when religion, ethics and morality part ways
If you’ve been following today’s trendy philosophical demagogues and their favorite memes, you’d know that a religious belief makes people more moral and responsive to the plight of others unlike that nasty evolutionary stuff that tells you it’s ok to do whatever you want and have to view your neighbors as competition. As pointed out in a past post, this assertion is ridiculous since evolution drove social mammals to cooperate with each other, often viewing those of their species as potential friends and partners instead of outright enemies. While my explanation was conceptual, this time I have a front and center illustration that religion does not make you any more moral or ethical, especially when you decide to hold the impoverished as political hostages.
Case in point, after the Washington D.C. city council wanted to get organizations receiving government finds to run charity programs for the poor to provide benefits to same-sex partners they employ, Catholic groups said they wouldn’t observe the rule out of their moral opposition to gay marriage. Of course to hear the spin on this story, you’d think that the evil city councilors were taking away money and the upstanding moral citizens of the church would love to provide services to the poor but they just couldn’t because that would require them to take the stance that all relationships are equal and ignore the millions of dollars spent on trying to sway laws in the states of Massachusetts, Maine and California to deny rights to gays…
The archdiocese says that it cannot [meet the requirements] because of its moral opposition to gay marriage. This is not new. The Archdiocese to San Francisco had the same fight with its city council, and adoption programs of Catholic Charities in Massachusetts were shut down because the state legislature insisted that they sponsor adoptions to gay couples while bishops insisted they would not.
It should be clear from this review of the facts that the church is not threatening to withdraw its money from the poor. It is simply pointing out that it cannot observe these new requirements and therefore the city will cancel its contracts. It is in fact the city council that is closing down these programs, not the archdiocese.
Maybe I missed something here, but how exactly is the archdiocese not taking away money from the poor with their stance of letting their contract with the city be canceled due to their willful refusal to follow the rules? Will the organization pump its own money into helping the poor? Doesn’t seem so since they’re content to end the churches’ role in the programs just so they can boast how moral they are, so while hundreds of impoverished Washingtonians face starvation or sleep in the street, at least they didn’t let Adam and Steve register under the same insurance plan. The homeless and the poor will understand of course. Their plight is nothing when we consider the theological implications of letting gay people have the same benefits as straight people. And just think of the impact on other charities. They will face a flood in domestic partners applying for benefits and may have to provide healthcare to as many as 3% more people. Oh the horror…
Also, correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t churches enjoy a tax exempt status and all the money they’re given gets a free pass form the IRS as long as they stay out of politics? Then why are the Catholic Church and the LDS allowed to spend millions upon millions of dollars to sway actual elections of a secular government? What a sweet scam. Take in tax free cash and use it to sway laws and regulations to your own favor while getting ever more tax free funds. And should the government actually try to do something you don’t like, threaten to pull out of helping charity programs and play the victim card. So where is that morality that comes with religious belief and is proof of the existence of a deity? Sounds more like blatant exploitation to me.
… adoption programs of Catholic Charities in Massachusetts were shut down …
Newsweek couldn’t possibly have chosen to write this in the passive voice just to leave it unclear who shut down those adoption programs (hint: not the government of Massachusetts), could they?
Who’s the bad guy? The organization that refuses funds due to long-held beliefs, or the politicians who think they can change those long-held beliefs with money as a wedge?
I don’t disagree with the notion that benefits should extent to all legal partnership arrangements, but I do disagree with a city council that is trying to exclude the nation’s second largest provider of services to the poor by thinking they can rewrite such organization’s philosophy by changing their own rules.
City council will not produce the social changes they want overnight. The Catholic Church is still the nation’s #2 service provider to the poor, and marginalizing DC’s poor this way will not change this. Only the slow social awakening of an entire nation will do this.
“… or the politicians who think they can change those long-held beliefs with money as a wedge?”
The city council did not just single out the Catholic Church and told them to provide benefits for same sex partners working for them, threatening to pull funds if they did. No, they required all social service provides to adhere to the same anti-discriminatory laws to which the city itself is held in order to avoid potential lawsuits in the future. It’s basically a CYA policy.
As noted in the post, the Church has plenty of money in the form of tax free donations, and if they had such huge objections to the policy but still wanted to provide services for the poor, they would’ve found a way to do it. Maybe they wouldn’t offer as much as they did before, but they would be offering something instead of threatening to shut down all services, using the poor as a hostage to force religious exemptions.
Instead, the Church’s record very clearly says that when it comes to taking care of the poor on their own, or getting public money to help the poor but with the stipulation that they don’t deny same sex partners legal benefits, they would rather let the poor sleep in the street and search through scraps for the sake of staying high and mighty.