Contact: Jeff Walton, Institute on Religion and Democracy, 202-682-4131, 202-413-5639 cell, jwalton@TheIRD.org
WASHINGTON, Dec. 1 /Christian Newswire/ -- The lobbying offices of the mainline churches have joined with abortion rights advocacy groups in opposing the Stupak-Pitts restriction against government health insurance funded abortions. Unlike the evangelical left, which has sought to consolidate liberal evangelical support behind Obamacare by promising protections against government funded abortion, the old religious left is urging constituents to tell the U.S. Senate to drop the abortion restriction.
"It is now up to the Senate to keep health care reform free of religious doctrine and restrictions that will prevent women from making their own reproductive health care choices," explained the Reverend Carlton Veazey of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC), which includes agencies of the United Methodist Church, Episcopal Church, Presbyterian Church (USA) and the United Church of Christ.
In an alert that the United Methodist lobby office sent out to supporters, health care reform passage in the House was honored as a "major milestone." But the office lamented that "what should have been a celebratory moment" had been tarnished by "restrictive language" that "politicized health care and posed the possibility of a tremendous setback for access to comprehensive reproduction health coverage."
IRD President Mark Tooley commented:
"For the mostly new Evangelical Left and the old Religious Left, government-imposed universal health care is a long-time totem for which their activists have toiled across years and decades. Politically liberal evangelicals who still are pro-life, or who at least care about gathering support from the majority of evangelicals who are, remain anxious to preserve Stupak-Pitts.
"The old Religious Left, which has enthusiastically supported unrestricted abortion since the 1960s, sees the proposed abortion funding restriction in Obamacare as a nightmarish stain upon their utopian dream of socialized medicine.
"United Methodism officially opposes partial-birth abortions and abortions for gender-selection or birth control. But the ultra-liberal United Methodist Capitol Hill lobby office interprets the stance as supporting unrestricted abortion rights.
"Evangelical Left activists like Jim Wallis desperately want Obamacare -- even if it entails abortion restrictions -- and see Stupak-Pitts as a sweetener for their constituency. Hard-line old Religious Leftists portray Stupak-Pitts as an outrageous accommodation of theocracy.
"Both Evangelical Left and Religious Left are united in their messianic hopes for socialized health care and almost certainly will support Obamacare ultimately in any form."
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