Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Why Wisconsin Matters

In the Catholic Church, there are two types of sin -- mortal and venal. Venal sins are the little ones; things that are wrong, but not that major. Think lying to someone or not tipping your waitress. Mortal sins, as you might imagine, are the big ones, the ones that "destroy charity in the heart of man by a grave violation of God's law."

As you're probably aware, right now in Wisconsin one of the biggest labor battles of my lifetime is going on, as Governor Walker has proposed gutting state employee benefits and barring them the right to collectively bargain for anything but the most narrow of pay issues (and even then, pay would be capped by certain factors tied to market functions) to solve a crisis he himself created, either because he's phenomenally stupid and does not grasp the most basic concepts of addition and subtraction, or because he
intentionally did this specifically to crush the power of organized labor.

So this is a good time to remind ourselves and Governor Walker that union busting is not just a sin, but a mortal one, violating the first, fifth, and seventh commandments.

So say what you will about the salary and benefits of public employees (though when adjusted for the fact that public employees tend to have much a higher degree of education and experience than their private-sector counterparts, they're actually underpaid), but the ability to collectively bargain for a decent and dignified life is a right sanctioned not only by the State, but by God.

And since we apparently get to defund Planned Parenthood simply because God might disagree with a small portion of what they do, I think we get to keep our collective bargaining rights...

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