edict.  I see this no differently than I do calling out the utter disregard of our US Constitution by the executive branch of our federal government when it ordered the assassination on 9/30/11 of a US citizen and his teenaged son via drone while the two were residing in Yemen .  Whatever one may think of the citizen based on his having been tried by our media for ‘crimes’ that ought to have carried the term ‘alleged,’ he did not receive due process and there is NOTHING to prevent the executive branch from making the same decision to take out any others of its citizens based on the deliberations of a ‘death squad committee’ that is clearly unconstitutional.  Now, with NDAA – and the indefinite detention clauses were drafted by the White House and delivered to Carl Levin, in Levin’s own words – all of this has been codified.

This issue for Roman Catholic-led health care institutions has nothing to do with contraceptives, but everything to do with a federal government that seeks to control through manacling every organization within its grasp to its ideology of collectivism/statism, whether that individual or group shares its ideology or not.

Back before Goldman Sachs and its ilk rejiggered bond indentures for health care institutions such that there is no pledge of any real revenues to bondholders under a ‘corporate style’ indenture, the Catholic health care institutions had a very nice ace they could play in such a circumstance.  We used to refer to it as the “abortion call.”  If forced to perform a service or procedure that was in direct opposition to the mission of those organizations, the health care institution could accelerate payment on its bonds.  Bondholders, for the most part, do not like to get accelerated.  Now, did the ‘abortion call’ survive these massive no-clothes-on-the-emperor alterations when they replaced the old indentures with the new?  I am not sure, since my primary concern at the time was the replacement of a true revenue pledge from a revenue-producing entity with that of a  moral pledge to ask the subsidiaries that had the money to pony up when needed.  That said, if abortion calls remain in place, perhaps it is time for the Roman Catholic health care institutions to threaten en masse to play the ace.