Joe Lieberman. Far Right in Disguise

I published this online May 2006; due to technical issues with Blogger 2 years ago, the post itself did not receive a permanent link, and was instead bundled into a monthly archive. I was and still am in strong agreement with everything I wrote in the aforementioned post and the essay I wrote (linked below) for my 'ethics in medicine' class that I took with Dr. Jeffrey Blustein of the Montefiore Bioethics Center, Professor of Bioethics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and adjunct Associate Professor of Philosophy, Barnard College. I am re-posting it for posterity and because I was reminded of Joe Lieberman the other day. In 2006 during the Senate race between Lieberman and Ned Lamont, the Lieberman website crashed and the campaign pointed fingers at the Lamont campaign and even went so far as to file a complaint with the US Attorney's Office. A Freedom of Information Act request revealed that the FBI found that the cause of the crash was due to the use of a crappy $15/month hosting site and a misconfigured server. Onwards!

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A few months ago Joe Lieberman spoke out in defense of Catholic hospitals' right to turn away rape, sexual assault, and incest victims who were seeking emergency contraception. "hospitals that refuse to give contraceptives to rape victims for 'principled reasons' shouldn't be forced to do so… In Connecticut, it shouldn't take more than a short ride to get to another hospital”. In a way he's right, in another way he's callous and very much not right. Look around at the hospitals in New York City, in your town, in your suburb, how many hospitals are Catholic; how many have merged with the Catholic Church and you don't even know about it?

The Catholic Church is a huge financial power that controls more than a few hospitals across our nation. As the largest non-profit provider of healthcare, they have the financial resources to keep hospitals afloat that other organizations could not. More and more hospitals are either selling to the Catholic Church or affiliating themselves with them. Does your hospital provide EC? It's hard to know these days.

Lieberman justifies the Catholic position saying that there are plenty of other hospitals in Connecticut you could go to. That's fine for Connecticut, that's not fine for the many counties and cities where the Catholic hospital is the sole provider of healthcare and residents have no alternative.

Furthermore, what an insensitive comment. If you are a rape victim, I'm sure the last thing you need is to drive to the hospital in a state if duress only to be turned away. What are Americans to do when there is no procreative freedom, our morals are being governed by an organization that represents about 25% of our population and less than 10% in many of the states where the Catholic hospital has been deemed a "sole-provider". America was founded by those seeking to escape religious oppression, look around though, here we are again.

Follow the link: CLICK ME! essay I wrote for "Ethics and Medicine" examining the ethics of the Catholic healthcare system.