In the OP, you asked for the explanation of why two people interviewed in an NPR segment who said “Christian values are under attack”, and you asked for an explanation of what they were thinking. I haven’t listened to the segment and presumably even if I did, there wasn’t any in-depth exploration of that point. Did the interview subjects specifically say, “Christian values are under attack, and the values of other religions are not under attack,” or something like that? And did the interview subjects say that they were under attack, or only their values?
What the fuck does this have to do with anything? ITR is very much quoting “what Christians mean when they say this.” The fact that you think they are wrong about it doesn’t change what they believe.
If you’re asking what someone believes, you can’t argue against it. It is factual that these Christians are referencing the fact that the law is making it hard for them to practice their beliefs. Some of these laws are good (like SSM), others are bad (like anti-homeless laws).
You don’t get to decide that the true meaning is “the law is specifically attacking Christians.” That’s not what they mean. I know you want to believe that, so you can dismiss them, but that makes it a strawman.
I am a Christian. I will 100% agree that the attack on feeding the homeless is an attack on a Christian value. No, not exclusively a Christian value, but it is a Christian value nonetheless. It’s something I would not have thought of at first, but it is a perfectly valid way to parse the concept.
I also 100% agree with Happy Lendervedder that there is no real upswing in attacks. At least, not recently. There’s a general momentum towards a more secular society, but this is offset by a move towards more humanitarianism.
The law was forcing hospitals to perform abortions? Pretty sure hospitals are buildings and I’ll think you’ll find that buildings don’t perform medical procedures.
Was any bishop ordered to perform an abortion? Was anyone ordered to perform an abortion against their will? I doubt it.
Doctors and nurses performed the abortions. They agreed to do so. They got paid to do so. And the money to pay them came from a government program which was funded by taxes. And some people who opposed abortions were required to pay taxes.
I’ve already addressed that point. Can the government require you to perform an abortion? No. Can the government require you have an abortion? No. Can the government require you to pay taxes? Yes.
And you haven’t given a very accurate summary of that lawsuit. The plaintiff arrived at a Catholic hospital (the only hospital in her county) in the middle of miscarrying at 18 weeks; the hospital sent her home twice and was in the process of discharging her for the third time in two days, while she was in extreme pain and with an active infection, when she delivered an infant who died shortly after birth. Her argument was that the hospital, in following the bishops’ guidelines, did not offer medically appropriate care (inducing labor when it became obvious the pregnancy would not continue), and thereby were directly responsible for medical negligence, causing her unnecessary suffering, and endangering her life. (And I’m pretty sure there’s some illegalities in that.) She did not seek to force Catholic hospitals to perform abortions willy-nilly; she wanted a ruling that Catholic hospitals must offer appropriate care to pregnant patients, even if that means terminating an unviable or dangerous pregnancy.
The bishops, in essence, were defending the right to allow a patient to die in the ER rather than save her life, if saving her life meant ending her pregnancy.
(The judge, in dismissing her lawsuit against the bishops, also said she could still sue the hospital and/or the doctors for malpractice, but that the bishops had the right to espouse a religious doctrine that made a woman’s life less important than the church’s stance on abortion.)
By the way, since it’s a really slow day for me, I actually looked up the bio’s of two of the Fort Lauderdale Council members who passed the law criminalizing feeding the homeless. The Mayor John Seiler is a Roman Catholic. The Vice mayor Robert McKinzie serves on the board of trustees of his Baptist Church.
Judging by what you are posting, the theory of religious exemption that you are presenting is that people should be allowed to ignore any law as long as they invoke religion as their reason for doing so. This apparently includes laws requiring people to pay their taxes.
I would have ruled that the bishops have the right to espouse any religious doctrine they wish. But they do not have the right to operate a hospital unless they are willing to do so under the normal standards of medical care.
Can you explain why it’s absurd to think that?
Hey, it works for the churches themselves !
Setting aside the “feeding the homeless” issue, when I’ve seen conservatives / fundamentalist Christians complain about “the War on Christianity”, it’s come down to complaints about the following:
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Christians being called out on “separation of church and state” issues (such as being challenged over placing nativity scenes or Ten Commandments displays on government property)
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Christians being forced to deal with issues which they find to be immoral, but which the broader society has deemed to be legal and / or acceptable (abortion, birth control, SSM)
These arguments nearly always come down to “my rights versus your rights”, and the offended Christian parties usually come across as sanctimonious, and unwilling / unable to see how following what they see as a right infringes on the rights of others.
We’ve basically reached the point in political discourse where phrases like “religious liberty” and “Christian values” are little more than dog whistles along the lines of “states’ rights”.
Maybe you should check again. Hospitals are also institutions, and are treated that way by law. That’s why it’s possible to sue a hospital.
Okay, your first paragraph was a total failure. Let’s go on to the next.
What abortions are you referring to? In the case that I mentioned, I am referring to the case filed by the ACLU against the USCCB. Hospitals run by the Catholic Church do not perform abortions, ever. What abortions are you referring to?
Actually, Auburn University is in Auburn, Alabama. There’s no town in Alabama called “fucking”. More importantly, the location of Auburn University has nothing whatsoever to do with the question I asked you.
What? You’re going from wrong to utterly incoherent. Who exactly gives the need for a chaplain a “wink, wink, nudge, nudge”? What on earth do you mean by saying that?
While Pope Francis may agree on some issues with the US Christian right wing, he’s more nuanced in his approach. He won’t simply ex-communicate a woman who has an abortion, for example. He wants to reach out to her and bring her back into the fold. This is far and away a radical approach to Catholic doctrine, he has turned the conservative Catholic wing on its ear. Conservatives in the evangelical protestant sects used to have a friend in the Catholic right wing. This Pope is changing all that.
He demonstrated a real anger towards those who covered up the abuses of the past. He has to do this, or the church will cease to exist, at least in the Americas. (We stopped going for quite awhile because of the hypocrisy of it all. Francis has gently encouraged a return, and I find myself back at mass).
He’s a low money pope and driving a Fiat instead of a limo is symbolic of his papacy. That doesn’t sit well with aggressive Capitalism, or wearing golden robes and red shoes. He’s the populist pope who would have probably backed the Liberation catholics who protected the very poor, instead of squash them like John Paul 2 did.
Moreover, this Pope is far more liberal than say JP2 or Benedict. His views on climate change and immigration are frankly pretty enlightened. The church’s stand on life doesn’t only extend to fetuses, in fact the church protects all life and therefore are against executions. There are still things that piss me off, the church is unrealistic when it comes to abstinence, and women rights. The role of women in the church is non-existent if you take away all the fundraising, music, events, and devotionals. They still are not welcomed at the pulpit. But individual enlightened priests that I know have invited women to say the homily and assist as deacons. It flies in the face of the traditional catholic role, but hope is with the those liberal priests, and I think Francis is of their mind.
He, at least for the optics of it, has embraced the early Christian values and lives them.
That is not at all a bad thing. If the Conservative right win feels threatened, then I think the Pope is doing his job and doing it well.
I think a lot of the upset comes from changed assumptions. Back when I was a few decades younger and growing up in a fairly conservative suburb, the assumption was that everyone was Christian, or that if they weren’t Christian they would keep quiet about it. So we had daily Christian prayers in (public) school, and we had openly religious assemblies. Sure, there were a couple of Muslim and Hindu kids, and they got to go to the library and no one made a fuss about it. At the time it never occurred to me that they might have not considered the situation as benign as I did.
You have a situation like that, and you just assume that everyone’s OK with it - especially if you’re in the majority. But then maybe the community becomes a little less homogenous, and someone does raise a complaint. It’s easy to feel like you’re under attack when you’re being forced to change the way you’ve always done things, especially if it feels like it’s at the behest of some unreasonable agitators.
What you end up with is a situation like in Arizona where a townthought about banning non-Christian prayers before council meetings (although they eventually listened to their attorney and didn’t). I’m sure that unofficially they’d never had a non-Christian prayer, and that at least some of the council members wanted to officially make sure that didn’t change.
In short, society is probably becoming more hostile to an assumption of default Christianity in people’s daily lives, but it’s sort of a stretch from that to an attack on the religious practice of individuals in any systematic way.
Because a law that just happens to inconvenience a religious group doing whatever it wants to is not the same thing as specifically targeting a group for violence or harassment out of hostility.
Sorry, you don’t get to declare you won the argument back over your shoulder as you run away.
I didn’t say a hospital can’t be sued. I said - as quoted above - that a building can’t perform an abortion. I’m standing by that. If you disagree, say so.
Gee, I’m pretty sure somebody brought up the subject of abortions. Let’s see if we can find that post.
If the law severely restricts when and where it’s legal to help the homeless, and greatly reduces the occasions when it’s legal to do so, then it also severely restricts and burdens the freedom of individuals who want to help the homeless.
You quoted the question that I asked in #48. What relationship does your answer have to that question? I don’t see any.
Well, actually you said more than that a building can’t perform an abortion. You said, “The law was forcing hospitals to perform abortions? Pretty sure hospitals are buildings and I’ll think you’ll find that buildings don’t perform medical procedures.” Your statement was inane and ridiculous, for reasons that should be obvious, and which I’ve already explained, but will explain again.
Hospitals are institutions. As institutions, they can perform medical procedures. It’s perfectly within the realm of possibility that the law could force them to perform abortions. (In this particular case the ACLU’s attempt to get the courts to create a law which did that was knocked down thoroughly; however, the point is that such a law is certainly possible.)
For you to say that “pretty sure hospitals are buildings” and thus can’t perform medical procedures, when in the legal context that I was talking about hospitals are institutions and obviously can perform medical procedures, is inane and ridiculous.
Have you never, even once, ever in your entire career posting at SDMB, used a similar linguistic shortcut? Have you never spoken of a nation making war, or a car running a red light, or a knife causing a wound?
It’s obvious that “the hospital” is a shortcut for the people who make up the hospital’s organizing board, its directors, its staff, etc.
Sure, we can all play hyper-linguistic pedantic games, but, c’mon. Is that helpful?
Anyway, is it true? Did the ACLU sue to try to force a Catholic hospital’s doctors and administrators to perform and authorize abortions? I’d never heard of this, and would like some more details.
(For instance, if the abortion were necessary to save the life or protect the health of the woman who was pregnant, and a hospital’s personnel refused, there could be a real whopper of a lawsuit for improper endangerment and malpractice.)