ReligionDispatches.org

Amy Sullivan was right when she wrote Saturday that "not all pro-life Democrats are the same." Some of them represent essentially Democratic districts, and some, like Bart Stupak, represent essentially Republican ones.

Stupak, Sullivan wrote, "represents a district so Republican that as one of his pro-life colleagues once told me, 'Bart simply couldn't win without the endorsement of the National Right to Life Committee. So he has to end up taking a much harder line than the rest of us do.'" That says it all, doesn't it? It's not about religion, it's not about the Catholic bishops, it's about getting re-elected in a Republican district.

Much has been made about how the House leadership permitted a vote on the abortion-restricting Stupak-Pitts amendment in order to get the blessing of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) for the Affordable Health Care for America Act. The USCCB, we are told, was so dedicated to the prospect of universal health care it shipped bulletin inserts to parishes across America, demanding that parishioners call upon their representatives to vote against the bill if it did not sufficiently restrict abortion.

As far as the abortion restriction, the USCCB apparently persuaded 35 Catholic Democrats to vote for its approved Stupak-Pitts amendment. Given the USCCB's teaching on the subject, you might then expect all 35 of them to go on to vote for the bill. But only 29 of them did.

Ariel Glucklich sent the following letter in response to Bruce Lawrence’s review of his latest book. In it, Prof. Lawrence wrote that Dying for Heaven is a “bizarrely casual, yet deeply serious, treatise,” adding that, “the thesis of the book itself would be a laughing matter were the author not intent on altering the way that the defense establishment—and not just academics or scholars of religion—think about ‘holy pleasure.’”

Prof. Glucklich writes:

Dying for Heaven is a tightly argued deductive theory of religion that must be read from beginning to end, without skipping around, in order to be understood and appreciated. Its basic premise is that behavioral adaptation and hedonic psychology can help us understand religious motivation. Hedonic psychology, needless to say, has nothing to do with Timothy Leary or Harvard University. It has a great deal to do with Michel Cabanac, Kent Berridge, Daniel Kahnemann and many others.

On Saturday, Fr. Frank Pavone, National Director of the virulently anti-choice Priests for Life, announced that his organization would be distributing the voting records of every member of Congress on the Stupak-Pitts amendment to every Catholic parish in the United States, "with instructions to each pastor on how to make clear to his congregation the implications of how that congregation's representative voted," according to a press release. The plan, declared a statement from Pavone, is "to inform pastors of these voting records is phase one of a year-long effort to activate Churches as never before regarding what they can legally do in preparation for next year's midterm elections. Publishing voting records in a non-partisan fashion is certainly one of those activities."

But a church-state separation watchdog questions whether Pavone's plan violates IRS rules against churches endorsing political candidates.

Last night, the House of Representatives passed the Affordable Health Care for America Act, which included an amendment forced by Reps. Bart Stupak (D-MI) and Joseph Pitts (R-PA), one of the most vociferous opponents of legal abortion in the House. By appeasing Stupak (and the 63 other Democrats who voted for the amendment, 39 of whom 23 of whom went on to vote against the overall bill), the House leadership secured passage of the overall bill, but at a cost to womens' reproductive health.

The amendment would, according to the statement of Planned Parenthood Federation of America President Cecile Richards condemning the amendment's passage, "result in women losing health benefits they have today. Simply put, the Stupak/Pitts amendment would restrict women’s access to abortion coverage in the private health insurance market, undermining the ability of women to purchase private health plans that cover abortion, even if they pay for most of the premiums with their own money. This amendment reaches much further than the Hyde Amendment, which has prohibited public funding of abortion in most instances since 1977."