Posted by
"Mind and Morals" Michael Coyne on Monday, October 12, 2009 10:41:00 AM
In the debate over government-run
healthcare, I’m pleased that the debate (if not necessarily the actions of the
Democratic congress and the White House) is going in the right direction.
Americans are largely saying, as my grandmother used to when voicing dissent,
“nothin’ doin.’” It’s a fight we can still win.
There is, however, an element of
the debate that is going all but completely ignored: secularization.
The two closest hospitals from my
old neighborhood were called Resurrection and Lutheran General. Consider other
hospital names across the country: First Methodist, Holy Family, Zion, Sinai,
etc. Were the government to employ a system in which they pay the doctors and
medical staff, they run in the tricky area in which taxpayers are funding religious
organizations. The ACLU would be up in arms in a matter of minutes.
Now, I know what you’re thinking,
and you’re right. I am focusing on a very small part of an infinitely larger
picture. However, in a country where First Amendment religious freedom is a
bedrock element of our founding principles, I feel as though someone needs to
talk about it. Secularization is dangerous, and the next salvo from the
secularist left is going to be coming out of the Trojan horse of federal
healthcare.
It goes without saying that the
American left has taken a very extreme interpretation of “separation of church
and state” in recent decades, and it seems that this would be a predictable
extension of that viewpoint. Imagine: hospitals being forced to change their
names, to fire chaplains, and to seal off chapels in order to accept patients
under the government healthcare plans. Or worse: ambulances ordered to redirect
patients only to secular hospitals. If a hospital called “Sacred Heart” is four
miles away, and one called “County General” is ten miles away, it would make
basic sense for the ambulance carrying the patient in cardiac arrest to go to
Sacred Heart. But, pursuant to the logic of the Democratic Party’s directing of
tax dollars, the ambulance would have to go to County General. And the patient
could die in the process.
Now, I’ll cede that nobody on the
left has made this call yet. To my knowledge, nobody calling for government
healthcare is demanding a directing of funds away from religious-backed
organizations, but I know liberal America, and I promise you that this battle
is coming. And sooner than you think. Remember, this is the political ideology
that has complaints with Christian crosses on sites of veterans’ monuments and
memorials. Would these people really sit by quietly while tax dollars went to
institutions named after religious figures, employers of workers whose jobs
center on religion, and edifices that house religious monuments (such as
chapels)?
When the government gets involved
with something, that something will invariably break down and do more harm than
good. Healthcare will be no exception. Should the DC Democrats get their way,
religious America will suffer yet another blow from the same minds that brought
you the removal of the Ten Commandments from a courthouse.