July 31, 2009
Muddled thinking...
Mark Shea (A writer I highly approve of...except when I want to wring his neck for his partisan venom):
...But the knee-jerk Talk Radio junk about how health care is not a right appears to me to owe far more to maintaining a system in which money is exalted over the good of the person than to anything remotely connected with Catholic teaching or common sense. One can base a credible opposition to so-called "health care reform" on worries that it's going to wind up killing a lot of innocent people as a cost-cutting measure. That I can respect.
But basing opposition to health care reform on the parroted claim that "health care is not a right"--a claim that is demonstrably rubbish if we are paying any attention to the Church's teaching, suggests that other agendas besides the desire to enact Catholic social teaching as public policy are the guiding principals at work in our thinking. That's no longer really a surprise to me, given the spectacle of Faithful Catholics[TM] striving with might and main to justify torture, but it still may be worth pointing out for Catholics who may be sensing a disconnect between the Church's actual teaching and what they are hearing from the conservative side of the blogosphere that so commonly claims adherence to the Church teaching in stark contrast to the Awful Dissenters....
This is mostly a case of getting two different ideas muddled together. Two different "rights."
I have myself actually heard Rush Limbaugh talk on this point. (I betcha Shea has just picked up some leftish rumors, and doesn't know or care what's actually said.) Rush's point was that we have a responsibility to maintain our own health, and we have a moral obligation to help those who can't help themselves. And I think (I'm not an expert) that this is what the Catechism of the Catholic Church is actually saying when it asserts that people have a right to health care.
People have a right to expect that we will assume our moral obligation, and help them if needed.
But the leftish position is something different. It is that people have a right to health care in the same way that they have a right to, say, freedom of religion. What our Constitution calls "inalienable rights." Rush's point is that this would destroy both our responsibility and our moral obligation. It would destroy Caritas.And I would add another point, which I think is desperately important. In America we have always regarded our rights as coming ultimately from God, and thus being inalienable. They somehow exist regardless of what laws we may pass. But once you start inventing new basic rights, that concept goes out the window. Rights become just human inventions, and can be given and taken away at will.
Posted by John Weidner at July 31, 2009 01:18 PMThe key point that seems to be missing is that while we have an obligation to help, that obligation does not involve helping by means of a bloated and inefficient federal government whose healthcare minions have written that an infant born alive is not yet a full person, similarly want to ration care to the elderly shortening their lives...
The Christian obligation to help others is to find the most effective charities of your own choice and willingly give your money to them, not have your money effectively taken at gunpoint by the government (try not paying taxes if you don't think they'll collect by force) and not letting them waste large portions on bureaucracy, not to mention funding abortions on demand as a matter of policy.
Posted by: doug in colorado at July 31, 2009 02:44 PMThe difference between the right to practice your religion freely is that no one is obligated to provide you services.
The Second Amendment guarantees your right to own and possess firearms, but it does not imply that someone has to supply you a subsidized firearm and then continue to subsidize your ammo (though...now that I think about it...).
A right to health care is exactly opposite because in order to exercise that right to health care you must be served by someone in that field. They will be required to provide you that service at a rate determined by someone else; you will be making a demand on someone else's talents and investment in their career choice.
No other constitutional right does this.
Exactly. Plus, the price of the care will be extracted from other people--presumably taxpayers--by (in the last resort) force. To say you have a right to health care is to say you have a right to take from others.
Also, every right has limits, limits which must be defined politically, or by bureaucracies. But it seems to me that the limits on what protected speech is, or to where you can carry firearms, are a different animal from limits on something like how much health care you should equitably get before you are volunteered for patriotic termination. Or whether "health care" includes killing the unborn.
Posted by: John Weidner at July 31, 2009 08:20 PMI betcha Shea has just picked up some leftish rumors
No. Cuz I don't pay much attention to the MSM, let alone the lefty media that doesn't pretend to be "unbiased".
I merely note that there are lots of people (I linked them) saying "Health care is not a right". My sole point was "The Church says health care is a right." One can argue all sort of ways about how that right is to be implemented, how to respect other rights in the heirarchy of goods and so forth. All perfectly legit. But a *Catholic* at any rate cannot say "health care is not a right" without being either ignorant of or in conscious dissent from magisterial teaching.
Posted by: Mark P. Shea at July 31, 2009 09:10 PMMark, you are making a mistake by sliding past the problem.
The second--Leftish-- sense of the phrase is not Catholic. So if you are saying "health care is a right" to people who understand it in that sense, you are preaching false doctrine.
Posted by: John Weidner at July 31, 2009 11:25 PMIt truly worries me that people refuse to see the problem here. The second sense of the phrase basically says that people have a "Robin Hood" right to steal from the rich and give the money to the poor. That's not moral, and not Catholic. And it's a really dangerous idea.
Posted by: John Weidner at July 31, 2009 11:39 PM
