Bishop Blair Uses Linguistic Ploy

Bishop Leonard Blair

The Catholic bishop of Toledo and Northwestern Ohio, Leonard Blair, recently (12/08/12) wrote a letter to the editor of the The Toledo Blade in which he claimed that the Obama administration was undermining "the conscience protection of religious belief" as though a woman's or a family's access to contraception was somehow unconstitutional because a group of unmarried Catholic men had so decreed.

Let's recall recent history. Many of the Catholic bishops of the United States tried to use their tax-free pulpits to campaign against President Obama in the 2012 election. That was a fail. A majority of American Catholics voted for President Obama. This reminds one of the bishops' telling Catholics not to use contraception (no clear reason why), and nearly 90% of Catholics disagree.

Bishop Blair used his bully pulpit to prevent diocesan Catholic parishes from supporting the Susan G Komen Breast Cancer Fund based on the logic that at some point in the future Komen Funds "might" be used for abortions. Or, some day in the future they might be used for frontal lobotomies?

And again, it was Bishop Blair whom the Vatican chose to investigate the wrong thinking of American Catholic nuns. Predictably  Bishop Blair found our nuns to be dogmatically challenged. They were too interested in carrying out the social justice message of the Gospels. (It is interesting that the Vatican felt the need to investigate American nuns, but never bothered to have a nation-wide investigation of clerical pedophilia or the attempts to cover up such perfidy.)

And now  in his letter to the editor  Bishop Blair writes, "the paramount concern of the Church has been her freedom to carry out her mission without undue interference of the secular state." In my seventy plus years of being a Catholic, I never knew that "the paramount interest of the Church has been her "freedom." Is that what the Catholic Church is all about? I was misinformed. I thought "the paramount interest of the Church" was to promote the christian principles of Jesus of Nazareth. And he was the Man who encouraged the separation of church and state. Although he lived in a politically-charged atmosphere, Jesus was preaching a gospel much more universal than the petty political concerns of the time.  Bishop Blair doesn't get it. When he talks about "freedom" he is more concerned with maintaining the Vatican's hierarchal, male power structure than he is about the gospels.

The real irony of Bishop Blair's letter is that he is appealing to the concept of freedom when in fact he and his colleagues are depriving their employees of the freedom to make up their own minds as to whether they use contraception. Obamacare is not forcing the bishops or their employees to practice contraception; it is simply saying that those employees who want to use contraception should have the freedom to make that decision for themselves.

Today Catholic hospitals are big money-making businesses. Gone are the days when Catholic nuns set up and operated hospitals to take care of the poor immigrants who needed health care. Today Catholic hospitals like the rest of the healthcare industry are about the bottom line. They compete in the industry for top physicians, nurses and staff, but now they want an "exemption" so that they do not have to provide contraceptive services to their employees -- only if the employee so chooses.

Bishop Blair's appeal for church "freedom" makes use of the same linguistic ploy the anti-unionists use when they use the term "Right to Work Laws."  The laws have nothing to do with the right to work; such laws in reality give employers to the right pay less and eliminate benefits and safety protections. Perhaps they should be called "Right to Slave Labor" laws. Bishop Blair's appeal to "freedom" makes use of the same reverse logic. He wants to deprive employees, Catholic, Protestant Jewish, Muslim, or atheist of their freedom and  right to choose.