Oh, no! Don’t tell me that I’m on the side of the Catholic bishops?!

According to Letters from Leo:

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier sent a letter Friday to the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops demanding that the state’s Catholic schools grant religious exemptions from vaccination — exemptions the Church’s own moral theology says it cannot honestly certify.

The threat arrives in plain language. “Failure to comply could jeopardize eligibility for state educational scholarship programs,” Uthmeier wrote, aiming at the funding stream that carried roughly 88 percent of Florida’s more than 94,000 Catholic school students last year. He gave the bishops until August 7 to respond — ten days before most Florida schools open for the new year.

[…]

Uthmeier wrapped the demand in his own piety, garlanding it with citations to the catechism and to scripture. “As a Catholic, I am confident that the teachings of the Catholic Church do not require Catholic schools to compel students to take vaccines derived from the tissue of aborted children against the sincerely held religious objections of their parents,” he wrote.

Not really though.

The Catholic Church pretty much brought this nonsense on themselves by their long and loud opposition to women’s healthcare. You know, abortion.

As I’ve pointed out previously, the Bible puts no value at all on persons younger than one month or on unborn fetuses, so the Catholic Church’s opposition to abortion, which only dates from the middle of the 19th century, arose more from the growing independence of women due to the Industrial Revolution than from anything biblical.

And now slimy right wing politicians are twisting it around and trying to extort the church for their own purposes.

Given that I loathe slimy right wing politicians and the Catholic Church pretty much equally, I would probably enjoy watching them tear into each other if it weren’t for the innocent victims who get hurt.