Is It Possible for a Believing Latter-day Saint to Be a Republican? Part 10

 

Abortion

There are many Latter-day Saints who are Republican for one reason only: abortion. It used to be two reasons. I remember a high priests group discussion years ago when we somehow got onto the topic of politics and the issues we should be concerned about. Someone mentioned abortion and same-sex marriage. Someone else said something about other issues, and my home teacher said, “Well, what other issues are there?” Over the past few years, the Church has changed its tune about same-sex marriage, except where it involves Church members. So abortion is now the only reason many members ignore other important issues and vote against their own interests.

But abortion is not as straightforward as most Latter-day Saints seem to think, especially since the Republican Party has pushed a set of extreme laws that go well beyond the Church’s stated position. But even the Church’s position is not as well thought out as many people assume. I’ve written about that topic in this space before, but in the interest of brevity, let me repeat here what I wrote in an op-ed for the Salt Lake Tribune, printed on May 23 of this year.

There Is a Hole in the LDS Position on Abortion

Since the leak of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade, emotions on both sides have run high and extremism has carried the day. In this climate, it would be wise to turn down the heat, recognize the complexity of the abortion issue and realize that the best solution is not on either extreme, but rather somewhere in the middle.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has long espoused a position on abortion that, while not in the middle, is certainly not extreme.

“The Church opposes elective abortion for personal or social convenience,” the policy reads, but “the Church allows for possible exceptions when . . . pregnancy results from rape or incest, or a competent physician determines that the life or health of the mother is in serious jeopardy, or . . . determines that the fetus has severe defects that will not allow the baby to survive beyond birth.”

The fact that the Church allows for exceptions means it does not consider abortion the equivalent of murder. The Church recognizes complicating factors that can make abortion not just acceptable, but perhaps even preferable in certain circumstances.

Abortion, however, is even more complex than the LDS position allows. Indeed, there is a significant hole in the official LDS abortion statement. The unspoken assumption is that any abortion that does not fall under the three exceptions is by default an abortion of “convenience.”

But thousands upon thousands of abortions are not sought for mere convenience but for reasons that include, among others, severe economic hardship, the fear of bringing a child into a family with an abusive husband and father, or the protection of the future life of a mentally or emotionally fragile woman who would be devastated by bringing an unwanted child into the world.

Perhaps the problem is the word “convenience.” Unless you redefine the word, it simply doesn’t cover the many complex situations that fall outside the bounds of the three exceptions. I’ve tried, but I can’t come up with a word that covers both convenience and all these difficult situations.

Consider the fact that 75 percent of women who terminate their pregnancies are low-income, and nearly half live below the poverty line. Fifty-five percent are either unmarried or do not live with the father. The average cost of having a baby in the United States is $13,024, which rises to $22,646 for a C-section. Such an expense would devastate many women who seek abortions, especially since a large percentage of them live without private health insurance or do not qualify for Medicaid. For many of these women, an abortion is not for “convenience”; it is for survival.

Some activists argue that the alternative to abortion is adoption. But adoption is often not a viable option. The cost for an adopting couple using an independent agency generally runs between $15,000 and $40,000. And adoption is not an easy, one-size-fits-all solution to unwanted pregnancy. Often finding an acceptable adoptive couple is not easy. There are already more than 400,000 children in foster care in the United States. Banning abortion would certainly increase this number.

Much of the rhetoric surrounding abortion is religious in nature. The theory that “life” begins at conception is largely an evangelical Christian argument that is of fairly recent origin. The LDS position on this question is undefined and is complicated by the unique doctrine of the pre-existence of human spirits. The Church has never officially declared when the spirit enters the body, but LDS scripture and policy suggest it is not at conception and may even be at birth.

As historian Ardis Parshall put it in a recent blog post, “The practice of the Church bolsters the thought that body and spirit are not joined until birth, because a child who dies in the womb, at any stage and from whatever cause, cannot be sealed to his or her parents and is not carried on Church records as a child of a family even if the parents were previously sealed in the temple.”

Abortion is a difficult decision for any woman, and there are uncounted complicating circumstances that make forced childbirth by blanket law an unwise and oppressive measure. Considering all this, the policy that makes the most sense for Latter-day Saints is to restrict abortions for mere “convenience,” but to support the right of a woman to terminate a pregnancy when she, her doctor, her clergy, and (in many cases) her partner deem this to be the best overall solution in truly difficult circumstances.

___________________

My point here is that if abortion is the only or even the primary reason you are Republican, the issue is more complicated than you might think, and there are certainly reasons to oppose the overly restrictive laws the GOP is promoting and passing. It is actually possible to be both pro-life and pro-choice. It all depends on individual circumstances, and blanket laws just don’t make sense because of the many situations where women find themselves somewhere in that yawning hole between “convenience” and the Church’s three exceptions.

Is It Possible for a Believing Latter-day Saint to Be a Republican? Part 9

 

Corporate Self-Regulation

 

If I could recommend just one book for you to read in the next six months, it would be Celine-Marie Pascale’s Living on the Edge: When Hard Times Become a Way of Life. Pascale is a professor of sociology at American University in Washington, DC. A major part of her research for this book involved interviewing Americans from what she calls the “struggling class” in communities across America—from inner-city Oakland to Ohio’s Athens County to the Standing Rock Reservation in North and South Dakota to Central Appalachia. The book is an eye-opener from beginning to end, but for today’s segment of this series I want to focus on what Pascale calls “sacrifice zones.”

One of the big campaign talking points of Republican candidates is deregulation. Unfortunately, though, this is more than a talking point. It’s something Republicans have been serious about acting on whenever possible. Their free-market ideology includes the hare-brained notion that everything is better when corporations are allowed to self-regulate. Granted, some regulations are excessive, but most are not. Most regulation exists to keep corporations from doing what corporations are programmed to do—make a profit in any way that is legal (and sometimes when it is illegal), regardless of the human or environmental costs. Economists refer to these costs with the harmless-sounding euphemism “negative externalities.” But let’s talk about some of these far-from-harmless externalities.

Pascale introduces her chapter on sacrifice zones with this statement: “If it seems surprising to find a chapter on environmental contamination in a book about families trying to make ends meet, consider that the most toxic environments in the country are consistently those that struggling families call home. This isn’t an accident, and it can profoundly affect the health and well-being of residents.” She gives many examples, but I’ll focus on just a couple here to illustrate the point that government and corporations often collude to harm the lives of individuals, especially those who do not have the influence or means to fight back—all for the sake of profit.

Republicans, especially Trump, have made coal mining the poster child of the GOP, bemoaning the loss of jobs that have disappeared largely because cleaner energy is also now a lot cheaper. But coal mining creates massive negative externalities for the local populations. “Sludge or slurry is the name for toxic waste created when coal is washed to separate it from rocks and dirt. The slurry is a mix of rock, water, and mud that carries arsenic, mercury, chromium, cadmium, and selenium—for starters. . . . Coal mining generates millions of tons of slurry each year and coal industries use the cheapest way of handling it, which is to build containment ponds. Because ponds are not lined, these heavy metals inevitably seep into groundwater and local waterways; and, of course, the dams holding the ponds fail with some regularity” (86). One breach in West Virginia in March 2017 spilled 5,400 gallons of slurry into Drawdy Creek, which polluted the drinking water of everyone in St. Albans and Lincoln counties. “Studies . . . consistently find that residents of West Virginia’s mining counties were more likely than folks in non-mining communities to suffer from cancer, kidney disease, obstructive lung diseases, birth defects, high blood pressure, and a shortened life span.”

Coal power plants not only put harmful chemicals in the air, but burning coal creates coal ash, which has the same heavy metals as coal slurry. The cheapest way to deal with it is to mix it with water and store it in ponds. In 2008, the Kingston Fossil Plant in Tennessee had a retaining wall collapse, which “released more than a billion gallons of toxic material into two rivers. The disaster . . . cost the federal government over one billion dollars to clean up. Regulations to secure coal ash waste were finally implemented in the Obama years but were rolled back by the Trump administration” (87). We might ask why such regulations would be rolled back. The answer is that this is simply what Republicans do. Government is evil, so we need to get government out of the way of corporate profit. Community health is not an issue at all with Republicans.

The second example comes from oil production, another extractive industry that has bought many politicians. In recent years, oil production in the North Dakota Bakken fracking fields, 160 miles from the Standing Rock Reservation, has increased 600 percent, leading to an increase in environmental disasters. “Between 2006 and 2014 an estimated 5.9 million gallons of oil were spilled in North Dakota, along with 11.8 million gallons of fracking wastewater called brine. While ‘brine’ might sound harmless—like something you’d use for making pickles—it isn’t. Fracking brines contain over 200 toxins including arsenic, benzene, formaldehyde, lead, and mercury. All of which have harmful impacts on health, ranging from lowered IQ levels and behavioral issues in children, to kidney, brain, and central nervous system damage in adults” (93). Fracking brine also contains radioactive contaminants, such as radium-226 and radium-228, which are linked to bone marrow and lung cancers.

“At Standing Rock, the Keystone Pipeline System [which Republicans have again used as a rallying cry against regulation] offers one more example of collusion between business and government at the expense of people and the environment” (94). This is a system of three pipelines that carry oil from tar sands over thousands of miles. “Tar sands, which are thicker, more acidic, and more corrosive than conventional crude oil, make pipelines prone to leaking. . . . The original Keystone pipeline commissioned in 2010 runs 1,600 miles from Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast. It has a long history of spills and leaks, including nearly 400,000 gallons of oil in North Dakota wetlands in 2019. The Keystone XL also runs from Canada to the Gulf Coast by a slightly different route. In its first year of operation it had twelve leaks that resulted in significant oil spills, one of which poured almost 407,000 of crude oil into the ground” (94). The third Keystone pipeline is the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). It runs 1,200 miles from the Bakken Formation in North Dakota to refineries in Illinois, passing through South Dakota and Iowa. Originally, it ran through wealthier white communities, but in 2016, because people in Bismarck complained, it was rerouted through historic and sacred sites in the Standing Rock Reservation. When the Standing Rock Sioux protested peacefully, they were met with a militarized response from the National Guard and private security forces who “used tear-gas, pepper spray, tasers, water cannons, rubber bullets, and dogs against protesters” (96).

“In September 2016, President Obama vetoed the pipeline construction, citing the pervasive threats to ecosystems, drinking water sources, and public health. Kelcy Warren, the billionaire head of Energy Transfer Partners that developed the pipeline, donated more than $720,000 to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and upon entering office Trump immediately signed an executive order reversing the Obama decision. . . . Since 2016, at least seventeen states have introduced legislation to criminalize pipeline protests” (96–97).

Of course, nowhere in this discussion is there any mention of global warming and the desperate need we have of transitioning away from fossil fuels, particularly those that are toxic to the environment in addition to putting massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But as discussed in an earlier post in this series, Republicans are still determined to delay any response to human-caused climate change, even as climate catastrophes continue to exceed the scientists’ predictions.

In a post dated February 21, 2021, I wrote about the movie Dark Waters, based on the true story of Rob Bilott as detailed in the New York Times article “The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare” (January 6, 2016). The movie and the article depict how DuPont knowingly dumped highly toxic PFOAs (perfluorooctanoic acids) into a stream that provided drinking water to tens of thousands of people who eventually forced DuPont to settle for $671 million. This is just another example of what happens when government allows corporations to “self-regulate,” which generally means not regulating their harmful behavior at all. But this is the world our current Republican Party want to perpetuate.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other ways corporations make life miserable or dangerous to their employees, customers, and society in general. There are inhumane working conditions, starvation wages, lack of health insurance, tax evasion, and dangerous products. All of this needs to be regulated, because if it is not, corporations will do whatever they can get away with in order to make a profit. And the Republican Party wants to simply get out of their way.

Is It Possible for a Believing Latter-day Saint to Be a Republican? Part 8

 

Government Is the Enemy

 

At a press conference on August 12, 1986, President Ronald Reagan said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” This statement was the beginning of something, but it certainly was not the end, and I’m sure Ronald Reagan would be appalled at how far the Republican Party has run with this catchy bit of antigovernment rhetoric.

The message from Reagan was clear: the government is inept, perhaps even harmful in its attempts to help American citizens. But it also indicative of a fundamental conservative belief: namely, that almost everything is better if left to the free market. And this is a fundamental difference between the two major political parties. To Democrats, government is the people’s tool to address sticky problems that the market either ignores (i.e., limited access to health care) or exacerbates (i.e., pollution). To Republicans, government is not only ineffective, but likely evil. Government is the enemy. According to conservative lobbyist Grover Norquist, “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” The difference in these perspectives led humorist P. J. O’Rourke to comment, “The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.”

These different perspectives on government have led to two very different approaches to solving problems. On the left, this means passing legislation or taking executive action to address problems like out-of-control health-care costs, millions of Americans without health insurance, global warming, gun violence, economic inequality, crumbling infrastructure, and the high cost of a college education. On the right, this means literally trying to take health insurance from millions of Americans, pushing for more fossil fuel production and consumption, giving tax breaks to the wealthy (because taxes are evil), defunding the IRS (which only reduces revenues and increases the national debt Republicans claim to abhor), kicking the infrastructure can down the road (until “infrastructure week” became a sick joke), and keeping the minimum wage as low as possible (it hasn’t changed since 2009).

Republicans generally believe that a small government is good government. But this ignores one massive problem: the abuses of authoritarian business entities such as multinational corporations. This is not a new problem, and former Republican President Teddy Roosevelt recognized this 110 years ago. Nothing has really changed in those years except that the problem has gotten a lot larger.

In an address at the Coliseum in San Francisco on September 14, 1912, when Roosevelt was running for a third term as a presidential candidate for the progressive “Bull Moose” party, he said this: “The people of the United States have but one instrument which they can efficiently use against the colossal combinations of business—and that instrument is the government of the United States. . . . Remember that it is absolutely impossible to limit the power of these great corporations whose enormous power constitutes so serious a problem in modern industrial life except by extending the power of the government. All that these great corporations ask is that the power of the government shall be limited. . . . There once was a time in history when the limitation of governmental power meant increasing liberty for the people. In the present day the limitation of governmental power, of governmental action, means the enslavement of the people by the great corporations who can only be held in check through the extension of governmental power.”

Corporate interests have purchased influence in government by basically purchasing politicians. And this is a problem for both parties. But it is a far greater problem on the right. The Democrats are still determined to increase the well-being of the lower and middle classes. The Republicans, on the other hand, may talk a good populist game, but when you look at what they support in terms of legislation, they almost exclusively enact laws to help the wealthy and the corporate behemoths. Tax cuts and corporate welfare and allowing corporations to self-regulate are high on the GOP’s agenda. And as Roosevelt made clear, when you try to shrink government, what you are really doing is shrinking the ability of government to rein in corporate abuses. Consider all the EPA pollution regulations the Trump administration rescinded. Whom does that help? Not me, and not you.

So, if you believe in democracy, that the power should reside in the people, then you must also agree that government is the only tool we as citizens have to serve our needs, some of which are desperate. But if you believe the rhetoric that began with Ronald Reagan and has only intensified over the years, claiming that government is the problem, then the Republican Party is where you belong. I would hope that Latter-day Saints would be for democracy, and not for a government of the corporation, by the corporation, and for the corporation.

Is It Possible for a Believing Latter-day Saint to Be a Republican? Part 7

 

Health Care

 

Among all developed countries and many un- and underdeveloped ones, the United States stands alone as the only country that does not guarantee health care for all citizens. Not only that, but our health care costs us much more than other countries pay, sometimes more than twice as much, and our health outcomes do not compare very well either. For instance, the U.S. ranks 46th in life expectancy, with males expected to live 76.61 years and females 81.65. This is lower than Chile (78.54, 82.80), Costa Rica (78.53, 83.39), Slovenia (79.26, 84.44), Martinique (79.85, 86.10), Singapore (82.06, 86.15), and 40 other countries large and small. Other statistics, such as maternal mortality rate, are especially revealing. Compared with nine other developed countries, the U.S. rate is highest at 23.8 per 100,000 live births. Next highest is Canada at 8.4. The Netherlands is lowest at 1.2.

The U.S. spent $12,318 per person on health care in 2021, the highest costs per capita among OECD nations. Next highest is Germany at $7,383. The average among the wealthy OECD countries was $5,829. Japan spends $4,666 per person, and South Korea spends only $3,914. This discrepancy is largely due to the fact that U.S. health care is a for-profit system. Republicans have insisted that we just need to turn the market loose in order to rein in health-care costs and get better results. But for a variety of reasons, the market simply does not work in health care. When, for instance did you last go shopping for the best deal on angioplasty? Or have you ever seen a hospital offer a two-for-one deal on appendectomies? The nature of human health problems makes comparison shopping virtually impossible. The two largest culprits in creating outrageous health-care costs are pharmaceuticals and medical equipment. Let me use my own experience as an example.

Four and a half years ago, I was playing basketball one morning, as I have done now for over 30 years. Another player, stepped on my foot and knocked me over. My foot stayed in place, while my body tipped over backward. This rearranged the bones in my foot. I had two displaced metatarsals, a cracked cuneiform bone, and a Lisfranc injury (a torn ligament in the center of the foot). All this damage required surgery to repair. I now have a plate and seven screws in my foot that tend to set off alarms in airports when I fly. My foot healed fine, and I’m playing basketball on all that hardware, but my encounter with the American health-care system left me both amazed and baffled.

The real shock came when I received the itemized bill from Intermountain Health Care for my morning in the operating room. The doctor’s bill as actually quite reasonable, but let me share with you a few of the highlights from the hospital’s “Itemized Statement of Services.” The prices I will list are what IHC billed my insurance. What the insurance paid was, of course, a fair bit lower since the hospital was in their network. If I hadn’t had insurance, I would have been responsible for the full amount.

The hospital billed the insurance about $25,460 for “medical supplies.” The operating room, by contrast, was a mere $7,547.40. The total charges amounted to $35,542.13, 70 percent of which was for medical supplies. I wondered what on earth could be that expensive. Well, the itemized bill explained it.

The plate (Plate Ankle Lapidus CP 0 Offset) was billed at $5,332.32. I have to wonder about the thirty-two cents. Really? They couldn’t round it to $5,330? One of the seven screws was billed at $2,852.28. Three other screws were $907.39 each. The others were only $653.86. The local hardware sore apparently doesn’t carry these screws. The hospital also billed for a pin, three reamers, a K-wire, and other odds and ends. One of the reamers was billed at $2,219.32. And some sort of unthreaded guidewire came in at $2,935.68. I asked the doctor what on earth that was. “I don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t use it.”

The item on this itemized statement that had me scratching my head, though, was the “Bit Screwdriver T8 AO Quick Coup.” Yes, my insurance got billed $2,201.76 for a screwdriver. I can’t help but wonder why. Don’t they do surgeries like this rather frequently? Don’t they have a screwdriver in the drawer from the last surgery like mine? Couldn’t they sterilize it and reuse it? If not, then I want that screwdriver. I mean, they obviously don’t need it. I asked the doctor for it. He just laughed, but hey, that screwdriver is a testament to the insanity of the American health-care system. I’d bet even the military doesn’t pay that much for a screwdriver. And if they did, they’d probably use it at least twice.

The doctor explained that he has to buy a kit for the surgery. It includes all kinds of stuff, some of which he doesn’t even use. And $2,200 screwdrivers are apparently thrown away. He complained about the medical supply industry and pharmaceuticals. That’s where people really get ripped off, he said. Why? Because health care has become an industry, and profit drives everything, and these businesses charge what they can. That’s why we need to get the profit motive out of health care and go to a single-payer system like almost all other countries, a system focused more on patient care than on profit.

And this brings us to the two political parties. The Democrats, of course, passed the Affordable Care Act, an admittedly imperfect system that nevertheless reduced prices for many Americans and ensured that millions of Americans now have insurance who previously did not. If they could, the Democrats would pass into law some sort of single-payer system comparable to what other nations offer. The Republicans? Well, they have been trying to repeal the ACA ever since it was passed, and since John McCain prevented them from accomplishing that dastardly deed, they have worked hard to undermine the ACA at every turn and have tried to deny health coverage to millions of Americans.

The Republicans used to claim they had a better plan. Of course, they never unveiled it. It is still a secret. But now they don’t even pretend to have a better alternative. And yet they still promise to kill the Affordable Care Act. In the entire civilized world, it is only the U.S. Republican Party that wants millions of people to be without health insurance. Only the Republicans Party wants hundreds of thousands of families to go bankrupt every year because of medical debt. Indeed, every year, 530,000 American families file for bankruptcy due to medical bills. Overall, 66.5 percent of all American bankruptcies are due to medical bills. Medical bankruptcies do occur in other countries, but no country compares with the United States. Total medical debt in the U.S. totaled $45 billion in 2020.

If we were to ask what the Republican policy on health care is, we would be unable to answer the question. The party created no platform in 2020, other than slavishly following Donald Trump’s whims. There is similarly no Republican platform this year. They are running not on ideas or policies but on culture-war issues and criticism of the Democrats for many things the Democrats aren’t even accountable for.

So, if Latter-day Saints want to promote poor but expensive health care, which is denied to millions of poor Americans, they should vote Republican. But if they really take seriously the scriptural injunction to care for the poor, the sick, and the disabled, they will support a measure to introduce in America a universal, single-payer health-care system patterned after any of a dozen or two that are working fine in other countries. Once again, this means believing Latter-day Saints simply cannot vote Republican.