ReligionDispatches.org

Catholics for Choice, which supports the health care reform reconciliation bill, has harsh words for Democrats who were able to garner sufficient congressional votes only by restricting abortion access: Democrats have betrayed poor and disenfranchised women.

Jon O'Brien, the organization's president, told me this morning that "the Democratic Party has absolutely failed dismally to uphold its own party platform that claims they are the party of choice and the party on the side of women." Party leaders are too beholden to political strategists, says O'Brien, which he says "raises real questions about how people will perceive the party in the future from the perspective of standing up for womens’ rights in this country."

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This post has been updated.

This week the Catholic Hospital Association and the Leadership Council of Women Religious, an organization of presidents of communities of nuns, thumbed their noses at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops by refusing to buy the bishops' false claims that the Senate health care bill requires taxpayers to fund abortions. These organizations, in a remarkable move against the church hierarchy, said they were supporting the health care reform bill because it adquately prevented federal funding for abortion and served their social justice goals of providing needed health insurance to 30 million uninsured.

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As the drama builds over whether House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will whip enough votes for the Senate version of the health care bill, anti-abortion activists continue to buoy Rep. Bart Stupak to hold out for nothing less than the language he secured in the version passed by the House last year.

But despite Stupak's intransigence, pro-life Catholic organizations and members of Congress are beginning to see that the Senate bill does not, as the anti-choice holdouts baselessly claim, fund abortions. His claim to have a dozen or so members on his side is rapidly fading.

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Over at TPM, Justin Elliott has been making a case that James Dobson was forced out of his leadership post at Focus on the Family, and from his radio program, because the organization found him to be be too much of an intransigent culture warrior for the 21st century. The story was based largely on the complaints of the Rev. Ken Hutcherson -- himself an unapologetic culture warrior undoubtedly miffed by the organization's attempt to soften its image. Elliott follows up suggesting that Dobson's son Ryan's 2001 divorce might have had something to do with the decision to oust Dobson from the Focus on the Family radio show as well.

I can't pretend to know the inner workings of Focus on the Family, and its spokeperson, Gary Schneeberger, gave me the same statement as the organization gave TPM: "We admire Rev. Hutcherson and the good work he has done for the cause of Christ and in support of families. He is, of course, entitled to his own opinion about the work we do, whether we agree with that opinion or not." Dobson's departure from two leadership positions at Focus on the Family was years in the making, with a phased transition of passing the mantle to Jim Daly, the current president, although reportedly Dobson's departure from the radio show came to him as a surprise.

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The Advisory Council to President Barack Obama's Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships submitted its recommendations to the administration yesterday, and civil liberties groups are calling for quick implementation of its advice on bolstering constitutional safeguards. The Coalition Against Religious Discrimination (CARD), comprised of 26 religious, civil liberties, and religious freedom organizations, is also demanding action from the administration to fulfill campaign promises on a contentious issue the administration asked the Council not to address.

The administration had requested guidance from the Reform of the Office task force of the Advisory Council on how it could better protect both the civil liberties of beneficiaries of faith-based programs and the religious freedom of providers. But the administration specifically did not include on the Council's to-do list one of the most controversial questions -- whether faith-based recipients of taxpayer-funded grants could discriminate in hiring on the basis of religion.

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For months, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has been portrayed as the vote-tipping behemoth that will ultimately dictate (with the help of Bart Stupak) the outcome of health care reform. Stupak is hailed as a hero by the conservative movement (which, remember, opposes health care reform anyway) for threatening to hold up reform over abortion funding. By pro-reform anti-choicers, he's lionized as a pro-life icon, but most of the members of the Stop the Abortion Mandate coalition wouldn't shed a tear if health care reform went down in flames owing to Stupak's contingent of anti-abortion Democrats.

But now a conservative Catholic group -- a self-described Catholic Tea Party -- thinks the bishops are wrong to advocate for reform at all.

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Rep. Bart Stupak, the Michigan Democrat best known for insisting on the inclusion of a U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops-approved abortion restriction in the House health care bill, is back on a media blitz, insisting he has enough Democratic allies in the House to kill the health care reform proposal headed for reconciliation because it insufficiently restricts abortion.

But a Catholic group that in the past has allied itself with the teachings of the church hierarchy opposes Stupak's efforts to derail health care reform over the abortion issue. Catholics United, an advocacy group founded in 2004 "to promote the U.S. Catholic Bishops' 2003 document Faithful Citizenship: A Catholic Call to Political Responsibility," has launched a campaign to urge the bishops to support the bill. 

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While the nation was fixated on the heartless antics of Sen. Jim Bunning, the Kentucky Republican who until yesterday held up a bill extending unemployment benefits to tens of thousands of Americans, another Republican is holding up a different bill that could save lives in Africa.

At UN Dispatch, Mark Goldberg reports on Tom Coburn's block of a bill that would disarm the Lord's Resistance Army, which has waged a brutal campaign of terror, rape, brutality, and mutilation in Northern Uganda and elsewhere in Africa, including in the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo. The LRA Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act would authorize "$40 million to post-conflict recovery efforts in Northern Uganda and directs President Obama to come up with a peace and recovery plan for war-ravaged Northern Uganda," writes Goldberg. "Though the bill does not actually appropriate any money (that can only happen through the budget process) Coburn objects, in principle, to new funding unless it is offset elsewhere in the budget. Coburn, therefore, has placed a hold on the bill."

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Last week's New York Times story about the courting of blacks to the anti-abortion movement -- by anti-choice activists claiming, in effect, that higher rates of abortion among African Americans is a kind of genocide -- highlights the result of years of coalition-building between conservative black activists and the religious right.

The Times piece describes, among other things, the Georgia billboard campaign claiming that "black children are an endangered species," but doesn't address the data, dissected earlier in the week by Shani O. Hilton at The American Prospect, that black women have a disproportionately higher abortion rate because they have disproportionately lower access to reproductive health care.

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In a follow-up to its decision to end its adoption services in the nation's capital, Catholic Charities has decided to stop providing health insurance to employees' spouses, in order to avoid providing services to same-sex couples, the Washington Post reports.

Same-sex marriage becomes legal in the District tomorrow. Starting today, Catholic Charities, according to the Post, "will not offer benefits to spouses of new employees or to spouses of current employees who are not already enrolled in the plan."

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My report last week from CPAC, about how Focus on the Family sees the Tebow Super Bowl ad as its future, is just one piece of a new public relations offensive from one of the religious right's oldest and biggest players. In addition to touting the Tebow ad, Focus on the Family also was distributing a recent piece by its president, Jim Daly, which makes an argument that in many ways seems indistinguishable from "common ground" "abortion reduction" arguments advanced by more centrist evangelicals and anti-abortion Democrats.

In the piece, "Saving lives by making abortion rare," published in the far-right WorldNetDaily, Daly maintains he is committed to "working toward a day when abortion is illegal and relegated to the dust bin of history." But that day "appears to be a long way off. Yet, for those who remain committed to making abortion less common, it's important we're able to offer a practical response to the simple question: How?"

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In the exhibit hall at CPAC, the National Organization for Marriage booth was just two away from the booth of GOProud, a gay Republican group whose presence at CPAC caused some religious right groups to pull their co-sponsorship. Now Jimmy LaSalvia of GOProud (sporting a Draft Cheney 2012 sticker) is miffed that NOM has threatened to "Dede Scozzafava" any pro-marriage equality candidates GOProud supports.

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Over at The American Prospect, I report on Focus on the Family Action's new Rising Voice initiative, launched at the American Conservative Union's annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington this week:

CPAC's outreach effort to millenials, the anachronistically named XPAC, featured a seminar by Focus on the Family Action's youth initiative Rising Voice, launched this week through the religious right powerhouse's advocacy arm. While some factions of the religious right, including Focus on the Family Action itself, appear anxious to combine their platform, opposition to abortion and LGBT rights, with the tea party's core issue, antagonism toward "big government," Rising Voice's organizers seem to be going in a different direction.

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A hardcore religious right activist who cut his teeth working with the American Family Association, the Christian Coalition, and former Family Research Council head Gary Bauer, says elements of the tea party movement are like Johnnies-come-lately who don't understand the central role Christians play in the conservative movement.

The tea party movement, said Allen Hardage in an interview with RD, needs to focus on elevating and unifying around people who can serve as leaders, if it is to "follow the example of the founders." Displaying the "Christian nation" ideology that is a cornerstone of the religious right, he added, "you cannot restore this country to the founding fathers' vision and exclude the fact that they understood our rights and ability to grow as a nation from our reverence to God."

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At the Washington Post On Faith blog, David Waters doubts the Christian right will join the Tea Party movement. Waters notes "this is an anti-government movement, not a pro-God movement," waving flags "but not crosses."

Yet the Christian right, long an indispensible part of the conservative movement and the Republican Party, is anti-government  too. It favors replacing government with a theocracy. The tea party movement wants to replace government with -- well, that's unclear, as is whether it would coalesce around the theocratic ambitions of the Christian right, either out of expediency, necessity, or ideology. Yet as evidenced, for example, at the Values Voters Summit last fall and in the new conservative site tvTownhall, the religious right seems intent on drinking some tea.

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This post has been updated.

Today is the one-year anniversary of the creation of the Obama administration's Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, and its accompanying Advisory Council. While candidate Obama had promised to fix the constitutional problems with the Bush-era Faith-Based Initiative, President Obama backtracked on those promises.

Obama had made three pledges: to end the exemption allowing federal grantees to discriminate in hiring based on religion; to require houses of worship receiving federal grants to form separate non-profits so that federal funds would not be directed to sectarian organizations; and to put in place oversight and monitoring of proselytizing by federal grantees.

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Planned Parenthood has a calm, measured, and effective YouTube response to the Focus on the Family/Tim Tebow Super Bowl ad: Pam Tebow made the right choice for herself, so trust other women to make the right choices for themselves. Perhaps it will garner fewer viewers than a Super Bowl ad, but as Katha Pollitt points out, blowing $2.5 million on a 30-second spot is not exactly a hallmark of good financial stewardship.

The Super Bowl won't be the Heisman trophy winner's only high-profile appearance this week. Yesterday, at the National Prayer Breakfast, Tebow rubbed shoulders with the world's most powerful people and delivered the closing prayer.

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As the trial of Scott Roeder, charged with murdering Dr. George Tiller in church last year, wraps up, the defendant made an extraordinary confession on the witness stand: "I shot him," Roeder admitted, after declaring "I did what I thought was needed to be done to protect the children."

Roeder's lawyers are aiming to have their client convicted not of the first-degree murder he has confessed to planning and executing, but of a lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter. They claim he had the legal requisite of "an unreasonable but honest belief that circumstances existed that justified deadly force."

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Even if you live in a football-free zone, by now you've heard about Focus on the Family's $2.5 million Super Bowl ad buy for a 30-second spot about how the mother of football star Tim Tebow, facing a possibly deadly medical condition during her pregnancy, rejected her doctor's advice to have an abortion.

Pro-choice groups are calling on CBS to pull the ad because Focus on the Family is an "extremist group" and CBS's decision to air an anti-choice ad was "outrageous."

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The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is now pushing the House and Senate to get health care reform passed -- but the bishops define "reform" in a very particular way. In a letter to all members of Congress, the bishops declare the "health care debate, with all its political and ideological conflict, seems to have lost its central moral focus and policy priority, which is to ensure that affordable, quality, life-giving care is available to all."

Note the words "life-giving," which are loaded with meaning for the bishops' stance on abortion and "conscience protections" for health care providers, insurers, employers, and the insured. In other words, as the bishops state in their letter, a reform bill without these "protections" is "not true health care reform." It's their clever way of trying to duck blame for stalling the bill -- we support "true" reform, honest!

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The most astonishing thing about the ABC News revelations that military contractor Trijicon inscribed New Testament verses on its rifle sights is that getting rid of them hasn't been a no-brainer.

Remember all the hand-wringing over taxpayers paying for other people's abortions? Taxpayers have committed $660 million for the military's contract with Trijicon, even though it hasn't exactly been cagey about its worldview. "We believe that America is great when its people are good. This goodness has been based on biblical standards throughout our history and we will strive to follow those morals," reads its web site. 

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As the recriminations fly among Democrats this morning over who is responsible for their loss of the Massachusetts Senate seat the late Ted Kennedy held for more than 40 years, the conservative movement is rejoicing over what it is characterizing as a "new" American revolution -- a new tea party, if you will -- emerging out of Massachusetts.

The geography is rife with symbolism: the first shots of the 2010 revolution fired in the heart of blue America, potentially killing Kennedy's life work and setting the stage for a Republican resurgence in New England, of all places. But what pro-life activists aren't saying right now -- but which is evident to anyone who understands how they operate -- is that Scott Brown is their tool for killing health care reform. He's hardly their new star.

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Evangelical pastors, writers, and activists have stepped up to condemn Pat Robertson's remarks about Haiti, saying that he does not represent them, nor do comments represent Christianity. If that's true, why does anyone care about anything Robertson says at all?

Judging a public figure's influence is a tricky business. Sure, best-selling books, sell-out crowds and the like tell you something. You could look at the 700 Club's Nielsen ratings, or do a public opinion survey on someone's favorability ratings, or ask other other evangelicals to name their most "influential" brethren. Or you could perform the Washington journalist's task of eliciting gossip ("asshole" is how one conservative operative once described Robertson to me) and figure out whether the person in question has any "juice."

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Lou Engle, founder of The Call and other charismatic intercessory prayer organizations, has a new target on the weekend of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday: a forthcoming Planned Parenthood facility in Houston that he claims will practice eugenics because of its location in a predominantly black and Latino neighborhood.

"Houston, we have a problem," Engle intones in a new "crisis" video on his web site. In the video, which is filled with his characteristic predictions of the earth-shattering impact of his prayer movement, he claims that an unspecified "they" are calling the clinic "an abortion super center." But who is the they? Engle himself.

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The Family Research Council has jumped on the bandwagon of right-wing opposition to President Obama's nominee to lead the Transportation Security Administration, Erroll Southers. The gripe is that in a 2008 interview, Southers pointed to, among other groups, "Christian identity" and "anti-abortion" groups as possible domestic terrorist threats.

"That's right," reads FRC's Washington Update. "The man chosen to be first line of defense against another 9-11 is more worried about churchgoers than radical Islamic fundamentalists."

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