Mar 31

To set the record straight in Milwaukee

Church, Culture, Law, Media, Society No Comments »

This is a stop-the-presses story. The unrelenting attacks on Pope Benedict XVI have a lot to do with a lot of cases and allegations but one of the central flashpoints is the now notorious Milwaukee scandal. Because the New York Times has been driving this story without availing themselves of the facts behind it, the priest who was the presiding judge over the canonical criminal case of Fr. Lawrence Murphy has spoken out to correct the record.

Fr. Thomas Brundage, JCL, gives a compelling account.

I will limit my comments, because of judicial oaths I have taken as a canon lawyer and as an ecclesiastical judge. However, since my name and comments in the matter of the Father Murphy case have been liberally and often inaccurately quoted in the New York Times and in more than 100 other newspapers and on-line periodicals, I feel a freedom to tell part of the story of Father Murphy’s trial from ground zero.

As I have found that the reporting on this issue has been inaccurate and poor in terms of the facts, I am also writing from a sense of duty to the truth.

The fact that I presided over this trial and have never once been contacted by any news organization for comment speaks for itself.

Volumes.

My intent in writing this column is to accomplish the following:

To tell the back-story of what actually happened in the Father Murphy case on the local level;

To outline the sloppy and inaccurate reporting on the Father Murphy case by the New York Times and other media outlets;

To assert that Pope Benedict XVI has done more than any other pope or bishop in history to rid the Catholic Church of the scourge of child sexual abuse and provide for those who have been injured;

To set the record straight with regards to the efforts made by the church to heal the wounds caused by clergy sexual misconduct. The Catholic Church is probably the safest place for children at this point in history.

That is an enormous statement, and it has solid documentation to back it up. Which is why it should be in headlines all over the world.

The depth of understanding Fr. Brundage reveals here is as compelling as the way he tells it.

Before proceeding, it is important to point out the scourge that child sexual abuse has been — not only for the church but for society as well. Few actions can distort a child’s life more than sexual abuse. It is a form of emotional and spiritual homicide and it starts a trajectory toward a skewed sense of sexuality. When committed by a person in authority, it creates a distrust of almost anyone, anywhere.

His profile of abusers cuts to the core, no psycho-babble and no spin. The criminal mind and intent and behavior of abusers is the same, no matter who the perpetrator, common man or priest.

As for the numerous reports about the case of Father Murphy, the back-story has not been reported as of yet.

And that’s another stunning statement, given all that has been reported. Alleged. Charged. And perpetuated globally by constantly looping news cycles. In the case at ‘ground zero’ in Milwaukee, “the back-story has not been reported as of yet.”

Well it is now.

Between 1996 and August, 1998, I interviewed, with the help of a qualified interpreter, about a dozen victims of Father Murphy. These were gut-wrenching interviews. In one instance the victim had become a perpetrator himself and had served time in prison for his crimes. I realized that this disease is virulent and was easily transmitted to others. I heard stories of distorted lives, sexualities diminished or expunged. These were the darkest days of my own priesthood, having been ordained less than 10 years at the time. Grace-filled spiritual direction has been a Godsend.

Murphy’s response and Fr. Brundage’s handling of this case are well covered in this account. By him, and at this point, him alone, until others take note.

With regard to the inaccurate reporting on behalf of the New York Times, the Associated Press, and those that utilized these resources, first of all, I was never contacted by any of these news agencies but they felt free to quote me. Almost all of my quotes are from a document that can be found online with the correspondence between the Holy See and the Archdiocese of Milwaukee..

The problem with these statements attributed to me is that they were handwritten. The documents were not written by me and do not resemble my handwriting. The syntax is similar to what I might have said but I have no idea who wrote these statements, yet I am credited as stating them. As a college freshman at the Marquette University School of Journalism, we were told to check, recheck, and triple check our quotes if necessary. I was never contacted by anyone on this document, written by an unknown source to me. Discerning truth takes time and it is apparent that the New York Times, the Associated Press and others did not take the time to get the facts correct.

Big media are weaving their own tales out of only partial information and largely conjecture, rumor and the desire to make an account fit an agenda. They have it that Murphy was given a pass, but Fr. Brundage sets the record straight.

…the fact is that on the day that Father Murphy died, he was still the defendant in a church criminal trial. No one seems to be aware of this. Had I been asked to abate this trial, I most certainly would have insisted that an appeal be made to the supreme court of the church, or Pope John Paul II if necessary. That process would have taken months if not longer.

Second, with regard to the role of then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI), in this matter, I have no reason to believe that he was involved at all. Placing this matter at his doorstep is a huge leap of logic and information.

Third, the competency to hear cases of sexual abuse of minors shifted from the Roman Rota to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith headed by Cardinal Ratzinger in 2001. Until that time, most appeal cases went to the Rota and it was our experience that cases could languish for years in this court. When the competency was changed to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in my observation as well as many of my canonical colleagues, sexual abuse cases were handled expeditiously, fairly, and with due regard to the rights of all the parties involved. I have no doubt that this was the work of then Cardinal Ratzinger.

Fourth, Pope Benedict has repeatedly apologized for the shame of the sexual abuse of children in various venues and to a worldwide audience. This has never happened before. He has met with victims. He has reigned in entire conferences of bishops on this matter, the Catholic Bishops of Ireland being the most recent. He has been most reactive and proactive of any international church official in history with regard to the scourge of clergy sexual abuse of minors. Instead of blaming him for inaction on these matters, he has truly been a strong and effective leader on these issues.

Finally, over the last 25 years, vigorous action has taken place within the church to avoid harm to children. Potential seminarians receive extensive sexual-psychological evaluation prior to admission. Virtually all seminaries concentrate their efforts on the safe environment for children.

And all  American dioceses are required to have some form of a ’safe environment program’ in place, and they are extensive. They have become the model for the world, at this point.

Finally…

On behalf of the church, I am deeply sorry and ashamed for the wrongs that have been done by my brother priests but realize my sorrow is probably of little importance 40 years after the fact. The only thing that we can do at this time is to learn the truth, beg for forgiveness, and do whatever is humanly possible to heal the wounds. The rest, I am grateful, is in God’s hands.

Read the entire account, and encourage others to learn the truth and be part of upholding it. And note to media: Fr. Brundage’s contact information is at the bottom of that article. No more excuses.

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Mar 30

Dysfunctional ‘family guy’

Bioethics, Media, Society No Comments »

Anyone familiar with the Fox channel’s satiric show ‘Family Guy’ already knows how irreverent its writers are about real family values and things like respect and common decency, which is growing increasingly uncommon. Just like common sense.

There was none of either – decency or sense – in a recent episode of that show when they tastelessly and offensively ridiculed Terri Schiavo and her end-of-life ordeal that gripped the nation before she passed away, five years ago. Her family’s foundation, which works tirelessly to protect and defend the cognitively impaired, and educate the public who about science, medicine and law we all need to know, made an outcry against the Fox series and commercial sponsors who would support such a degrading show.

In this sketch, Schiavo is mocked and the memory of the suffering she endured ridiculed – portrayed as someone on a number of mechanical life support systems. She is referred to as a vegetable. Both inferences are false regarding Terri’s case! The sketch ends with characters calling for pulling the plug.
 
Terri’s brother, Bobby Schindler stated: “My family was astonished at the cruelty and bigotry towards our beloved sister, and all disabled people that we witnessed in this show. My first thought was how this attempt at satire must have been enormously difficult and painful for my mother.
 
“After further thought, I realized that using my deceased sister as fodder for satire also validates what our family has been saying for many years. There is growing, deep-rooted prejudice against people with brain injuries and other cognitive disabilities. This sort of bare-faced bigotry is dehumanizing to those with disabilities and cruel to those who work tirelessly to ensure that people with disabilities are provided the proper care, protection and respect. People are not vegetables.”
 
Terri Schiavo was not kept alive on mechanical life support. She made use of a feeding tube after some doctors determined it safer for her than swallowing food and fluids on her own.
 
“The depiction of Terri in The Family Guy episode on March 21 is not only inaccurate,” states Schindler, “it seems to take the position that certain people are simply not worthy of receiving medical care because they are viewed as burdens on the health care system.”

And that’s a road we’re about to go down with the sweeping health care legislation now signed into law. Experts familiar with it predict health care rationing – to a degree we have not seen in programs like Medicare and Medicaid – are certain in the forseeable future, and the most vulnerable and needy citizens will be the ones denied limited and costly health resources. The culture of misinformation and distortion in both news and entertainment media are sometimes callous and indifferent, but sometimes worse….when they craft their messages to re-shape public opinion to see cognitively impaired human beings as dependent, costly and of less value than other classes of what they would call ‘healthy.’

Health and care have become increasingly relative terms. When it’s your relative, funny how treatment matters more.

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Mar 30

In the wake of the Times

Church, Culture, Media No Comments »

The New York Times hasn’t been credible on so many big stories for such a long time now, they’ve generated a sort of cottage industry of journalism to correct the record in the wake of their irresponsible and tendentious reporting. Good news is…there are many solid journalists and scholars out there clarifying how many ways the Times gets a story wrong, as they are right now in their attacks on Pope Benedict.

Like Fr. Raymond de Souza.

The New York Times on March 25 accused Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, of intervening to prevent a priest, Fr. Lawrence Murphy, from facing penalties for cases of sexual abuse of minors.

The story is false. It is unsupported by its own documentation. Indeed, it gives every indication of being part of a coordinated campaign against Pope Benedict, rather than responsible journalism.

Yep. That’s not only clear, it’s provable. Which Times’ reporting is not. Fr. de Souza lists plenty of evidence, but prefaces it with noteworthy circumstances that should have discredited the story in the first place and kept it off the pages of the paper had any good editor done their due diligence. Or even a passing check on the framework within which this picture was painted by author Laurie Goodstein.

The New York Times story had two sources. First, lawyers who currently have a civil suit pending against the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. One of the lawyers, Jeffrey Anderson, also has cases in the United States Supreme Court pending against the Holy See. He has a direct financial interest in the matter being reported.

The second source was Archbishop Rembert Weakland, retired archbishop of Milwaukee. He is the most discredited and disgraced bishop in the United States, widely known for mishandling sexual-abuse cases during his tenure, and guilty of using $450,000 of archdiocesan funds to pay hush money to a former homosexual lover who was blackmailing him…He is prima facie not a reliable source.

Already, enough to render the story barely even tabloid-worthy. But that’s very telling of the Times…

A demonstration took place in Rome on Friday, coinciding with the publication of the New York Times story. One might ask how American activists would happen to be in Rome distributing the very documents referred to that day in the New York Times. The appearance here is one of a coordinated campaign, rather than disinterested reporting.

It’s possible that bad sources could still provide the truth. But compromised sources scream out for greater scrutiny. Instead of greater scrutiny of the original story, however, news editors the world over simply parroted the New York Times piece. Which leads us the more fundamental problem: The story is not true, according to its own documentation.

This is what always gets me, the major media all reporting from the reporting of others, which all goes back to the first ones who pick up a story from…The New York Times. Nothing is sourced, nothing fact-checked, nothing questioned for authenticity. Research really isn’t that hard. It just sometimes produces facts that don’t match the narrative.

Do read on, there’s so much here. And in this clarification, de Souza documents the history of the relevant timeline in this scandal from materials available right there on the New York Times website. Proving that somebody covered themselves.

The Times “flatly got the story wrong,” he says. “Readers may want to speculate on why.”

Here are some ideas.

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Mar 29

Church attacks and the facts

Church, Culture, Media 1 Comment »

The media mantra over the weekend, and they increasingly hyperventilated as the tone ramped up, was ‘What did the Pope know and when did he know it?’ Headlines by Sunday on the 24/7 news cycles were something having to do with ‘Calls for the Pope to resign!’

Yes, Benedict is beleaguered, as is the Church, but one casualty out of the public eye is truth. Or as National Catholic Reporter’s John Allen said, “the first casualty of any crisis is perspective,” and facts are surely falling and buried in all the orchestrated fury over the abuse crisis that’s erupted worldwide. He correctly notes in this good piece that “raising these questions is entirely legitimate,” but let’s get some things straight in this debate.

There are at least three aspects of Benedict’s record on the sexual abuse crisis which are being misconstrued, or at least sloppily characterized, in today’s discussion. Bringing clarity to these points is not a matter of excusing the pope, but rather of trying to understand accurately how we got where we are.

I’m very keen on clarity, so let’s go for it…

First, some media reports have suggested that then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger presided over the Vatican office with responsibility for the sex abuse crisis for almost a quarter-century, from 1981 until his election to the papacy in April 2005, and therefore that he’s responsible for whatever the Vatican did or didn’t do during that entire stretch of time. That’s not correct. 

In truth, Ratzinger did not have any direct responsibility for managing the overall Vatican response to the crisis until 2001, four years before he became pope.

Bishops were not required to send cases of priests accused of sexual abuse to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith until 2001, when they were directed to do so by Pope John Paul II’s motu proprio titled Sacramentorum sanctitatis tutela. Prior to that, most cases involving sex abuse never got to Rome.

So Ratzinger was “not the point man.” Now about that infamous letter…

In some reporting and commentary, a May 2001 letter from Ratzinger to the bishops of the world, titled De delictis gravioribus, is being touted as a “smoking gun” proving that Ratzinger attempted to thwart reporting priestly sex abuse to the police or other civil authorities by ordering the bishops to keep it secret.

That letter…was not intended to prevent anyone from also reporting these cases to the police or other civil authorities…

In reality, few bishops needed a legal edict from Rome ordering them not to talk publicly about sexual abuse. That was simply the culture of the church at the time, which makes the hunt for a “smoking gun” something of a red herring right out of the gate.

Now here’s the point about that 2001 letter, Allen says:

Far from being seen as part of the problem, at the time it was widely hailed as a watershed moment towards a solution. It marked recognition in Rome, really for the first time, of how serious the problem of sex abuse really is, and it committed the Vatican to getting directly involved…

For those who have followed the church’s response to the crisis, Ratzinger’s 2001 letter is therefore seen as a long overdue assumption of responsibility by the Vatican, and the beginning of a far more aggressive response.

And that hasn’t been a very big group, since most of the world’s media and certainly all of the Church’s opponents pick their moments to jump on an allegation and then start cranking out what passes as journalism, when it’s merely reporting on the reporting, which is usually not original and not sourced or researched.

The new norms the American bishops developed to ensure swifter handling of alleged cases of abuse set the pace for the Church, and Rome responded far better to their system and precedent than the New York Times and other media either acknowledge, or even know. Allen points out that anyone paying attention would know this background. Enough said there…

It’s ironic, Allen says, that the Times and others have been accusing Ratzinger/Benedict of “inaction”, when the opposite is the reality.

In truth, handling 60 percent of the cases through the stroke of a bishop’s pen has, up to now, more often been cited as evidence of exaggerated and draconian action by Ratzinger and his deputies.

Obviously, none of this is to suggest that Benedict’s handling of the crisis — in Munich, at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, or as pope — is somehow exemplary. An accounting needs to be offered if this pope, and the church he leads, hopes to move forward. For that analysis to be constructive, however, as opposed to fueling polarization and confusion, it’s important to keep the record straight.

L’Osservatore Romano published an editorial trying to do that, stating pointedly that there’s been “no cover-up” in Rome.

Transparency, firmness and severity in shedding light on several cases of sexual abuse by priests and religious: these are the criteria that Benedict XVI is indicating, with constancy and serenity, to the entire Church. A work method – consistent with his personal history and more than twenty years of experience as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith – that is feared by those who apparently do not want the truth to be asserted but who would prefer to exploit, without any foundation in fact, horrible episodes and painful events in some cases dating back to decades ago…

The purposes have been indisputably confirmed by the Pope, as evidenced by his recent pastoral letter to Catholics in Ireland. But the prevailing trend in the media is to ignore the facts, preferring  instead to force interpretations in order to disseminate an image of the Catholic Church as almost solely responsible for sexual abuse, a view that does not correspond to reality, and which is furthermore in function of the rather obvious and ignoble intention of attacking Benedict XVI and his closest collaborators at all costs.

And the Vatican was attacked for this editorial, too.

What remains intriguing to me is how hard the media pounded the image of Cardinal Ratzinger as the “doctrinal hardliner” when he was head of the CDF, and when he was elected pope their initial reaction – headlines and story ledes carried this everywhere for some time – was that “God’s Rottweiler” would now take over the Church. They spread the dreaded notion that the Enforcer would be cracking heads in his intolerant manner (a caricature created by them, notwithstanding). So there’s been a real flip here.

Look whose become the Grand Inquisitor now.

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Mar 27

Flaming headlines

Church, Culture, Media, Society No Comments »

Media frenzy is focused wherever cameras are aimed and RSS feeds bring up top headlines, so we all learn to direct our attention to the gasping story of the moment. We’ve gone from Tiger Woods to….Pope Benedict.

Hold it. Let’s have a moment of serious reflection.

I’m getting so many headlines in my inbox and newletter feeds, it’s hard to keep up with it all. But for my money, the best analysis wrapping it all in one reflective piece right now is this commentary by Michael Cook. It goes beyond the usual papal or Church bashing to something much deeper, wider and more sinister.

The scandal of clergy who sexually abused children is diabolically real. It has to be confronted humbly and courageously by the bishops who run the Catholic Church. Clergy who are found guilty should be punished. Higher-ups who shielded them should resign.

There is no doubt that Pope Benedict is ready to take a tough line on this…

However…

The huge, unreported story is that we are in denial about a widespread, deliberate, systemic encouragement of people not to control their sexuality. It’s as if a health department allowed witch doctors and Reiki therapists to edge out surgeons. Or as if a defence department allowed its tanks to rust. Fundamental principles of a civilized society like sexual restraint, fidelity in marriage, and nurturing families, are being undermined. The mind-numbing list of politicians caught with their pants down, the tsunami of pornography, sky-rocketing teen sex – all these are warning bells about the consequences of creating a hyper-sexualised culture…

What kind of society are we creating if we actively encourage children to treat sex as  entertainment and encourage men to remain in a constant state of arousal? Sex is not a toy. Without clear moral standards, it is a natural passion which easily becomes an unnatural addiction. Does anyone seriously believe that in 30 years’ time there will be less sex abuse after giving children classroom lessons in how to masturbate?

Of all our social institutions, it seems that only the Church realizes that a crisis is brewing for which we are going to pay dearly in the years ahead. As Benedict told American bishops:

“Children deserve to grow up with a healthy understanding of sexuality and its proper place in human relationships. They should be spared the degrading manifestations and the crude manipulation of sexuality so prevalent today. They have a right to be educated in authentic moral values rooted in the dignity of the human person… What does it mean to speak of child protection when pornography and violence can be viewed in so many homes through media widely available today?”

Who has taken that to heart since Benedict delivered that impassioned appeal in his U.S. visit in April 2008? Covering it in Washington at the time, my producer and I went over all the pope’s lines of the week’s addresses, and marked the ones that jumped out at us. That one did.

To whom else did it jump out?

The bandagon is rolling to pile on to bash the pope, and the clever media response is ‘oh, the Vatican is responding by blaming the media’. Let’s do some serious soul-searching on this, and ask what we can do for our own self-discipline, for our families, and our responsibility to the church in the modern world.

Serously, we are being watched. Practice virtue. It’s Holy Week. Good time to start over.

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Mar 26

Semantic gymnastics in media

Abortion, Culture, Media No Comments »

The tactic of changing style books in different print and electronic media is to change how news consumers think about what they’re hearing. I recall the first tactic was making ‘pro-life’ a pejorative. Then the style books changed and they were not to be called ‘pro-life’ anymore, but ‘anti’-something, as in ‘abortion-rights’, or ‘opponents of abortion rights’. You know, plant the negative connotation about a social movement and turn public opinion against them as a bunch of activists who want to take rights away.

It would be tempting to call it a game, but semantic engineering has changed the way we hear public debates about social issues. Control information and you control thought.

National Public Radio has taken that tactic to the next level. They’ve changed their style books again.

The folks at National Public Radio understand the power of words. Managing Editor David Sweeney announced yesterday that the station would no longer refer to people in the abortion debate as “pro-choice” and “pro-life.” Instead, the station will say “abortion rights advocates” and “abortion rights opponents,” according to a memo circulated to NPR staff.

In making this change, NPR is shifting the terms of the debate to make it more friendly to the pro-choice position.

This is a fair and reasonable article, and I like the critical thinking they apply here:

Is NPR planning on referring to advocates of gun control as “gun rights opponents”? As the Cato Institute’s David Boaz wrote earlier this month,

“In 415 NPR stories on abortion, I found only one reference to ‘abortion advocates,’ in 2005. There are far more references, hundreds more, to ‘abortion rights,’ ‘reproductive rights,’ and “women’s rights.’ And certainly abortion-rights advocates would insist that they are not ‘abortion advocates,’ they are advocates for the right of women to choose whether or not to have an abortion. NPR grants them the respect of characterizing them the way they prefer.”

I called Sweeney to ask him if NPR was going to change its terminology concerning gun rights. He did not return my call (I will post an update if he does).

NPR has chosen stilted terminology that conveys pro-choicers and pro-lifers in positive and negative lights, respectively. The station could just as easily (though perhaps with less aesthetic appeal) have labeled the two groups “pro-rights of the unborn” and “anti-rights of the unborn.”

And here’s the key, I think:

But NPR apparently does not see it that way. The station’s staff sees the issue — and now frames it on air — as a battle over women’s rights, not the rights of the unborn.

This debate will advance in greater strides when everyone can understand that it’s about both.

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Mar 26

Catholics and the abortion regime

Abortion, Church, Culture, Law, Politics, Society 1 Comment »

Back to that point Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput made in a recent column analyzing ‘A bad bill and how we got it’…

In counting the ways, he went through several lessons we need to draw from what happened to give us legislation that is not grounded in moral fundamentals. I wanted to come back to his final one.

Fourth, self-described “Catholic” groups have done a serious disservice to justice, to the Church, and to the ethical needs of the American people by undercutting the leadership and witness of their own bishops.  For groups like Catholics United, this is unsurprising.  In their effect, if not in formal intent, such groups exist to advance the interests of a particular political spectrum.  Nor is it newsworthy from an organization like Network, which – whatever the nature of its good work — has rarely shown much enthusiasm for a definition of “social justice” that includes the rights of the unborn child.

In his role as teacher and pastor, Archbishop Chaput is being instructive about the confusion certain organizations are causing the lay faithful these days.

But the actions of the Catholic Health Association (CHA) in providing a deliberate public counter-message to the bishops were both surprising and profoundly disappointing; and also genuinely damaging.  In the crucial final days of debate on health-care legislation, CHA lobbyists worked directly against the efforts of the American bishops in their approach to members of Congress.  The bad law we now likely face, we owe in part to the efforts of the Catholic Health Association and similar “Catholic” organizations.

On the other hand,

many thousands of ordinary, faithful Catholics, from both political parties, have worked hard over the past seven months to advance sensible, legitimate health-care reform; the kind that serves the poor and protects the rights of the unborn child, and immigrants, and the freedom of conscience rights of health-care professionals and institutions.  If that effort seems to have failed, faithful Catholics don’t bear the blame. That responsibility lies elsewhere.

This all reminds me of something I came across and bring up occasionally in writing and giving talks, always to a surprised audience. It quotes a religion writer:

Several years ago, I did an analysis on the pro-life voting records of members of Congress correlated with religious affiliation. I no longer have it and we have a different Congress today, but the main finding still holds – If there were NO Catholic members of Congress, the body would be significantly MORE pro-life.

Think about that.

If, God willing, the abortion regime someday ends and historians looking back in horror on the period make their report, two things will be true: 1. The Catholic Church was the strongest voice in the defense of life. 2. The abortion regime would have been impossible without the active encouragement of many individual Catholics.

This is even clearer now than it was when I first discovered it, one year ago.

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Mar 26

We didn’t know Stupak

Abortion, Politics 1 Comment »

Days after the Senate version of the health care bill was ceremoniously and victoriously signed into law, media people are still writing about the man who made it happen. Besides President Obama…

Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak had been the determined pro-life boy with his finger in the dike holding back the flood of new abortions that would happen under health care law that provides federal funds and wider access to them. Or so it seemed.

Jim Geraghty at NRO examines the person who portrayed himself one way, and turned out to be another…

now that the dramatic end to the fight over the health-care bill transformed one of the most prominent pro-life Democrats into a man without a country — disdained by national Democrats and pro-choice liberals as a man who nearly derailed health care, and rejected by pro-lifers on both sides of the aisle as a supremely disappointing leader who quit at the last minute…

Duplicity? Naïveté? A failure of nerve? Whatever the reasoning behind Stupak’s unexpected decision, it opened up a question one rarely hears about a nine-term incumbent: Who is this guy?

Good question.

“He’s in a strongly conservative, pro-life district and his only real connection was on cultural issues. But he infuriated the Left on the way to infuriating the Right. It’s hard to see who his base now is. Where he ended up on this issue was a big problem for him, but the way he got there was just incomprehensible.

Kathleen Parker calls it a “fall from grace”.

Ultimately, he was weak and overwhelmed by raw political power. History is no stranger to such moments, but this one needs to be understood for what it was. A deception.

The executive order promising that no federal funds will be used for abortion is utterly useless, and everybody knows it…

Stupak, too, knew that the executive order was merely political cover for him and his pro-life colleagues. He knew it because several members of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops explained it to him, according to sources. The only way to prevent public funding for abortion was for his amendment to be added to the Senate bill.

Clearly, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the president didn’t want that. What they did want was the abortion funding that the Senate bill allowed.

Thus, the health care bill passed because of a mutually understood deception — a pretense masquerading as virtue.

And, as she notes, a lesson in human frailty. What a tragedy if his fall broke the best barricade we had to protect many thousands more frail humans.

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Mar 25

Electronic medical records may have merit….

Culture, Law, Politics, Society 1 Comment »

…..but they are not secure. Get used to the idea though. Starting with the fact that your records haven’t been as private as you may have thought.

Those privacy notices you sign in doctors’ offices do not actually give you any control over your personal data; they merely describe how the data will be used and disclosed.

Good time for that reminder. Because it’s going to be more available before long.

In a January 2009 speech, President Barack Obama said that his administration wants every American to have an electronic health record by 2014, and last year’s stimulus bill allocated over $36 billion to build electronic record systems. Meanwhile, the Senate health-care bill just approved by the House of Representatives on Sunday requires certain kinds of research and reporting to be done using electronic health records. Electronic records, Mr. Obama said in his 2009 speech, “will cut waste, eliminate red tape and reduce the need to repeat expensive medical tests [and] save lives by reducing the deadly but preventable medical errors that pervade our health-care system.”

Sounds good, right? Not to Americans concerned about their most private personal health matters.

When patients realize they can’t control who sees their electronic health records, they will be far less likely to tell their doctors about drinking problems, feelings of depression, sexual problems, or exposure to sexually transmitted diseases. In 2005, a California Healthcare Foundation poll found that one in eight Americans avoided seeing a regular doctor, asked a doctor to alter a diagnosis, paid privately for a test, or avoided tests altogether due to privacy concerns…

Electronic record systems that don’t put patients in control of data or have inadequate security create huge opportunities for the theft, misuse and sale of personal health information. The public is aware of these problems.

Which is only one of the more minor reasons the newly passed legislation is so overwhelmingly unpopular with the American people.

Privacy has been essential to the ethical practice of medicine since the time of Hippocrates in fifth century B.C. The success of health-care reform and electronic record systems requires the same foundation of informed consent patients have always had with paper records systems. But if we squander billions on a health-care system no one trusts, millions will seek treatment outside the system or not at all. The resulting data, filled with errors and omissions, will be worth less than the paper it isn’t written on.

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Mar 24

The Stupak-Obama deal

Abortion, Law, Politics, Society No Comments »

At the end of the day, it seemed vote-a-rama was the big political story. But then this came out…

Both sides in the abortion debate came to a rare agreement on Wednesday: The executive order on abortion signed by President Obama, they said, was basically meaningless.

“A transparent political fig leaf,” according to the National Right to Life Committee’s Douglas Johnson.

“A symbolic gesture,” said Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards.

We knew this. But on the same day that Obama signed the flimsy executive order (behind closed doors, with no press allowed), this is the final insult.

Richards says the order only “codifies” what’s already in the bill. Although she said she’s pleased women can pay for coverage of abortions on their own, she regrets that a “pro-choice president” signed the order.

Johnson lashed out at Stupak and those who voted for the health care bill, calling them “lawmakers who in the end cared more about pleasing the powerful (House) speaker from San Francisco than their pro-life constituents.”

The White House is looking to move on.

Let them play politics. And let there be consequences.

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