The Vatican is pissed:

Archbishop Rino Fisichella, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life at the Vatican, described President Barack Obama’s signing of an executive order allowing U.S. tax dollars to fund pro-abortion organizations beyond the shores of the United States saying it is “the arrogance of someone who believes they are right, in signing a decree which will open the door to abortion and thus to the destruction of human life,” as quoted by Italian daily Corriere della Sera on January 24.

The outspoken prelate, who also once denounced what he termed as “racism” on the part of instructors at the Academy, added “What is important is to know how to listen… without locking oneself into ideological visions with the arrogance of a person who, having the power, thinks they can decide on life and death.”

Let’s take a look at what we’re dealing with, shall we?

First of all, the Mexico City Policy, also called the Global Gag Rule, was about far more than “funding pro-abortion organizations,” a highly misleading characterization. It sounds like it means that the U.S. government is giving money to groups whose objective it is to perform abortions, which is not what we’re talking about. The term “pro-abortion” itself is highly biased and politicized charged, like calling pro-life “anti-choice.”

The Global Gag Rule was a set of rules that went so far as to essentially force a strict, zero-tolerance pro-life agenda on all medical organizations that received U.S. funds. You did not have to be a “pro-abortion” to have your funds cut off. You simply had to be an institution which did not fully and utterly eschew any and all references to abortion. For example, let’s say that you received U.S. aid for performing vaccinations, but one part of your hospital, completely disassociated from the funded program except for being in the same hospital, provides not abortions, but rather family planning advice which could include a reference to legal abortion as one choice. The Global Gag Rule cuts off your funding for this. Unless your entire organization toes the line with conservative pro-life politicians halfway around the world, even to the point of not even talking about abortions, you get nothing from the United States to help heal people and save their lives. Hospitals around the world were even afraid to hand out condoms or give other family planning advice for fear of getting their essential funding slashed.

In short, the gag rule shoves a far-right political agenda down the throats of doctors worldwide, holding the lives of innocent patients as hostage to these demands. That’s arrogance.

The gag rule is objectionable for many reasons, that being one of them. It effectively legislates local American political policy worldwide where it has no right to do so. It restricts free speech and the right for doctors and patients to discuss all medical options which may be legal in that country. In fact, such a policy, enacted within the United States itself would be illegal–here, we have the freedom of choice. Imagine if a foreign country tried to shove their morals down our throats. Yet, here we are telling people they have to accept a policy that would not even be allowed within our own borders.

There is no evidence that this policy even does what is intended–reducing the number of abortions. To the contrary, it does what any anti-abortion policy tends to do, which is to displace them, allowing for more unsafe procedures that only cost more life in the end.

In the end, it is not Obama, but this dick in the Vatican who is so arrogant as to think he can dictate terms of life and death. But the lifting of the gag rule? Not about life and death. It’s about freedom of speech. It’s about free access to medical consultation. But most of all, it’s about not giving Obama or the Vatican the power to decide–it’s about giving each and every person to right to decide for themselves, on an issue which is morally ambiguous at best, how they wish to believe.