Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith is an Embarrassment and Danger to Indiana
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What I predicted in my Op-Ed in the Indianapolis Star last year is playing out right now: Indiana Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith wants to impose theocracy on Indiana. He does so in a very sly way. He wants to use the budget cuts to public healthcare passed this year to promote faith groups he approves of to push their narrow values on those in need.
Beckwith prescribes praying the sick away while preying on the most vulnerable in the state.
That is basically what he said yesterday (video here) in a contentious town hall in Greenfield, which made headlines primarily because of Beckwith’s state-sponsored anti-LGBTQ+ agenda.
But his proposal in this town hall (minute 6:00) to replace quality healthcare with ideologically driven faith-based nonprofits is just as dangerous. The budget signed into law by Governor Braun has cut 60 % of funds for public healthcare. Those funds had previously been used to fight, for instance, maternal mortality, diabetes, and to lower tobacco use on the local level in all 92 counties of Indiana.
When asked how those most in need can now receive care, Beckwith promised heaven on earth if only people follow his faith. He did so as slyly as the serpent in Genesis 3 promised when it posed as savior to Adam and Eve, saying, “You will not die” if only you take the fruit which will make you like God. We know where that ended in the story: they became ashamed of themselves and no longer experienced the world as a paradise filled with trust but rather as a land of misery, marked with fear and death.
In other words, when Beckwith wants to replace quality medical care and mental health care by licensed clinicians with an army of unlicensed, unqualified members of faith groups, he is playing God and will inadvertently plunge us back into the pre-scientific Middle Ages of quackery and preventable misery.
One attendee pointedly asked, “So, are you going to pray the baby well?”
The basic problem is that Beckwith shows no awareness at all that spirituality often creates mental health problems, namely when it is used in psychologically harmful ways. As someone specializing in the integration of mental health and spirituality and training counselors for this integration, I see every day the devastating consequences of the misuse of spirituality and faith by often well-meaning people.
I had a patient once who suffered from a debilitating fear of flying (you can read more about it in this paper on p. 702). She had been raised in a very strict Christian household where her mother, as she put it, was “like Jesus.” This meant the mother claimed absolute right to control things in the house in the name of God and Jesus. This patient lost her fear of flying only when she worked through her conflation of God with the obsessive “Christian” values of her mother. Yet, similarly, it is precisely this conflation of God and of his own values that Beckwith wants to impose on Indiana.
He wants to impose theocracy on Indiana by funding and partnering, in the name of the state, with groups to pray the sick away; to impose conversion therapy, which has been proven to be psychologically harmful to LGBTQ+ folks; and to leave maternity care not to unbiased professionals but, as he said in the Town Hall, to anti-abortion groups such as Life Choices who do not list the qualifications (or lack thereof) of their providers.
On top of the embarrassment of wanting to lead us back in terms of medical and mental health care to the Middle Ages, it was shocking to see that Beckwith couldn’t even get the basics of how the free market and insurance companies work right.
When Cathy, a retired nurse, confronted Beckwith about the state cuts to Public Health for maternity care and mental health services by poignantly stating that “I feel like sometimes our government just says ‘The hell with you!’, Beckwith responded by opposing capitalism with a free market system.
Anyone in his position of leadership should know that a free market system is nothing but “a stricter form of capitalism.” A free market system is capitalism on steroids, without the ethical regulations protecting the most vulnerable in the market.
When the nurse said to applause that “part of the problem with healthcare and accessing it is because money and capitalism is involved in it. It’s a money-making venture. So, insurances are incentivized to deny coverage,” Beckwith suggested the solution would be to allow people to buy insurance in other states, as if the insurance there wouldn’t also want to maximize profit just the same.
The nurse set him straight: “I don’t think it is going to solve the problem because the bottom line is the insurance companies are incentivized to make money for their shareholders. And they do that by denying care and charging high premiums, high deductibles, and not being transparent to consumers.” Beckwith tried to counter this with the fairy tale that getting rid of regulations for insurance companies would lead them to care more for their consumers than their shareholders.
Nurse Cathy then shared something personal: “Medicare has worked well for seniors. Why can’t we do that for everybody? My father, a lifelong Republican, very conservative, when he retired, he couldn’t believe how good Medicare was. He says ‘I don’t know why we don’t do this for everybody? Instead of all this stuff people have to go through.’”
Instead of playing God and prescribing to pray the sick away, Beckwith should listen to the nurse’s lifelong Republican father and make healthcare and mental healthcare available free of charge to those who can’t afford it. And do so without imposing narrow so-called “Christian” values that often resemble more those of the serpent in Genesis 3 than those of the unconditional love lived by Jesus or the Buddha.
While Micah Beckwith wants to impose theocracy on Indiana, it is up to Indiana voters whether they will let him. Keep going to those Town Halls!
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