A Death in Wichita (26 page)

The next morning, tens of thousands of people marched to the U.S. Capitol carrying placards that read, “Obamacare Makes Me Sick,” and denouncing illegal immigrants, increased taxes, restricted gun rights, and big government. Glenn Beck, whose annual earnings were now estimated at $23 million, had sponsored the rally and it had been organized by Freedomworks, a group headed by the former House Republican leader Dick Armey. Beck had chosen September 12 because it was one day after the eighth anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the United States. He’d started the “9/12 Project” in order to “bring us all back to the place we were on September 12, 2001” when “we were not obsessed with Red States, Blue States or political parties. We were united as Americans, standing together to protect the greatest nation ever created.” In almost the exact spot where President Obama had been sworn in eight months earlier, Beck and Armey addressed the angry crowd, which waved posters calling Obama the “parasite in chief” and once again compared him to Hitler. Some of the demonstrators had come out dressed in costume—as Betsy Ross, Patrick Henry, and Death.

“Pelosi has to go!” they chanted, referring to the California representative and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

“You lie! You lie!” they shouted, echoing what Representative Joe Wilson (Republican of South Carolina) had yelled out three days earlier when interrupting President Obama’s congressional address.

America had seen such populist uprisings before, going back to the inauguration of President Andrew Jackson in 1829, when hordes of protesters had stood on the White House lawn and railed against the money interests; in the 1850s, when the Know Nothing movement had sprung up over fears that German and Irish Catholic immigrants were destroying the country’s traditional values and religious beliefs, opening the way for the pope to dictate to U.S. politicians; again with the 1890s People’s Party, led by Western and Southern farmers ruined by the Panic of 1893; and more recently, in the efforts of the perennial presidential candidate Lyndon Larouche, who in 1988 was sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment for conspiracy to commit mail fraud and tax code violations. At the first national Tea Party convention in Nashville in early 2010, Sarah Palin declared that America was ripe for revolution. Mocking Obama’s 2008 campaign slogans, she said, “How’s that hope-y, change-y stuff workin’ out for you?”

Populism, of course, is in the eye of the beholder. Palin received $100,000 for this nonprofit event.

President Obama had staked his young presidency on health care reform, and by late 2009 abortion was the key issue in this battle. Democratic members of the House, led by Nancy Pelosi, supported a compromise allowing Americans to buy government-subsidized insurance plans covering abortion (as many as 87 percent of employer-based insurance policies currently offered their subscribers similar coverage). If this passed, families of four earning less than $88,000 a year would be eligible for federally subsidized insurance. A large majority of those expected to buy the new policies would pay part of the premium and receive government tax credits for the rest. Abortion foes, not just Republicans but conservative Democrats, vehemently opposed this policy and supported existing law, known as the Hyde amendment, under which government funds could be used for abortions only in cases of rape or incest, or to save the life of the mother. These restrictions also applied to Medicaid, military health care, and the federal employee health plan. In a letter signed by 183 lawmakers and sent to Speaker Pelosi, they wrote, “The U.S. government should not be in the business of promoting abortion as health care. Real health care is about saving and nurturing life, not about taking life.”

In early November, as a House vote approached on America’s biggest health care overhaul ever, Catholic and evangelical leaders saw an opportunity to accomplish something they couldn’t get done during a collective five terms—or two full decades—under President Reagan and both President Bushes. While many Catholics had turned away from the 2004 Democratic Catholic presidential candidate John Kerry, a majority had supported Obama in 2008 and felt they had political leverage with him. In recent years, women’s groups had placed less emphasis on abortion rights and the nation’s support for abortion had gradually eroded to around 50 percent, from its earlier height of 75 percent. Now, with health care reform as
the
primary Democratic issue, both Republicans and the Catholic Church smelled vulnerability.

After Senator Ted Kennedy died in August 2009, Boston’s Cardinal Sean O’Malley approached the president at the church altar at Kennedy’s funeral and appealed to him not to back publicly funded abortions. The United States had 68 million Catholics and Cardinal O’Malley wanted the president to know that although the Church backed health care reform, the Vatican adamantly opposed abortion. It was a moment of great historical context. When running for president in 1960, the Catholic senator John Kennedy had diligently tried to convince Americans that if he won the White House, he wouldn’t take orders from Rome. Half a century later, the Vatican was about to weigh in heavily on American politics.

On Friday, November 6, Nancy Pelosi got a call from Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, Washington, D.C.’s, former archbishop, who reiterated the pope’s position on the abortion issue. Legally, the Catholic Church could not lobby for political causes and continue to maintain its tax-exempt status, but this kind of pressure was not technically considered lobbying (many Americans disagreed with this interpretation of the law and felt it should be changed). Ever since Cardinal O’Malley had gently muscled President Obama at Kennedy’s funeral, Catholic officials across America had been talking with worshippers and local church officials about supporting health care reform—but opposing any public funding of abortion. The U.S. Conference of Bishops, the Church’s Washington-based advocacy group, was staffed by 350 members who maintained close contact with Washington lawmakers. The organization sent out flyers to every parish in the country, asking Catholics to pray for restrictions on abortion and to phone their representatives and ask them to “fix these bills with pro-life amendments.”

Evangelicals kept just as busy working their constituents. Since 1935, the highly secretive Washington Christian fellowship known as the Family had built a membership including scores of U.S. senators, congressmen, White House officials, military officers, corporate executives, and other politicians and ambassadors outside the United States. The Family was widely regarded as the best-connected fundamentalist Christian organization in the nation, if not the world. Its resident headquarters on Washington’s C Street had twelve bedrooms, nine bathrooms, five living rooms, four dining rooms, three offices, a kitchen, and a small chapel. Rooms were rented out to those in Congress for a reported $600 a month for room and board. The Family’s core purpose, according to its leader, Douglas Coe, was to offer public officials a place for Bible study, prayer meetings, and worship services, or to have a forum in which to share their personal troubles (in 2009, two Family members, Senator John Ensign of Nevada and Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina, became embroiled in sex scandals). The group sponsored the National Prayer Breakfast, attended by every sitting U.S. president since 1953.

Coe also talked about the need to make a personal commitment to Jesus Christ. In a 1989 lecture, he proclaimed, “Jesus said, ‘You have to put me before other people. And you have to put me before yourself.’ Hitler—that was the demand to be in the Nazi party. You have to put the Nazi party and its objectives ahead of your own life and ahead of other people.”

Coe saw parallels between Jesus’ demands and those of the Red Guard during the Chinese Cultural Revolution: “I’ve seen pictures of young men in the Red Guard of China…They would bring in this young man’s mother and father, lay her on the table with a basket on the end, he would take an axe and cut her head off…. They have to put the purposes of the Red Guard ahead of the mother-father-brother-sister—their own life! That was a covenant. A pledge. That was what Jesus said.”

Two Family members were the longtime Pennsylvania Republican congressman Joe Pitts and Representative Bart Stupak, a Michigan Democrat. On November 6, after Speaker Pelosi got the call from Cardinal McCarrick, Stupak told her that if she wanted to get her health reform bill through Congress, she should meet with the Catholic bishop’s staff, now assembled down the hall in his office. She took his advice and spoke with the group for three hours.

Congressmen Stupak and Pitts then introduced the Stupak-Pitts amendment, barring the use of federal funds for abortion coverage, except in cases involving rape, incest, or danger to the mother’s life. If women wanted abortion coverage, they’d have to buy it separately. The amendment blindsided House Democrats. Stupak knew that virtually no Republicans were going to vote for the health reform bill in its present form and forty to sixty conservative Democrats would vote against it unless the amendment was accepted. He had Pelosi boxed in.

She then met with leaders of the 190-member Pro-Choice Caucus, explaining to them that without the Stupak amendment the bill was dead. Shouting matches and tears erupted in her office, with many in the caucus feeling betrayed by their leader. As Pelosi frantically tried to keep the reform bill on track, the word went out from America’s Catholic hierarchy to announce “at all Masses” that priests and parishioners should tell House members: “Please support the Stupak Amendment that addresses essential pro-life concerns…If these serious concerns are not addressed, the final bill should be opposed.”

Outside on the streets of Washington, abortion protesters stood next to the U.S. Capitol, carrying signs showing piles of bodies at the German concentration camp Dachau. The signs’ caption read, “National Socialist Healthcare.” Other placards displayed grisly photos identified as aborted fetuses.

On Saturday, November 7, with the vote coming that evening, Democrats launched a counterattack. If the bill passed, said Congresswoman Diana DeGette of Colorado, it would amount to the broadest “restriction of a woman’s right to choose” in her lifetime. Representative Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat, told
The New York Times
that “abortion is a matter of conscience on both sides of the debate. This amendment takes away that same freedom of conscience from America’s women. It prohibits them from access to an abortion even if they pay for it with their own money. It invades women’s personal decisions.”

That night the House voted and sixty-four Democrats favored the Stupak-Pitts amendment, which passed 240–194, sending tremors through the Democratic Party’s national leadership. The House’s health reform bill, with the Stupak-Pitts amendment included, passed 220–215, gutting public funding for abortion. Exactly one Republican, Congressman Anh “Joseph” Cao of Louisiana, had voted for the bill. Representative DeGette now promised to kill this legislation if the Stupak-Pitts amendment wasn’t stripped from the final version.

Feminist and women’s rights groups immediately launched a public relations battle against the amendment:

“Stop Abortion Coverage Ban!” read an online solicitation from NARAL Pro-Choice America, which warned that women could lose the right to use “their own personal, private funds to purchase an insurance plan with abortion coverage in the new health system.”

“Stop Stupak!” read the headline of an online petition doubling as a fund-raiser for Emily’s List, which solicited contributions for female candidates who supported abortion rights.

President Obama had called for the health reform bill to be on his desk for his signature by Christmas 2009. He hoped to talk about the passage of this historic legislation at his State of the Union speech in January 2010. But the fight over abortion would threaten to take away the Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress and to weaken Obama’s presidency.

The battle over sex and reproduction was intensifying not just nationally, but globally.

Within weeks of the emergence of the Stupak-Pitts amendment, Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragán of Mexico, recently retired as the Vatican’s chief spokesman on health care, declared to a magazine in Rome that homosexuals and transgendered people would not get into heaven. On the Web site Pontifex, he said that taking a “morning-after pill” to prevent pregnancy was comparable to “an assassination” and that every abortion was a crime that “merits punishment.” Like Scott Roeder, he backed up his assertions with quotations from Saint Paul, referring to the first chapter of his Letter to the Romans, in which Paul chastened those who’d turned against God through erotic behavior:

“Their females exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the males likewise gave up natural relations with females and burned with lust for one another. Males did shameful things with males and thus received in their own persons the due penalty for their perversity.”

People who rebuffed God were “filled with every form of wickedness, evil, greed, and malice; full of envy, murder, rivalry, treachery, and spite. They are insolent, haughty, boastful, ingenious in their wickedness, and rebellious toward their parents. They are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless.”

On November 20, more than 150 Christian leaders issued a statement reaffirming their opposition to abortion and gay marriage. The 4,700-word document, called “The Manhattan Declaration: A Call of Christian Conscience,” admitted that “Christians and our institutions have too often scandalously failed to uphold the institution of marriage,” but rejected same-sex marriage. Allowing gay marriage would open the way for “poly-amorous partnerships, polygamous households, even adult brothers, sisters, or brothers and sisters living in incestuous relationships.”

The document said that President Obama’s desire to reduce the need for abortion is “a commendable goal,” but his health care reforms would likely increase the number of elective abortions. “The present administration is led and staffed by those who want to make abortions legal at any stage of fetal development, and who want to provide abortions at taxpayer expense.”

Signees of the Manhattan Declaration included fifteen Roman Catholic bishops, including Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York and Archbishop Donald Wuerl of Washington; Focus on the Family’s founder, James Dobson; the National Association of Evangelicals president, Leith Anderson; and seminary leaders, professors, and pastors.

Not even a member of the nation’s most famous Catholic family was spared the Church’s wrath for backing women’s rights and the laws of the United States. The Rhode Island Roman Catholic bishop Thomas Tobin banned U.S. Representative Patrick Kennedy, son of the late Senator Edward Kennedy, from receiving communion in his state because of the congressman’s support for abortion rights. The war over abortion had extended to Rome, and was deepening in the American south.

In Atlanta, anti-abortion groups erected sixty-five alarmist billboards proclaiming that “Black children are an endangered species.” Georgia Right to Life, in partnership with the Radiance Foundation, sponsored the billboards, featuring a worried-looking African-American boy and suggesting that Georgia’s black women had a disproportionately high number of abortions. In 2006, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), nearly 58 percent of Georgia’s abortions were performed on black women, even though blacks made up about 30 percent of the population. Only New York and Texas reported a higher number of abortions performed on black women, but this didn’t appear to endanger black children as a group. Based on CDC numbers, the fertility rate among black women, or births per thousand females of childbearing age, remained higher than the national average and had increased in recent years.

In early 2010 in Utah, Governor Gary Herbert signed a controversial law stating that women who sought illegal abortions could be charged with criminal homicide. The push for the new bill came after a seventeen-year-old paid a man $150 to beat her in the stomach in an effort to end her pregnancy.

That May, Sister Margaret McBride, a member of a Phoenix Catholic hospital’s ethics committee, was excommunicated for her role in allowing an abortion to take place at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center. Both the nun and the surgery, considered necessary to save the life of a critically ill patient, were condemned by Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted, head of the Phoenix diocese.

“The Catholic Church,” said Bishop Olmsted, “will continue to defend life and proclaim the evil of abortion without compromise, and must act to correct even her own members if they fail in this duty.”