Sully: "The Catholic Thing"

Andrew Sullivan reacting to the POTUS' address:

I'm a complicated person as readers well know. And I'm suspicious of government healthcare and also a fan of the drug companies for saving my life. But I am also a Catholic and I was brought up to know and believe that we do have an obligation to care for the sick. It is a non-negotiable demand of my faith, although, of course, how we do it is up for debate. Right now, our conscience is appeased by emergency room care. That's obviously dumb, expensive and horribly unjust.

I don't find Obama's fundamentally private reform measure socialist; I find it pragmatic in an age in which technology has transformed both our ability to be healthy and the expense of it. But the moral case is what got through to me tonight, and as someone who has lived very closely with illness and medicine, I know that in real life I cannot easily walk past someone who is sick and cannot get treatment. A reader sees the Catholic angle as well:

"I am so glad he spoke about abortion. Interestingly, I just received my Florida Catholic newspaper in the mail last week. It comes from the bishops. It had an entire section about the importance of reform. One article spoke about Obama's religious leader conference call that over 140,000 signed in for. They also mentioned that Obama said that abortion would not be federally funded. The article not only called for reform it called for universal healthcare as a basic human right. I think this proves people wrong who were skeptical of Obama reaching out to religious folks specifically Catholics. He gets the social justice aspect of our religion. He just gets it."

Yes, he does. And if the theocons would let go of their partisanship and remember the faith they are allegedly representing, they would too.

Reminder: The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has a Website dedicated to the topic of health care reform.