Respect Life? Gimme a Break.

Call the doctor. The healthcare-cum-abortion debate is sickening.

If the historic dust-up proves one thing, it’s that God handles the gavel for the United States government. It’s painfully apparent just how little separation there is between church pews and congressional chambers.

The Hyde Amendment already bars federal funds from being used to pay for elective abortions. But that’s simply not good enough for those feisty right-to-life folks. They demand the bill’s anti-abortion language be crystal clear, crypt-tight and colossal in its fight to protect that beloved ball of amorphous, macrobiotic goo. Or as pro-lifers call it, a pre-schooler.

NPR acutely cited that Hyde is “an agreement between anti-abortion and pro-abortion rights lawmakers that is so delicate it could balance on a pin.”

Now if we can only turn that pin inward and pop this carnival balloon chock-full of bunk.

Protect life? Respect life? Gimme a break. The very people who prescribe life more than often also prescribe death. And like death row, healthcare — or the dearth thereof — continues to submit massive amounts of American citizens to a point of no return. Although in this case, their only crime is citizenship.

Maybe the best way to address this healthcare hot-mess is to explore the ever-bedeviled life-death continuum.

For instance, our pro-life pal Sarah Palin. Sarah’s a good ole god-fearing gal who just loved to build up a whole bundle of little babes. And wouldn’t you know it, daughter Bristol did too, even at the ripe old age of 17. (Think Obama would’ve even been a political consideration were his daughter 17 and preggers?)

The dark shadows of under-employment and over-inflation consume families of ALL ilk. Having worked at a nonprofit that afforded outreach for America’s chilling number of homeless families, I witnessed the plight of this sinking ship firsthand. The once wanted become perpetually unwanted. Pawns become casualties of kings and queens.

By the dastardly known unknowns meted by their God and maker cause the Palins or Pences or Santorums or Huckabee-Sanders’ to suffer such a spiral, heaven forbid any one of them suffer some crippling ill. Free healthcare would suck. It’s just not pro-life enough.

The healthcare debacle provides a platform for holier-than-thou preaching the likes we haven’t seen in some time.

And just why does the debate slate abortion as tantamount to fiscal and social accountability? God knows. And that’s not meant idiomatically. According to our Democrat and Republican pro-life politicos, only God actually knows, literally.

Well here’s what we do know. Palin’s Alaska is the rape capital of America. If her own daughter were to suffer such monstrous violence and become pregnant and diseased as a consequence, would the Hyde abortion funding amendment still be up for such debate? Maybe.

And how’s this for further irony? While God continues to consummate the halls of Congress over heavenly healthcare language, piles of priests are being caught with their pants down, AGAIN. Surprise, surprise.

Oh, those poor pious souls who manhandle God’s little munchkins. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do,” say the Catholic Bishops. In fact, the sexual abuse committed by their priests is “a general social problem, traceable not to the church but to the sexualization of society, to the zeitgeist, to the sins of the 60’s generation.”

So, while the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops lobbies Capitol Hill to fight for the protections of the unborn, their white collared soldiers fight to suppress the rape and brutality inflicted upon those not long removed from the womb.

Over 11,000 cases of priestly violence against youth have been reported over the last five decades alone. (And who knows how many tens of thousands of cases still reside in tortured minds with tied up tongues.) That’s at least 200 cases of ungodly molestation every year for fifty years - from one institution! Could you imagine if executives at an institution like AIG inflicted such evil upon that many souls? The Beltway would never forgive them. Uh, bad example.

Furthermore, Bishops have the balls to declare, “Unborn children remain the persons whose lives are most at risk in America.” Oh really? What about the 62% of Americans whose medical problems led to personal bankruptcy, according to a Harvard research study.

Listen, everyone has a right to practice what they believe and as they see fit. But this ain’t fit practicing, folks. Apostolic succession does not grant legislative appropriation nor does it exist above and beyond retribution.

Though 25% of Americans are self-identified Catholics, which translates into massive political and financial influence, this argument cannot and should not solely spotlight Catholicism. Religious practices across the board must not continue to morph into mandates for public policy.