[Dialogue] 9/10/09, Spong: The Rhetoric of the Health Reform Debate

Thu Sep 10 12:47:06 CDT 2009

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Subject: The Rhetoric of the Health Reform Debate

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By John Shelby Spong

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                  Thursday September 10, 2009
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Seeking to Understand the Rhetoric of the Health Reform Debate

I went to my local post office in New Jersey last week only to be confronted by a group of demonstrators who had set up a table filled with pamphlets and information about the communist plot to take over health care in America.  Several slogans were quite visible on their posters.  One said "Stop Socialist Medicine," another portrayed President Obama with the signature moustache of Adolf Hitler.  Some of the available literature hinted that the proposed health care reforms were actually part of a plot to cut medical costs by euthanizing senior citizens.  Making a cameo appearance in this new setting was the old abortion issue, with the suggestion that Obama's health care reform proposal was a not-so-subtle attempt to finance abortion with public funds and thus to violate the consciences of the pro-life minority.  People walking in and out of the post office were given the various fear lines and were urged to pick up materials that would validate their wildest charges.  What we had witnessed on television at Town Meetings across the country had now appeared in our local community.  As an advocate of free speech guaranteed to us by the Constitution of the United States I do not oppose anyone seeking, by whatev
er lawful means they choose, to win public support for whatever issue they espouse.  I do find it interesting to note, however, that while the content of the issues that draw out this kind of paranoid response changes from time to time, the emotions of at least a small segment of the American population that always seems to be threatened to the point of hysteria by changing law, changing practice and even changing consciousness, remain the same.  It is not the content of the heath care reform debate, but the reality of these extreme emotions that show up in every period of social transition that I seek to understand today.

    In order to set this discussion into a context of history, recall that the primary theme in America's 2008 presidential campaign was "change."  Mr. Obama not only ran on that theme, but he also embodied it.  He was an African-American candidate.  Never before in the history of the world has a nation chosen as its highest leader a member of a racial minority that had once been enslaved and then segregated by the majority.  This was an amazing accomplishment.  One obvious sign of that election was that racism, so deep in our national character, was now in a steep decline.  If that change was not significant enough, this 47-year-old Illinois Senator represented a new, post-baby-boomer generation.  The torch of leadership that had moved from the World War II generation to the Vietnam generation with the election of Bill Clinton in 1992 and in 1996 had now pass
ed rather swiftly beyond Vietnam to a generation skeptical of all wars of aggression and especially the failed wars of Iraq and Afghanistan.  Mr. Obama further epitomized change in his outspoken defense of equality for women in all areas of life and in his clear opposition to any law or practice that calls into question the full rights of America's gay and lesbian population.  His actions and subsequent appointments made these convictions clear and operative. In this election our nation had voted by large majorities to surge forward to embrace a new world.  Such a surge, however, inevitably carries many people whose ability to adapt to change is limited into the backwaters of debilitating fear and gives birth to the rhetoric of paranoia that we are now seeing.  

    Prior to this election much of this latent and irrational anger in our body politic had been focused on homophobia, the popular wedge issue during the years of George W. Bush's administration.  That prejudice had, however, run its course and had been largely relegated to the uninformed and increasingly irrelevant religious voices that typically represent the past.  There was Pope Benedict XVI, well into his 80s, articulating a long since abandoned theory that homosexuality was an abnormality, a sickness or at least a deviation from the norm that should be changed if possible and repressed if not.  There was evangelist Pat Robertson, also an octogenarian, who loses credibility on issue after issue by quoting a literal Bible and by sug
gesting that God will send hurricanes to punish gay-friendly communities.  Finally, there was the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, younger but still dated, trying to preserve the last vestige of the British Empire, known as the Anglican Communion, by sacrificing women, gay people and modern knowledge on the altar of Christian unity. These voices of yesterday have no real credibility except among those who inhabit America's religious ghettoes and among the populations of the third world that have not yet achieved access to the modern world. Few people today buy yesterday's rhetoric that "the institution of marriage is being undermined by gay lobbyists" or that "acceptance of homosexuality will lead to generalized moral degeneracy." The day of playing the "homosexual card" to create a winning political strategy has clearly passed. All of the movement is now in the other direction.  Vermont has changed civil unions to equal marriage for gay and lesbian couples.  Iowa has enacted laws making gay marriage legal.  The national assemblies of both the Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America have passed resolutions by large majorities opening the process of ordination of deacons, priests and bishops to qualified candidates irrespective of their sexual orienta
tion and asserting that those who live in faithful, monogamous homosexual partnerships are completely acceptable for election and confirmation in any position the church has to offer.  These two church bodies are also preparing liturgies suitable for gay ma
rriages to be ready soon.

    If one looks at the history of fear and paranoia in the body politic of this nation, it is clear that homosexual people simply replaced black people as "legitimate" targets for those ever-present wells of hostility that had nowhere to go when racism began to die.  Now it has become equally inappropriate to treat gay and lesbians as outcasts, so the anger, fear and paranoia of those who cannot adjust to a new world had to find another target.  The health care debate offered that in spades. Those afraid of change fastened onto this subject with stunning swiftness.

    The depth of people's anxiety over change, augmented by the insecurity brought on by the economic turndown and fueled by the powerful industries making fortunes on health care now coalesced to create an epidemic of fear in the debate over the reform of our health care system.  So sudden, so hostile and irrational was the depth of the public response that even the Obama administration appeared to be caught off guard.  When they recovered their political moorings they revealed a lack of understanding by attacking the absurdities rather than addressing the substance of people's fears. Now, recognizing that mistake, they have attempted to recapture the initiative by having the president address a joint session of the Congress and to use that opportunity to refocus the debate. The work of reform will now have a chance to move on.  To do so at least four principles will need to be faced 
and addressed.

 There is at present enormous waste in American health care.  We spend 17% of our gross national product on health care, which is 40% to 50% higher than in any other developed nation, almost all of which have nationalized health care programs.  Despite this cost, a significant portion of our population is without heath insurance and even more stand to lose it if they become unemployed. There is no evidence to suggest that this greater cost makes better health care possible and indeed much evidence that it does not. In fragmented "private" systems, tests are regularly duplicated by doctors who do not have access to previous test results.

  People need to recognize that they are already paying an enormous premium to cover those who have no insurance.  If health care were universal, then the premiums for all people would go down. Hospitals across this land are required by law to care for those who come to them in need of help.  This is so regardless of whether they have insurance or whether they are citizens, legal aliens or illegal aliens. The charge that the proposed health reform bill will cover health care for illegal aliens is nothing more than a smokescreen scare tactic.  The real issue is that emergency room medical care, which the uninsured are now using, is the most expensive care possible and emergency room doctors have no ability to practice wellness or preventive care.  It would thus be far cheaper to offer medical care to all people than
 to continue the present system. Health care reform must not be held hostage to xenophobic immigration fears.

 Reality must be faced in that if no reform of our present system is forthcoming, health care as presently practiced in America will not be sustainable for anyone.  Businesses will continue to cut back benefits and will look for reasons to dismiss those with pre-existing conditions that are costly.  Health care will become a luxury for the rich and the stability of our entire way of life will be called into question.

 Finally the time has come for this nation and our elected leaders to face the fact that universal health care is a moral issue.  This administration must claim and defend this high ground if this debate is to be successfully won. Nothing dissipates fear as quickly as successful leadership.  Nothing feeds fear more than weak and ineffective waffling.  Failure at this moment would be a national catastrophe, an act of surrender to the most irrational voices in the land, the voices of fear, anger and paranoia in the face of change. 

A note from history may be helpful: when Social Security was passed in the Franklin Roosevelt administration, a similar rhetoric of government takeover, socialism, and communism rang throughout the land.  The media voice of that day was not Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity but a Catholic priest named Father Charles Coughlin, but the misinformation was the same.  That administration took the heat, passed the program and t
he rest is history. I pass on to our President the words of a very wise man: "When you do an audacious thing, you do not then tremble at your own audacity."    

– John Shelby Spong

                  Question and Answer

With John Shelby Spong

Shirley Krogstad from Hendersonville, North Carolina, writes:

    If you had to name one "belief" of yours that has evolved or grown the most over the last ten years, what would it be?

Dear Shirley,

    Since my whole belief system is deeply interrelated that is not an easy question to answer.  I like the story told about an elderly bishop who remarked, "The older I get, the more deeply I believe=2
0but the less beliefs I have."  That is exactly what I feel.

    To answer your question more specifically, however, I believe it would be the way I think about God.  God is no longer a person, a being or an entity to me.  God is rather a presence in whom, to use words attributed to St. Paul, "I live and move and have my being."  The "old man in the sky" was the first image to go, then the heavenly judge who kept record books and finally the father figure who desired praise and whose mercy I implored.  The invasive, external heavenly deity faded and new images began to intrude themselves into my consciousness.

The interesting thing to me was that while these old images were fading, the God intensity within me remained steady and steadfast.  Today I am a God-intoxicated person, but my definition of God is anything but crisp and well defined.  I struggle to find words big enough to use when I try to talk about God. God to me is now more of an experience of transcendence, or perhaps the source of life, the source of love and the ground of all being.  An experience to me is vastly different from a being who might be described externally.  People hear these concepts sometimes as simply words.  I hear them, however as a call to transcend all human limits and all human boundaries.  God to me is a call to live fully, to love wastefully and to be all that I can be.

    A redefined Jesus still stands at the center of my God experience
.  He is not the one sent to be my savior, redeemer or rescuer.  Jesus is not to God what Clark Kent is to Superman, a deity masquerading as a human being. He is rather a God presence through whom I am empowered to be open to the life, love and being that flows through me.

    I now call myself a mystic because in my understanding of God I have gone beyond words into a kind of wordless wonder, awe and mystery.  This is not where I was a decade ago.  I doubt if it will be where I am a decade from now, but it is where I am today and it represents the evolving, growing frontier of where I was ten years ago.

    Thanks for asking.

– John Shelby Spong

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