When Linda McMahon, republican senate candidate in Connecticut, was asked by a local paper on emergency contraception for rape victims seen at a Catholic hospital ER, she gave an answer showing her profound ignorance.
Courant: So a rape victim, in a hospital. And it’s a hospital that is run by a Catholic institution. Emergency contraception, should that be—should she be sent to another hospital in the middle of the night when she’s in dire distress?
McMahon: I don’t think that the government should overreach. I mean it’s a separation of church and state in my view, and I think that a religious institution has the right to decide what its policies would be in that, in that case.
Courant: Yeah and I respect that, I just wonder if that institution, gets a certain, a majority of it’s money from the government, if it’s mostly federally funded, does that play a role in your thinking?
McMahon: Well I just think again, that it is an issue of separation of church and state, and that institution should decide what its role would be, and what it’s comfortable with doing in that instance.
Well, yes, it is a state-church issue. Only she’s got it ass-backwards: the state is not telling a church how to practice their faith. Rather, the state is fulfilling its obligation by making sure that a hospital, which is licensed by the state, is providing the standard of care for the community. Failure to do so would be an abdication of responsibility on the part of the state, and allowing hospitals to provides different standards of service based on their religious affiliation would be an illegal state endorsement of religion. The church is not licensed by the state; the hospital is (and that is the elephant Linda is failing to see). Requiring a provider to fulfill its obligations to maintain its status with the state is not government overreaching.
She subsequently tried to back off, sort of:
I do want to clarify one thing that Congressman Murphy had said about this, um, the rape issue and contraception. That was asking the Hartford Courant review board, and it was really an issue about a Catholic church being forced to offer those pills if the person came in in an emergency rape… that was my response to it. I absolutely think that we should avail women who come in with rape victims the opportunity to have those morning after pills or that treatment that they should get.
So it still doesn’t look like she thinks a Catholic hospital should be asked to live up to the standard of care if their religion tells them not to…but on top of that, we get a new qualifier for the ugly word “rape”: “emergency”. Of course, Ms McMahon is not the first republican to treat us to such gems this season:
…the number of different flavors of rape according to Republicans has really reached epic proportions: forcible rape, honest rape, legitimate rape (of course), easy rape, and now emergency rape.
I am speechless.
