American Savage: Insights, Slights, and Fights on Faith, Sex, Love, and Politics

by Dan Savage

  But, like I said, I can understand grumbling about Obamacare when it comes from right-wing business owners. I don’t like the grumbling; I think Liautaud and Schnatter are complete shits for grumbling (if Starbucks can provide health insurance—and stock options!—to their employees, so can Jimmy John’s and Papa John’s), but I can certainly understand the grumbling. And I certainly understand the grumbling from left-wingers who would’ve preferred the more humane, more efficient single-payer system. What I can’t understand is the outrage from fundamentalist American evangelical Christians. Their grumbling baffles me.5

  Here’s an interesting statistic: the more religious a state, the greater the opposition to Obamacare.

  Christians—America’s loudest, if not America’s best—are up in arms about the new law that makes health insurance available to millions of previously uninsured Americans. Somehow more people with access to health care is an affront to Jesus and everything he stood for. The advent of Barack Obama’s reelection inspired a crisis of faith of sorts for many right-wing Christians. It seems God either didn’t hear or chose to ignore the messages emanating from the 40 Days of Prayer campaign (praying for the election of Mitt Romney, that is).6

  After warning that the reelection of Obama will bring God’s judgment and ultimate destruction, Franklin Graham, while speaking to David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network, asserted that Obama’s second term will “usher in the largest changes in our society since the Civil War.” He later maintained that Obama’s reelection is proof that we Americans have “turned our back on God,” and said that “we need someone like a Jerry Falwell to come back and resurrect the Moral Majority movement.”

  They prayed and prayed and the Lord said no. Or maybe the Lord said yes to health care? Maybe that’s what the Lord said?

  Whether the Lord approves of Obamacare or not, we know it doesn’t do away with those larcenous and immoral health insurance companies, but it will save tens of thousands of lives every year. Indeed, with full implementation still years away (some Obamacare provisions don’t go into effect until 2020), Obamacare is already saving lives.

  Stacey Lihn, to give one example, has a daughter who was born with a congenital heart defect. Unlike Rick Santorum, Lihn isn’t a wealthy and well-connected politician who can afford to pay out-of-pocket for the medical care her daughter needs. Lihn spoke at the Democratic National Convention about the three open-heart surgeries her daughter, Zoe, needed to survive and the fear that her insurance company would refuse to cover any more of her daughter’s medical expenses due to a “lifetime cap” set by the insurer. But the Affordable Care Act made those caps illegal, and Lihn’s daughter got the care she needed. (“Governor Romney says people like me were the most excited about President Obama the day we voted for him,” Lihn told the crowd at the DNC. “But that’s not true. Not even close. For me, there was the day the Affordable Care Act passed and I no longer had to worry about Zoe getting the care she needed. There was the day the letter arrived from the insurance company, saying that our daughter’s lifetime cap had been lifted.”)

  Curious as to why Christians would oppose Obamacare, I typed “Why would a Christian oppose Obamacare?” into Google. A Yahoo! Answers page was the first search result. There I found a dozen self-identified Christians weighing in on why Jesus Christ believes Stacey Lihn’s daughter should die.

  “Christ believed in people giving out of the goodness of their own hearts,” GOZ2FAST writes, “not through government control and taxation.”

  “Jesus said we should help the poor,” writes crash.override, “but he didn’t say that we should pay the GOVERNMENT to help the poor.”

  “Jesus wasn’t a big government coercion dude,” writes Shovel Ready.

  These “government control” and “coercion” themes aren’t just popular with anonymous Internet trolls. The Catholic author Greg Stone writes of the Affordable Care Act: “Only a despot seeking to dominate others could love such legislation; the legislation contradicts [St.] Francis’ advice to avoid the desire to dominate and coerce others.”

  I had actually heard these arguments against Obamacare before. Whenever I blog about health care—particularly when I say something in support of a single-payer system—people who claim to be Christian turn up in the comments thread to insist that, yes, while access to health care is good, and while it would be nice if all sick children could see doctors, Obamacare isn’t Christian because Jesus Christ wants each of us to make an individual choice to be charitable. Collective acts of charity—a society coming together to make sure all citizens have access to health care—isn’t Christian because Jesus wants us to choose to be charitable. Coerced acts of charity aren’t charity. You’re not doing good if the government is forcing you to do good.

  Oddly enough, the very same Christians who oppose collective, coerced, society-wide action to provide health care to all—health care the way those socialists do it in Vatican City—turn around and argue that we must take collective, coercive action as a nation to prevent women from having abortions—even in cases of rape or incest. A society that allows children to die of toothaches isn’t an affront to God, but one that allows women to terminate an unplanned pregnancy is. We can, they argue, employ the coercive powers of the state to close women’s clinics, arrest doctors who perform abortions, imprison women who obtain abortions. Using the coercive powers of the state to force a rape victim to carry her rapist’s baby to term? That’s the right thing to do, Jesus-wise. Using the coercive powers of the state to collect taxes so that the women you’re forcing to give birth to their rapists’ babies can get prenatal care? That’s an outrage, Jesus-wise.

  This is Christianity? A collective action taken by a society that alleviates suffering—creating a health care system that extends coverage to millions of Americans—is un-Christian because it doesn’t allow for individual agency. But collective action that heaps misery on top of someone who has already suffered—forcing a woman to give birth to her rapist’s child—is just what Jesus would do. An isolated, terrified, and impregnated rape victim should be forced to give birth to her rapist’s baby because Jesus loves babies. But you shouldn’t be forced to pay taxes to support a health care system that could save that child’s life if it’s born with a life-threatening medical condition, because that’s a coercive abuse of state power and Jesus hates that shit.

  The mind boggles.

  Listening to conservative Christians condemn Obamacare makes you wonder what Jesus would say if he could have a short conversation with one of his followers—particularly one like Peter LaBarbera. Peter’s panicked tweet about the impact of Obamacare on the price of a Jimmy John’s sandwich inspired me to write a one-act play. There are only two roles in this play: Jesus Christ and Peter LaBarbera. Imagine a ripped, bearded Jake Gyllenhaal in the role of Jesus and twitchy, sweaty Jeffrey Jones (the bug-eyed character actor who played the principal in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) in the role of Peter.

  Jesus And The Huge Asshole

  A one-act play by Dan Savage

  Curtain. Jesus Christ is sitting in a garden in quiet contemplation.

  One of Jesus’s followers, Peter LaBarbera, approaches Jesus.

  PETER: Jesus?

  JESUS: Yes, Peter?

  PETER: I want a Jimmy John’s sandwich and a bag of chips.

  JESUS: Okay, Peter. So go get a sandwich and a bag of chips.

  PETER: I can’t, Jesus.

  JESUS: [After a long pause.] Why not, Peter?

  PETER: Because, Jesus, the price of a Jimmy John’s sandwich just went up fifty cents thanks to Obamacare, and now I can’t afford to get a sandwich and a bag of chips. I can only afford a sandwich.

  JESUS: You are an asshole.

  PETER: Excuse me, Jesus?

  JESUS: Are you deaf? I said, YOU ARE AN ASSHOLE. You’re seriously standing there bitching about having to pay a little more for a sandwich?

  PETER: You don’t understand, Jesus, the government is forcing me to pay mo
re—

  JESUS: Shut the fuck up. I was crucified for your sins and all I asked in return was for you people to be nice to each other—

  PETER: But the government—

  JESUS: Shut the fuck up, Peter. All I asked was for you people to be nice to each other. And you’re telling me that you’re not willing to pay fifty cents more for a fucking sandwich so that the guy who made it for you can go see a doctor when he’s sick? You’re not a Christian.

  PETER: But I go to church, Jesus, and I hate gay people so hard!

  JESUS: Not good enough, Peter. Stop bothering me and go worship Thor or Quetzalcoatl or Isis instead, okay? I don’t want you calling yourself a Christian anymore. You’re a dick.

  PETER: I can’t believe Jesus just called me a dick.

  JESUS: Yeah, well, you are a dick. I sacrificed my life for you, and you can’t sacrifice a bag of chips for the sandwich guy? Or scrounge up the extra fifty fucking cents? Dick.

  PETER: With all due respect, Jesus, I don’t think you fully appreciate the implications of the Affordable Care Act. The state is using its coercive authority to collect taxes in order to provide health care to the poor in what amounts to a massive redistributionist welfare scheme that, yes, in the final accounting makes health care more available to some, Jesus, but it does so while driving up the cost of Jimmy John’s sandwiches for all. And this is not the kind of private charity that you encouraged your followers to engage in. This is socialism, Jesus. Socialism!

  JESUS: Do you remember that render-unto-Caesar shit I talked about in the Bible? When I said, basically, “Pay your fucking taxes and don’t bitch about it.” Remember that?

  PETER: Yes, of course, but—

  JESUS: Shut up, Peter. When I said, “Render unto Caesar,” I was talking to Jews about paying taxes to Romans. Romans who turned around and spent the tax money they collected from Jews on swords and armor for Roman soldiers who they sent to Israel to oppress the Jews. The Romans were coercing the living shit out of the Jews, Peter, and I told them to shut up and pay up. And here you are bitching about the Caesar Obamulus using a few of your precious tax dollars to provide people with health insurance—people including you, members of your own family, other Christians, the guy who made your lousy sandwich, the kids of the guy who made your lousy sandwich. You have got to be fucking kidding me.

  PETER: But Jesus! It’s socialism!

  JESUS: Love one another as I have loved you, the Greatest Commandment, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, take care of the poor, take care of the sick, give away all that you have and follow me—does any of this shit ring a bell? Any of it, you stupid asshole?

  PETER: Okay, Jesus! Okay! I’m sorry! I’ll go worship Quetzalcoatl instead!

  The End.

  1 Nations with generous, single-payer health care systems also have lower abortion rates, something that should prompt conservative Christians to embrace health care for all. This little truism, which clocks in at exactly 140 characters, regularly makes the rounds on Twitter: “If you want to prevent abortions, you make sure everyone has health care, a high school education, and birth control. Not the exact opposite.” It turns out that women with access to primary health care and contraceptives are less likely to experience an unplanned pregnancy that ends in abortion. (I know, right? No one could’ve predicted.) And a woman with access to health care and contraceptives who does experience an unplanned pregnancy—which is not, as social conservatives frequently assume, due to carelessness (condoms sometimes break, hormonal birth control can fail)—is less likely to abort if having the baby doesn’t mean racking up medical bills she could never hope to pay. Some conservatives see the link: “As a general rule, societies that do the most to support mothers and child-bearing have the fewest abortions,” rogue conservative pundit David Frum wrote in the fall of 2012 in an opinion piece on CNN’s website (“Let’s Get Real About Abortions,” CNN.com, October 29, 2012). “Societies that do the least to support mothers and child-bearing have more abortions.”

  Frum, who grew up in Canada, is too polite to mention it—Canadians are like that—but the United States is one of those societies that “do the least” to support mothers. “Germany, for example, operates perhaps the world’s plushest welfare state,” Frum continues. “Working women receive 14 weeks of maternity leave, during which time they receive pay from the state. The state pays a child allowance to the parents of every German child for potentially as many as 25 years, depending on how long the child remains in school. Women who leave the work force after giving birth receive a replacement wage from the state for up to 14 months. Maybe not coincidentally, Germany has one of the lowest abortion rates, about one-third that of the United States. Yet German abortion laws are not especially restrictive.”

  Frum neglects to mention that Germany also has a universal health care system (the oldest in the world), a pillar of its welfare state.

  “Abortion is a product of poverty and maternal distress,” Frum concludes. “A woman who enjoys the most emotional and financial security and who has chosen the timing of her pregnancy will not choose abortion, even when abortion laws are liberal.”

  2 This just in: The most conservative, tea-party-hardiest member of the Senate—the guy who hates Obamacare harder than anyone else—South Carolina’s Jim DeMint—just resigned to head…the Heritage Foundation, which cooked up Obamacare to begin with. DeMint, in the words of Dana Milbank, a columnist for The Washington Post, “is, arguably, the perfect candidate to run a post-thought think tank.” On the subject of Obamacare, the good senator remarked, “If we’re able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.” How’s that working for you, Jim? And on the president in general, DeMint offered these words in the run-up to the 2012 election: “Just because you are good on TV doesn’t mean you can sell socialism to freedom-loving Americans.”

  3 Jimmy John’s employees in Minneapolis waged a yearlong battle to unionize. One of their key concerns was lack of health care benefits. Workers do not get paid sick days and can’t miss work without a note from their doctor. If they can afford to go to one that is. “Since most of the workers don’t have health insurance, most employees work through their health problems,” reports City Pages (Minneapolis). “Mike Wilklow, a long-time employee who has worked at Jimmy John’s across the city, says he worked bicycle delivery shifts with a broken clavicle. Jared Ingebretson, a 24-year-old who works at the Riverside store, recalls working shifts with colleagues so sick they had to periodically duck into the bathroom to vomit. ‘If someone’s that sick, we try to keep them on the register and away from the sandwiches, but still, it’s not how you want to be working,’ Wilklow says.” Even if you don’t find Jimmy John Liautaud’s actions offensive enough to stop eating at his sandwich shops altogether, you might want to avoid the place during flu season at least.

  4 This just in (well, at the time of writing) from The Huffington Post: Seems math is hard for John Schnatter, who argues that Obamacare is forcing him to raise the cost of the pizza he sells you by up to fourteen cents, as well as cut back workers’ hours so he doesn’t have to provide health care to them. “Caleb Melby of Forbes has graciously done the math on Obamacare’s cost to Papa John’s and according to his analysis, to cover the cost of Obamacare, the pizza chain would have to raise prices by 3.4 to 4.6 cents per pie—way less than the 11 to 14 cents Schnatter claims he needs. And there are other changes the chain could make to save some money, Melby notes, like not giving away 2 million pizzas for free at a cost of between $24 and $32 million to the company, for example.” It’s a safe bet that Jimmy John Liautaud is similarly math challenged, and that providing health insurance for his sixty thousand workers would not translate into a full fifty cents a sandwich…. Or if it does, maybe Liautaud could cut back on the African safaris so his employees can have a sick day, afford to see a doctor, and don’t have to vomit in the chain’s bathrooms whilst making those economical sandwiches.

  5 In fairness, it’s not j
ust conservatives who oppose Obamacare or—God forbid—a single-payer health care system. Libertarians oppose it on principle because they believe in principle that the government should be as small as possible, and they’re willing to sacrifice their lives—and your life, and your spouse’s life, and your kids’ lives—in defense of their principles.

  And I personally know some contrarian progressives who don’t want to pay the higher taxes that a single-payer health care system would require because they’ve never been sick a day in their lives and they never intend to get sick. (Unlike your aunt who died of breast cancer on purpose.) These healthy anti-single-payer progressives are, it seems, immune to all known human diseases, they have unbreakable bones, and they have jobs that include health insurance that they’re never going to need to use and they’re never going to lose their jobs and their employers are never going to stop offering health insurance. So what’s in a single-payer system for them?

  Not much, I’ll concede. There’s really not much in a single-payer health care system for immortals with titanium bones and lifetime job security at companies that offer generous benefits. But for the rest of us—for those of us who are lucky to be healthy but know that we could get sick or injured at any time, for those of us with children who could get sick or injured at any time, for those of us who have health insurance through our employers but know that we could, like so many other Americans, lose our jobs and our health insurance at any time—here’s what’s in a single-payer system for us: peace of mind. Even if we never get sick, even if we never have to spend a day in a hospital in our lives, we get peace of mind. We don’t have to worry about being bankrupted if we get sick, and we don’t have to worry about what will happen to our family members, friends, coworkers, and neighbors if they get sick.