Why did a pro-choice president appoint someone to HHS who is against abortion AND birth control? Political payback? By Frances Kissling June 7, 2009 | President Barack Obama's appointment of Alexia Kelley, founder of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, as director of the Department of Health and Human Services' Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiativestook the pro-choice movement by surprise. On Thursday, the day that news of the appointment leaked out, Marcia Greenberger, co-president of the National Women's Law Center and a quintessential Washington insider, told me that she "hadn't heard anything about it till today, and we are trying to get to the bottom of it." What Greenberger and others will want to know is why the post, which includes oversight of the department's faith-based grant-making in family planning, HIV and AIDS and in small-scale research into the effect of religion and spirituality on early sexual behavior, has gone to someone who both believes abortion should be illegal and opposes contraception. That's right -- Kelley's group of self-described progressive Catholics takes a position held by only a small minority, that the Catholic church is right to prohibit birth control. Were there no qualified religious experts who hold more mainstream views on family planning and abortion, views that are consistent with those of President Obama? Kelley and other moderately progressive Catholic and evangelical groups owe their pull in the Democratic Party to the disappointment of 2004. They seized on the Democratic defeat in the 2004 elections as a means to push the party to the right on sex and reproduction. Democrats, stung by their near miss in Ohio, desperate to attract swing voters, eager to prove that they were "sensitive" to religion, took the bait. With support from George Soros and Michael Kieschnick, the founder of Working Assets and Credo Mobile, groups like Sojourners, Faith in Public Life and Catholics in Alliance entered the electoral arena. Catholics in Alliance and its sister organization, Catholics United, were active in voter registration and organizing Catholic voters in swing states like Ohio and Pennsylvania in 2006 and 2008. Presenting themselves as more Catholic than the pope -- faithful to church teachings on contraception, abortion and everything else the majority of Catholics have long rejected -- the groups insisted in press release after press release that good Catholics could vote for pro-choice candidates, so long as those candidates were also working to reduce the number of abortions. After all, they admitted, it was simply not possible in the current environment to make abortion illegal, so the next best option was pushing the numbers down. In part, Kelley's appointment is the usual political payback. Catholics and evangelicals including Kelley provided abortion cover for the president and for candidates like Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius. A Democratic governor from a red state famous for the ferocity and electoral strength of its social conservatives, Sebelius won a second term in a landslide in 2006. Catholics in Alliance campaigned for her reelection. Though she faced heavy fire from the religious right when she was nominated, Sebelius is now the HHS secretary. Kelley is a distinguished advocate of healthcare reform and the rights of poor people. For almost a decade, she worked for the Conference of Catholic Bishops on the Campaign for Human Development, a grant-making program roundly condemned by conservatives as too progressive. She entered electoral politics in 2004 when she served as the DNC liaison to the religious community. In 2005, she founded Catholics in Alliance. She has much to offer in government -- but not at HHS. There are 10 other government agencies that have faith-based offices. A far less controversial placement could have been found at Labor, Housing and Urban Development, or the Department of Education.Obama's poor choice for faith leader
Monday, 8 June 2009
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