So take Catholics not wanting to support abortion for moral reasons as an example. If they don't want their money going to Planned Parenthood, then I think it's wrong to use the government to force them into it.
As Theodoric already informed you, no federal money is used to fund abortions. That is explicitly against the law. Planned Parenthood does not use any federal money for abortions.
Planned Parenthood provides many more vitally needed services. Oh, I'm sure that Catholics will object to the contraceptives, though non-Catholics still shake their heads in utter disbelief at that. Do they also object to preventing the spread of HIV? I saw an article about a Planned Parenthood clinic that had to close and the HIV rates in that area rose very sharply. Planned Parenthood also provides health services for women, many of whom cannot get care elsewhere. Are Catholics against women's health? I never realized how anti-life Catholics are.
I think you should look into what Planned Parenthood actually does.
As for not wanting your tax dollars going to something you don't like, is there a mechanism to prevent that? Many people want their tax dollars to go to things that you don't like, so is there a mechanism to allow that? No, there isn't.
In rabbinic literature, the
Pirke Avoth ("Sayings of the Father" -- you heard a number of them in
Yentl), there are several sayings in which the four combinations of the two states of two traits are examined (similar to
Pascal's infamous wager (also see my examination of its use in fundamentalist proselytizing as "
after-life insurance").
The one that comes to mind is the one about the four kinds of charity. Either the donor knows who the recipient is or he does not. Either the recipient knows who the donor is or he does not. One example was a Jew who walked through the city with his hood down and filled with money such that anyone could take some money out without his knowledge; that would be an example of the recipient knowing who the donor is, but the donor not knowing the recipient. The one where neither recipient nor donor knows the other is where the donor places his money somewhere and the recipient comes to get it. That way is considered to be true charity, since the donor does not expect praise from the recipients -- negative example: Donald Trump's boast of having made a donation to veterans which he never made until public scrutiny forced him to actually make that donation; he expected the reward of praise while trying to minimize his actual payment.
Now, aren't we talking about that best of the four forms of charity? We all donate to a common fund out of which those in need can benefit. Whose dollars actually go to Planned Parenthood? Once your money is in that common fund, can you point to an individual dollar and identify it as being from you?
OK, if you are not satisfied with Jewish wisdom and charity (which is unsurpassed) ... . What is your solution? Some system to earmark every dollar of your federal taxes as to where it must go? Such a system does not exist and, were it to exist, would be unmanageable as well as extremely ineffective. Get rid of recipients that
you do not approve of, even though
I and many others do approve of them and consider them very necessary for the common good. And if we can itemize where we want our tax dollars to go, what happens when one program is heavily over-funded while many very necessary programs are underfunded (the vast majority of which nobody has ever heard of) and vast unallocated money just lies there impossible to use? Inefficient, impractical, and utterly useless.
So what's the solution? Nu?
PS
Just to stave off a possible argument for faith-based charities to take up that slack.
I have an atheist friend and fellow veteran (same service even, USAF, though I went Navy in the reserves) through a local skeptics meet-up. He was homeless for a few years. Now, he grew up atheist -- his parents were of extremely different religious backgrounds so they let their children follow their own religious paths -- and remains so. While homeless he encountered a number of charities reaching out to the homeless. Many of them were faith-based. The faith-based facilities expected you to engage in their religious practices; if you fought that pressure too much, you ended up back on the street. His path off the streets was to volunteer to work for these services, which eventually led to being hired as staff once he had proved his worth (before becoming homeless, he had managed a cinema multiplex very well). He was especially good at working with homeless veterans because he understood where they were at and how they thought. But they fired him solely because his religion wasn't right. Now he's working with a non-religious organization providing the same service for our homeless veterans.
Going back to that Pirke Avoth matrix of charity, in the situation of religiously based charities, both the donors and the recipients know each other's identity and compliance to the donor's religion is a requirement to receive the charity (especially when it's a
Christian "charity").
So then, let's go for the option of taking the government completely out of the picture and let private charities take care of all society's woes. First of all, they can't handle the load. Second, they reject those who will not conform to their religious requirements. So what happens to the rest?
That is what happens when the donors and recipients know each other. Clearly we need the system where neither knows the other, which the rabbis already knew was the best form of charity.
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