Obama is reportedly backing off on the declaration that insurance coverage will be provided for birth control. Boehner does some sabre-rattling and Obama folds like a cheap card table. Because of course the desires of the church trump the desires of American women.
You know what Obama should have said? “Fine. The church gets to decide who gets compensated for birth control as soon as they give up their non-profit status.”
People can like Obama or hate Obama, but you know what they love?
Guts.
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That was my first thought about this as well.
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I also love how they’re all arguing that this is a freedom of religion argument. No, it’s the usual put women in their place argument.
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And then Mike Huckabee goes off this morning and says we’re all Catholics now, thanks to Obama. Now, last I checked, freedom of religion means I get to choose my religion; it doesn’t mean you get to choose which religion you want me to be at any given politically-driven moment. But then, he’ll also never say that we’re all Mormons, or Muslims.
I didn’t see the Huckster say that, but he was obviously referring to solidarity. He’s not suggesting that we’re all about to bend our knee and receive the Eucharist.
He could’ve simply said that this is a way to unite against Obama. But to say that the unity makes everybody a Catholic? That deserves ridicule.
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On top of that, the Pope could come out later today and suddenly declare that birth control is a wonderful thing after all. It won’t happen, but it would be hilarious.
To say “We are all *insert relevant group here* now.” is a longstanding usage to show solidarity. Huck was a Baptist minister for a while. If you know anything about the history between Baptists and Catholics, you know there is no way he he meant that in any literal sense.
And for clarity’s sake, I’ve never been a fan of Huck as either a politician or a commentator.
If you know anything about the history between Baptists and Catholics, you know there is no way he he meant that in any literal sense.
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And if you know anything about politics, then you keep your dámņëd mouth shut when making sweeping statements involving religion.
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Maybe Huck meant “catholics” rather than “Catholics”.
As when the Methodists say, in their services, “I believe in the holy catholic church”?
Touche’
No one is obliged to join the Catholic Church, nor is anyone forced to go to a Catholic hospital or health center. Seriously: What would Obama (or any American government official) do if the Pope bulled the law? Shut down the clinic?
I’m not Catholic (I’m not even Christian). But, I’m smart enough to recognize that this was just another dumb move on the part of an Administration known for its left-wing foolishness.
nor is anyone forced to go to a Catholic hospital or health center
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Because the first thing you want to do in an emergency is make sure that they’re not going to take you to a specific hospital…
No one is talking about being turned away in an emergency. This is people like you wanting to bully a non-profit, religious institution into providing something that goes against the beliefs of the institution.
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Any other time people on this board would be talking how much they’re for separation of church and state…but are perfectly fine with an Administration they like telling people they need to do what the government deems best, regardless of whether or not the people feels it makes them act contrary to their beliefs.
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real freedom of religion and separation of church and state there.
No one is talking about being turned away in an emergency.
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Robert said nobody is forced to go a Catholic hospital. I provided a logical counter point.
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real freedom of religion and separation of church and state there.
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Much like freedom of speech actually has limits, so does freedom of religion. So, yes, imo, if you want to have a hospital, then you should not be picking and choosing your services due to religious guidelines.
Excuse me? I must have missed something. We were talking about the Catholic Church being forced to provide contraceptive services, not somebody dying from an arterial haemorrhage. I’m 60 years old, and I’ve never even heard of, let alone seen someone get run over by a car in the course of taking one on her fanny. But, maybe squirrels do it differently.
I must have missed something
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Yes, you have. Repeatedly.
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“We were talking about the Catholic Church being forced to provide contraceptive services, not somebody dying from an arterial haemorrhage.”
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Maybe not that, but close.
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Ever heard of a medication called methergine? Methergine, a brand name for Methylergonovine Oral, belongs to a class of drugs called ergot alkaloids. Methylergonovine is used to prevent or treat bleeding from the uterus that can happen after childbirth. In some cases, it can be life threatening to not have it or a like medication and for many people on lower incomes it’s not an inexpensive medication.
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Part of the reason I know this is because methergine was in the news last year. See, methergine is used, as I said above, to prevent or treat bleeding from the uterus after childbirth, but it’s also prescribed to prevent or treat bleeding from the uterus after spontaneous or elective abortions.
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And because it can be used for the one, Catholics are creating issues for the other.
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http://www.ktvb.com/home/Planned-Parenthood-files-complaint-against-Nampa-pharmacist-113429849.html
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So a pharmacist decides that they don’t like what a drug could be used for and refuses to dispense it based on “moral” reasons. Now imagine that in a slightly different form.
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A woman has medical issue so that she’s one of the ones who has serious bleeding for days after giving birth, not having an abortion, but giving birth, and her doctor prescribes this medication. She goes in to get it filled and gets told that, whoops, her health insurance won’t cover this prescription, a prescription for an after care drug and not a contraceptive, because it and the other drugs that would help her right now are associated with after care for abortions as well as childbirth. But, hey, if she has a giant wad of cash, she can just buy it herself.
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Just as methergine has uses not related to abortion, some contraceptives have uses beyond merely contraception. Some women need them because of medical conditions like von Willebrand disease and hemophilia. Interestingly, it’s common knowledge that women cannot be active hemophiliacs, but they can be affected by it nonetheless.
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Women with bleeding diseases like von Willebrand disease and hemophilia will have heavy periods, some well beyond what you may think of from such a simple phrase, but it can range from mild health threatening issues to even women bleeding to death from their first or early menses. This problem can come and go early or it can be an issue for a woman into her mid twenties.
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Some contraceptives act to dramatically reduce the bleeding that these woman face. It’s not about having an abortion or having sex without fear of getting pregnant, it’s a matter of health and in some cases life and death.
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Now imagine that you’re a mother of a child and the girl’s father was/is a hemophiliac. Now imagine that you’ve become a one income family due to death in the family or just the economy and you are living paycheck to paycheck. Now imagine that your family doctor tells you that, yes, your daughter is an active carrier and that she needs to start some form of contraception or she may be facing some serious health risks.
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You’re living paycheck to paycheck. Good thing you have insurance.
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Oops, your employer believes contraception is a sin and won’t allow it to be covered in the employee insurance package. Hëll, you may have believed that it was a sin up until then for that matter. But, either way, it’s not covered.
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So now, if you’re lucky, you have to come up with $50 to $75 a month to get one of the contraceptives that will adequately lower the amount of bleeding your daughter might be facing. And you’d better pray that you don’t live in a town where the pharmacy hires nitwits like the one from the above linked news story and a state where your Republican legislators have rushed to make their base happy and legally cover nitwits like that so that you can actually get the things easily and not have pharmacists explain that what you want is morally wrong and you can do without.
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If your unlucky? The doctor recommends an implant that can cost you $550 to $650 up front. You’ll actually save money in the long run because such implants are more effective and cover you for three to five years. But, if you’re on a tight budget and just barely coping, that may as well seem like a million dollars.
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Far fetched? Nope. I didn’t know this little quirk about hemophilia until the last couple of days. I found out about it from discussing this thread subject with my wife while the weekend news chat shows were on. My wife’s sister married a hemophiliac. When their two daughters were hitting puberty, they were being checked left and right and up and down by their family physician. Oh, and, as per my example, my sister-in-law was laid off. They became a one income family of four for about two-and-a-half years right after some heavy financial hits.
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Fortunately, neither girl turned out to be a carrier who faces serious issues. But for the issues they did face, they’re insurance covered what they needed rather than deciding that it might be better to let young girls die for moral reasons.
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Again, as I said elsewhere, if you want to be a church, be a church. If you want to be a business, then you be a business. And if you want to be a business that gets all of the tax breaks, grants and other perks that businesses like yours get from the state and federal governments, then you play by the same rules as every other business.
The use of claviceps purpurea (or the ergotamine tartrate one can get from it) as an abortafacient has been known for thousands of years. This is not some new, burning issue. Ergotamine tartrate also can be used to treat migraine headaches — as can other, substitute drugs.
I won’t be trapped into supporting pharmacists who withhold any drug generally on the ground such drugs are subject to specific abuses (one does not stop using morphine sulfate because it can generate opium addicts). The issue raised by the President’s action is whether the CATHOLIC CHURCH can be COMPELLED to provide and PAY FOR what IT considers specific ABUSE of the drug, given a constitutional prohibition which states, “Congress shall pass no law…”
Unless my logic has failed me, “no law” includes “no jurisdictional law.” The President has no more business ordering the Cathoilic Church to provide medical services the President approves of than he does ordering the Christian Scientists to provide the prayer services he despises. HE HAS NO JURISDICTION.
I gather from your response that you believe the patient’s need somehow negatives the provider’s sovereignty in the provision of the care — a strange position to someone who came to these fora generally on the wings of David’s SOPA rants. Are you trying to tell me that, because so many people need this comic-book care, there is no real harm in me appropriating CATHOLIC funnies?
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“I gather from your response that you believe the patient’s need somehow negatives the provider’s sovereignty in the provision of the care — a strange position to someone who came to these fora generally on the wings of David’s SOPA rants. Are you trying to tell me that, because so many people need this comic-book care, there is no real harm in me appropriating CATHOLIC funnies?”
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Nope. My take is a clear as a bell.
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If you want to run a church, then run a church. A church is exempt from the reg.
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If your church wants to run a volunteer food kitchen or homeless shelter and advertise it as such and as being such, fine. You want to force the people who show up there to pray your prayer even if they’re not Catholic or even of a Christian faith before actually offering aid? Don’t really care about that or the fact that it makes you look like a jáçkášš. And, you’re exempt from the reg.
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But if you start a business, and a hospital and a university is dámņëd sure a business, and you’re hiring people in the local community and taking in tax dollars from the government for various things, getting tax breaks and perks that like businesses would get and you expect to be treated just like the other businesses of that kind… You’re not a church anymore. You’re a business and an employer and if you expect to get all the benefits of like businesses then you play by the rules that govern all of the other like businesses.
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Be a church or a business, but you don’t get to be a business and claim to be a church.
Well, at least Jerry now appears to be getting back to the original issue, the one Jennifer mentioned, which is what to do about EMPLOYEES of the hospital which are both female and non-Catholic. And, courts WILL listen to that.
But, Jerry, your answer still does not address some of the fundamental problems here. If someone is bleeding to death, there is a clear, objective standard by which one can measure the level of care, viz. that, e.g., withholding the ergotamine tartrate results in the death of the organism. That makes administering the ergotamine “theraputic” and withholding it potentially actionable (compare cases where parents withhold medical care so they can “pray” for their child).
But, withholding contraceptives is not theraputiuc, at least to the Catholics. Aborting the fetus rather than obliging the birth is not theraputic, at least to the Catholics. So, the first problem with your argument is that you are demanding that a Catholic institution involved in what YOU call a business provide a service on command when the service is not part of the business.
Beyond that, you still have not addressed the far more basic problem (which perhaps is beyond the scope of this thread), which is that there still is no federal jurisdiction to intervene in the matter. NOT buying an insurance policy is NOT commerce and does NOT cross a state line. So, even if one were to grant that hospitals are businesses subject to the same regulation as any other business, there remains the problem, which is that this problem does not belong on the President’s desk.
Finally, although it was David, not you, who first raised the problem addressed (even if incompetently) by SOPA, you have not addressed the point I made, which is that the antithesis of a contractual society is a command society, in which anyone who can dress up crime as the law gets to give “orders” the rest of us are forced to obey. My response to such arrogance is to shout, “F**k you!” Which leaves you with few options: You can declare me a “lawbreaker” and attack me, and maybe you’ll lock me up, maybe I’ll shoot you in the process (but maybe you’re a better shot and will shoot me first), so maybe terrorism works with small fry. But, you’re not going to shoot the Pope, nor am I, and if HE says “no,” then the law is bulled, which was the point I made in the beginning. At that point, we stop co-operating with one another, the fight is on, and no one gets ANY health care — for their abortion OR their hemmorhage.
Ludwig von Mises made the observation that society cannot advance when everyone spends all their time, fighting one another. I refrain from pirating David’s comics because the Constitution (the Supremem Law of the Land) has created a property interest in them and awarded same to him for a temporary period “to advance science and the useful arts.” For similar reasons, I don’t steal the Church’s medical care on the plea I need the care, because I acknowledge that the Pope has a will of his own, a mind of his own, perhaps at times a foolish one, but still, like David, a mind which is the origin (and thereby the creator and owner) of that which is valuable. Yes, we could have a society in which medical care can be pirated gratis (when a lion “steals” a cheetah’s kill, we don’t call it a “lying, thieving lion”; we just call it a lion). But, in the long run, society will pay for that. Maybe no one will miss David’s comics when, in disgust, he stops making them available under a regime where he no longer can profit by them. But, people are going to miss my nephew, who no longer is part of a pre-med program because, under Obamacare, neither he nor many others like him ever will be able to repay the educational expenses one must incur to become a doctor.
As I pointed out in another sub-thread, the irony here is that the first freely elected black president in the history of this not always noble country has embarked on a course designed ultimately to make ņìggërš of us all. Those cotton balls in the doctor’s office are not free. In addition to everything else, Obamacare violates the Thirteenth Amendment, which is why I’m voting for someone else.
You don’t get to pick and choose which part of the Constitution you will support. It exists as a protection for all, in peace and war, in sickness and in health, for law giver, law follower, and law breaker alike. Albert Einstein (who had trouble believing in quantam mechanics) was accustomed to protesting that “God would not play dice with the universe” — until one day, Niels Bohr turned on him and said, “Albert, stop telling God what to do!” I don’t believe the Pope is God’s personal representative on earth and suspect much of what he professes is bunkum, but it behooves me not to be giving Him orders.
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“Well, at least Jerry now appears to be getting back to the original issue, the one Jennifer mentioned, which is what to do about EMPLOYEES of the hospital which are both female and non-Catholic. And, courts WILL listen to that.”
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Never changed subjects or moved from the original issue. It all falls under one simple idea. Do you get to decide what is available to me based just on your religious beliefs and not mine?
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If you want to run a church, you dámņëd sure do. If you want to run a business, you play by the rules that all the other businesses do.
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“You don’t get to pick and choose which part of the Constitution you will support.”
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So, right now, you are saying that Muslim communities in this country should be able to practice Sharia Law and have the ability to say that, where their religious law, a law that in many cases is being pulled directly from the Quran and deemed by their faith as the Word of Allah, and our law is in conflict with it, Sharia Law supersedes our laws? While some laws in Sharia Law are cultural, others are outlined in the Quran and both acts that are prohibited and the various punishments that must be dealt to the offender are laid out quite clearly and very much the Word of Allah. There are things in there that are 100% religious in nature and they clash with our laws.
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So, again, you’re now advocating for allowing the establishment of Sharia Law in Muslim households and communities in the US and and allowing Muslims to claim that their faith and church cannot be infringed upon at all by our state, no?
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Hey, separation of church and state and all. You don’t get to pick and choose which part of the Constitution you will support or decide that it only applies the way you want it to to “your team” and not “their team.”
What the Amendment is is a restriction on Congress: “Congress shall pass no law…” It says nothing about Muslims.
For the record, “jurisdiction” is the power of a court to hear a case. Jurisdiction of federal courts is established by Article III and is restricted to “cases” or “controversies” “arising” under the Constitution, treaties, and laws of the United States. The First Amendment further restricts jurisdiction by excluding “cases” or “controversies” which seek to “establish” a religion or restrict the “free exercise” thereof.
Muslims who want to live by Sharia law are free to do so. So are cannibals. But, any cannibal who tries to eat you in the process also would have to find some way around the State law proscribing murder. Normal criminal laws of the United States also would apply here in, e.g., a federal territory like Guam.
What you seek to impose is something fundamentally different: Birth control and abortion are not “therapies”; they are moral choices. The Church is not seeking authority to impose the “Catholic” choice and would not be granted such authority anyway given the current state of Fourteenth Amendment law. But, the Church clearly has the absolute authority not to participate in the procedure.
You seek to worm around this difference by declaring “health care” to be either a natural resource (like a rock, tree, or mud puddle) or a condition of general welfare (like sunshine), which must be provided gratis via demodonkey decree. It is neither; it is a service provided on the market. There is no obligation on the part of the Catholic Church to provide the service in ANY dimension (it does not have to operate a hospital at all). If it elects to offer “prayer services” a la Christian Science instead of penicillin, your remedy is to find another provider, not stick a pistol in a priest’s face and tell him that “prayer isn’t good enough — give me the drug!”
But, you say, “There ought’o be a law!” In other words, find a way for Obama & Co. to make a “law” in the shape of a pistol. Well, what part of the Constitution do you invoke to make the law? Let’s restrict ourselves to Jennifer’s case, the employee who is female, non-Catholic, and is not being offered an abortion rider by her Catholic employer. A federal court CAN hear this case, because the employment relation potentially brings the matter outside of the religious proscription (a general employment law, applicable to everyone, no more “disestablishes” Catholicism than a general murder statute “disestablishes” cannibalism).
Unfortunately, you’ve still only made 5 yards, and you need 10. You still must plead the “case” or “controversy” requirement, and without that, you’ll still be thrown out of court. In this situation, you seek to “order” the Church to provide an insurance rider. But, not buying insurance is not commerce and does not cross a state line. So, you don’t have a claim “arising” under the Constitution or laws. What you have instead is (at best) federal usurpation of State power (that violates the Tenth Amendment).
Now, take another look at the Catholic defense: It is not seeking to block the abortion (even though it would like to). What it seeks is to absolve itself from it. It is not withholding “therapy,” because absent exigent circumstances, abortion is not therapy (and neither is birth control). You can’t get around that by saying, “You’re treating heart murmers for pay, and that makes you a business” (treating a heart murmer is therapy associated with running a hospital). The bishop simply will respond, “And, we will continue to treat heart murmers without discrimination to anyone, as we’ve always done, but we will not advance a cardinal sin in defiance of the will of God.”
At that point, the judge looks at the scale, and you lose. The judge may disagree about whether abortion is murder, but he knows where the Church stands and knows nothing he does will change that. If it becomes necessary to keep the Church “clean” from murder, the Pope is going to close the clinic, because the Pope does not answer to a federal judge, and the judge knows that. Then there will be neither abortions nor repair of heart murmers, just enrichment of the insurance company.
Well, no federal judge is going to shut down a hospital with some fool order about an insurance policy which, of itself, provides no care to anyone. What he will do is look at the facts and the law and say that, until some higher authority tells him that there is some actual commerce here that crosses a state line, HE’S withholding all relief.
End of case.
Finally, none of this even begins to address the fundamental problem you keep trying to ignore. In effect, what you seek is a federal writ of mandamus, available solely to command a ministerial act. Participating in a murder hardly can be called “ministerial”; there is no way a federal court ever would give it to you. Instead, all your case is going to do is highlight the “slavery” features of Obamacare and further convince the judge that, under Obama, there are, indeed, “white ņìggërš too.”
In short, you could not pick a WORSE case to make a test case of the constitutionality of federal usurpation of one-sixth of the national economy. This is a program which, of itself, creates no health care, which regiments the medical profession in a way that inevitably dries up the supply of doctors (starting with my nephew), which pours as many as 20 to 30 million new patients into the health-care system with no additional supply of care for them, and which therefore inevitably obliges rationing of care per some politically contrived formula administered by a bunch of pointy-eared bureaucrats protected from discipline by the electorate thanks to Civil Service. And, if you win this case, that formula not only will screw up the personal, contractual relationship which American patients always have had with their doctors and their rabbis, it will drag priests and bishops into direct cardinal conflict with their most holy vows and force those religious leaders to choose between terminating all care for pay in the United States as the alternative to suffering dámņáŧìøņ of their immortal souls!
You cannot SERIOUSLY be contemplating bringing such a HOPELESS lawsuit! The conservatives all will be dancing on your lawn if you do! In addition to the current problems faced by the demodonkeys before the Supreme Court, your case challenges the First Amendment, the Tenth Amendment, the Thirteenth Amendment, and probably the Ninth Amendment as well!
You might as well just call another Constitutional Convention and start over!
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“What the Amendment is is a restriction on Congress: “Congress shall pass no law…” It says nothing about Muslims.”
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Riiiight…
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So since it doesn’t specifically say Muslims and address their religion, their religion just doesn’t count in your world or qualify for the protection of that Amendment. Hey, wanna know something? That Amendment doesn’t say anything about Catholics either. So by the standard you just laid down, Catholics don’t get any protection under it either.
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“Muslims who want to live by Sharia law are free to do so. So are cannibals. But, any cannibal who tries to eat you in the process also would have to find some way around the State law proscribing murder. “
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Nice attempt to compare apples and lead balloons painted red there. One item there is established religion and the religious law of a huge religion and the other is not. And even in regards to the cases in history where cannibalism is a major part of a religion, well, you just shot your argument in the foot.
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We wouldn’t allow it in this country. Someone could claim that they and their family were 110% card carrying Aztecs or Aghori practitioners and claim that cannibalism was there religious right and they could be living in a community where everyone else converted and we wouldn’t allow it. We could even take murder out of the equation and say that they claimed that they would compromise and only eat those members of their religious community who died by natural causes and we would still not allow it in this country.
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And we would not allow it even if they cried about religious freedoms. Because, and here’s the simple fact of the matter, we’ve already established that no Constitutional right is 100% as laid out by the constitution.
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There is no such thing as 100% free speech in this country. We have laws, both state and federal, that make some forms of speech punishable. We limit the arms that we have the right to bear. And we even play with the wording of that one. We want the right to bear arms, but we don’t want to be held to the requirement of being a part of a well regulated militia.
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And would you like to take a guess at what else we’ve established isn’t 100%? Religion. We just won’t allow certain religious practices in this country. And we’ve established that for quite some time now.
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As a matter of fact, the same Republican hypocrites acting like howler monkeys right now are in favor of federal law that restricts religious freedom. For that matter, so to is the Catholic Church. See, they’re both in favor of supporting and continuing DOMA.
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What’s that you ask? How is DOMA restricting religious freedom by stopping the federal government from recognizing gay marriage? Well, it’s not that part of the equation that I’m talking about. See, by defining marriage as exclusively a union between one man and one woman, the federal government by act of federal law refusing to acknowledge polygamy and polygamy is outlined and allowed in several religions.
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You may have heard of a few of them. There’s a GOP primary nominee right now who had family flee this country in part so that they could enjoy certain religious freedoms that we in America denied them by act of law.
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We do not, despite a Constitutional Amendment, give unrestricted free exercise of religion to anyone in this country. Most Christians just ignore that fact most of the time because they have the biggest lobby in Washington of any religious practice by far and can cry louder than all the others.
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So, again, unless you’re about to declare that every religious group in the country gets to start practicing their religion to the fullest extent of their desire to do so and not be punished by the law or denied recognition of rights due them by their religious practices… You’re being a hypocrite along with the Republicans and the Church.
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And, honestly, again, we’re not talking about religion or the church here. We’re talking about businesses and the laws and requirements that govern businesses.
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But I’m willing to compromise. If a business wants to claim that they’re a church and thus should be exempt when it comes to some regulations that impact like businesses, I’m willing to cut a deal with them. They can give up the state and federal grants, funding and perks that other secular businesses like them are entitled to. If they want to give up the state and federal grants, funding and perks that secular businesses are entitled to, then I have no problem with them pretending that they’re a church instead and keeping their church owed exemptions.
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Again, as I’ve said about a million time now, you can be a church or a business, but you don’t get to be a business and claim to be a church.
You ignored what I said and instead rambled off on a rant over homosexual pretensions of marriage, infringement of the militia, freedom of speech, and your definition of a “true” religion. That’s loss of 5 yards on the play and obliges you to punt.
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“You ignored what I said and instead rambled off on a rant over homosexual pretensions of marriage”
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Actually, I didn’t. I discussed how DOMA impacts the religious freedoms by law and on a federal level of anyone who might have polygamy as a part of their religion. And you call it the “homosexual pretensions of marriage.” Really? So you’re against equal rights for homosexuals on top of everything else?
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Nice…
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As for the rest of your post…
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“infringement of the militia, freedom of speech, and your definition of a “true” religion.”
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No, I discussed the fact that we have limits on Constitutionally protected rights. That impacts the discussion. Nor did I define what is a “true” religion.
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But you want to dodge that. You also want to dodge the simple point that most people have no issue with a church being exempted from certain things, but that many feel a business should have to play by the same rules that all the other like businesses have to play by.
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But we’re done. Between your ducking and dodging simple points and ideas, silly post remarks and… interesting… choice of wording about basic civil rights for homosexuals, any further discussion with you is an obvious waste of my time and Peter’s bandwidth.
I’ll let our other readers decide who’s wasting the bandwidth. The issue before us all is whether the Catholic Church should be forced to fund a service which has nothing to do with providing medical therapy, when the “business” they are asking some non-Catholic women to help them provide IS providing medical therapy. There at least is a case which can be heard by a federal court if a constitutional claim can be made that Obamacare somehow constitutes “interstate commerce,” so that the mandatory insurance provision becomes a general business regulation the FEDERAL government PERHAPS lawfully may impose. The point you won’t address — the one the Supreme Court will hear very soon — is that NOT buying an insurance policy is not “commerce” (it’s not anything), nor does it cross a state line. Within that restriction, whether a Catholic hospital is or is not a business is irrelevant, since without federal jurisdiction, there is no “business” to regulate.
Craig,
Your counterpoint isn’t relevant and therefore isn’t logical (which does not appear to bother you).
It definitely was a historic blunder on the part of the Obama administration, not just because it’s yet another example of his statism but because it brings Obamacare back to the attention of the nation, which has been something the administration (along with their willing accomplices in the media) has tried to avoid since it was passed.
nor is anyone forced to go to a Catholic hospital or health center.
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The debate is over the health coverage of the employees of a Catholic hospital or health center, not the patients.
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These facilities employ a lot of non-Catholics in addition to Catholics. In addition to wages paid directly, these employees receive health insurance as part of their compensation.
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The question was whether employers had to comply with the Affordable Care Act’s mandate that all contraceptives be covered. For example, if the employer forced a nurse to pay for her Nuvaring prescription out-of-pocket, she’d effectively be docked $1000/year in her salary.
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It wasn’t just a matter of employees who worked for Catholic-run hospitals, either. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops wanted this mandate removed for ALL employers, not just Catholic-run hospitals:
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From USA Today:
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That was no consolation to Catholic leaders. The White House is “all talk, no action” on moving toward compromise, said Anthony Picarello, general counsel for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. “There has been a lot of talk in the last couple days about compromise, but it sounds to us like a way to turn down the heat, to placate people without doing anything in particular,” Picarello said. “We’re not going to do anything until this is fixed.”
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That means removing the provision from the health care law altogether, he said, not simply changing it for Catholic employers and their insurers. He cited the problem that would create for “good Catholic business people who can’t in good conscience cooperate with this.”
For heaven’s sake, Jennifer, women aren’t being punished for being women. If they get a job with a Catholic-run hospital they are told upfront what their benefits package should be. if that is not sufficient for them, there are other employers who will provide them what they seek.
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Honestly, it’s like a female bartender at a strip club crying sexual harassment because guys are making comments about the dancers’ hooters all night.
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Jerome Maida: “If they get a job with a Catholic-run hospital they are told upfront what their benefits package should be. if that is not sufficient for them, there are other employers who will provide them what they seek.”
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Or they could, well, you know, work for one of the many Catholic-run hospitals or employers who have been providing coverage that included contraception for quite some time now and just didn’t feel like making a national stink about it because it was an advantageous moment in an presidential election season where the incumbent was a Democrat.
@Jerry — thanks for the heads-up. I did not know Darin was a troll.
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@Jerome –
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For heaven’s sake
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Apt choice of words.
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women aren’t being punished for being women.
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Prescription birth control only applies to women. Birth control can cost $1000/year out-of-pocket (Nuvaring). Birth control medication is also prescribed for reasons other than birth control (ie: cancer treatment) when it comes to women’s health.
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These bishops are singling out women and women only for financial punishment, and they’re doing through the financial compensation paid to those women — health insurance coverage.
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Health insurance benefits are not a gift. They are a form of payment, just like wages. The workers earned that benefit, just the same as they earned their wages. That is their health insurance, not the bishops’ health insurance. That health insurance belongs to the workers, and the bishops want to reduce the value of that compensation in a way that only applies to women.
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In short, I don’t see the bishops withholding coverage for Viagra.
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If they get a job with a Catholic-run hospital they are told upfront what their benefits package should be. if that is not sufficient for them, there are other employers who will provide them what they seek.
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In some towns, only Catholic-run hospitals/clinics are available. If the doctors and nurses don’t like the benefits package in that town, do you honestly expect them to leave town in order to search for another employer?
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That really doesn’t seem fair to female nurses and doctors, or the female dependents of the male nurses and doctors.
Around the time that Ron Paul first ran for president as a libertarian, some libertarian advanced the proposition that (1) a woman “owns” her own body; (2) that therefore a woman has a right to hire a mover, but not an assassin.
I don’t know if this is an ultimate solution to the abortion debate or not; but, without doubt, it makes form of the abortion the sine qua non of decision. Under such circumstances, not even the most liberal Catholic could acquiesce to a provision which forbade them even to make a distinction. You may, indeed, have an absolute right to evict even a peaceful trespasser of your mountain cabin, rather than put them up for the winter. Under no conditions would that give you any right to cut his throat or crush his skull. True, the snow storm may kill him anyway. But, the law clearly prohibits you from helping the storm along.
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Which just shows that you’ve never lived in Texas (a state still in the US the last time I looked) and that you disagree with the Republican supported laws that say that you can in essence cut his throat or crush his skull.
No, I’ve never lived in Texas, but I’ve studied law generally, and no state allows anyone to use excessive force in the settling of disputes. Even the recent “stand your ground” statutes in Florida (which I have opposed, especially after it got one of my students killed) don’t expand the universe of allowable force, just muddy the water in terms of when allowable force may be used.
I challenge you to cite a statute, of ANY state (and I mean chapter, section, and verse) which allows anyone other than perhaps a soldier in war or an executioner to INITIATE deadly force against another person. The Governor, himself, can’t do that absent due process (that violates the Fourteenth Amendment).
Until you do, take some lawyerly advice and teach yourself to talk less and think more. At minimum, you’ll make less of a fool of yourself.
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“Until you do, take some lawyerly advice and teach yourself to talk less and think more. At minimum, you’ll make less of a fool of yourself.”
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First off, I was joking around. But if you want to be an ášš about it, that’s fine with me.
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Robert, in Texas they have a statute justifies the use of deadly force if the shooter “reasonably believes” it’s necessary to stop the theft. That statute had been rather broad in how it is seen by Texans. As a matter of fact, many Texans and Texas politicians declared that it was just fine and dandy to do such a thing in just the lat decade.
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On November 14, 2007 a Pasadena, Texas resident named Joe Horn shot and killed two men who had burglarized his neighbor’s home while his neighbors were not even home. Horn got his trusty shotgun while on the phone with the local 911. There were no lives at risk, the people two of them were not invading his home and so the 911 dispatcher actually told him not to go outside and do anything based on the circumstances.
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Horn: “Uh, I’ve got a shotgun … uh, do you want me to stop them?”
Dispatcher: “Nope, don’t do that. Ain’t no property worth shooting somebody over, OK?”
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Horn decided different. Despite no threat to his neighbor’s lives or his in in that situation, he decided that he would kill them. And that’s not speculation on my part as to what went through his mind by the way. That was his stated intent to the dispatcher.
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Horn: “I’m going to kill them.”
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So he went outside, showed off his shotgun, shot them in the back as the were fleeing the scene and killed them.
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And Texas law said it was probably okay and Texans said it was absolutely okay.
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http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jul/01/nation/na-shoot1
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So, take some friendly advice and teach yourself to talk less and keep up with current events more more. At minimum, you’ll make less of a fool of yourself. And maybe less of an ášš on top of that. 🙂
Again, I called for a STATUTE, and your response was, instead, to provide us all with an INTERPRETATION of a complex incident in Texas by a REPORTER for a California newspaper.
This sounds like another “stand your ground” case, for which I have little sympathy. In any event, from the account, we can’t even tell if Horne uttered the magic words, “You are under arrest!”
If I’ve never lived in Texas, I obviously can’t know if there’s individual respect for due process in Pasedena. I do know that, if you burgle someone’s house and a neighbor with a gun arrests you, you’d better take that seriously, because you very possibly could be shot.
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Actually, we know all of that.
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It was discussed in the news that the wording of the statute is what I said it was. We also know what was said by Horn since he never hung up on the 911 call.
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“Move or you’re dead.”
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That’s what was on the 911 recording. That was then followed almost immediately by Boom – Click – Boom – Click – Boom.
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He never declared that they were under arrest. He left his home, he left safety, and he shot in the back and killed two men. And Texas said that it’s okay with that. And legal experts discussed the case as it was going on and said that, yeah, the way that the statutes in Texas were written, some long ago and never really updated well, that the Texas laws said that what he did was correct.
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It’s not a matter of a reporter interpreting what Texas law says. It’s what other legal scholars have said that Texas law says you can do and what Texas says that Texas law says you can do. And the simple fact that he did exactly what you said no one, not even a governor, can do and was cleared of all charges despite what was on that 911 tape pretty much backs that.
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If you want to argue this reality beyond this post, go argue it with Texas.
Can’t: You won’t plead the statute! So, how can Texas or any of its personnel know which one you have in mind?
Let’s try this one last time: WHAT IS THE STATUTE; GIVE ME THE CITATION!
Hearsay is not evidence, even if the reporter does work for the Times.
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Texas Senate Bill 378, also known as the NRA backed Castle Law, passed by an overwhelming 133-13 vote and enacted with great fanfare in Texas on September 1, 2007.
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Texas Penal Code – Section 9.41.
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Texas Penal Code – Section 9.42.
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Texas Penal Code – Section 9.43.
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All cited in his defense and all worded in such a way that he was allowed by the law and the courts (and practically encouraged by Texas culture) to exit his home with a shotgun and shot in the back two men fleeing from the scene after robbing his neighbors’s home.
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Now, again, if you wish to argue reality any further, go do it with Texas.
I have to go to work, the statutes are both lengthy and complex, and I won’t be back in the office until the weekend.
Preliminarily, I can say that the applicable law is 9.43, pursuant to demonstration of certain conditions specified by 9.41 (force) and 9.42 (deadly force). Readers may elect to read the statutes themselves, and most certainly they speak for themselves. The one thing I can say preliminarily is that use of deadly force appears restricted against crimes like burglary or to prevent escape from a burglary (which are hardly peaceful acts).
I see nothing in the statutes (at least up front) which allow anyone to INITIATE deadly force against a mere trespasser, which is NOT what appeared to be present in the Horn case (whatever happened).
This thread was started by Jenny, upon the question of whether a Catholic EMPLOYER should be allowed to have any say in the FORM of contraceptive or abortafacient which the employer CONTRACTS to provide, as part of a health-care package. Jenny opined in the negative, and I joined because some libertarians in CONNECTICUT in the 1980s had made the observation that form of abortion (rather than abortion generally) is (or ought to be) the real focus of the debate, viz. “that a woman has a right to hire a mover but not an assassin.” I do not know if there were a miscarriage of justice in the Horn case (and most certainly the act of a single grand jury would not be final — recall New York’s notorious “subway shooter” case), but I don’t see how Horn’s response to a BURGLARY has any relevance to an inquiry over form of abortion.
I fear, Jenny, that Jerry is attempting to kidnap your thread.
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Uhm… No, Robert.
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You wrote a line about being able to evict a trespasser, but not being able to slit his throat. I then made on offhand joke at the expense of Texas (a state with many laws that I find almost as screwed up as the Texas legal system itself) by playing on fairly recent events that were covered in the national media for quite some time.
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You then wrote a post where you said, “no state allows anyone to use excessive force in the settling of disputes.”
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You followed that by telling me that you, “challenge you [me] to cite a statute, of ANY state (and I mean chapter, section, and verse) which allows anyone other than perhaps a soldier in war or an executioner to INITIATE deadly force against another person.”
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You then ended the post by being an ášš.
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So I cited a case that hinged on state laws written open enough that all you had to do was to just say that one just “reasonably believes” (a fairly open term) that deadly force was necessary to employ its use. I then also pointed out the statute, 9.43, was used to extend personal protection justification to others or their property.
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That was answering you. Not hijacking a thread. But feel free to keep making the stupid comments. You can feel free to do it without me however.
To my knowledge, “to initiate” means to start. Since I gather you are saying that Horn “initiated” force (the challenge was to find a statute allowing one to “initiate” force), your position must be also that burglarly is a peaceful, legitimate act, and that Horn was violating the burglars’ rights when he went to arrest them.
Oh, I get it! You’re voting for Obama! Of course you believe it’s OK to steal from people — a perfectly peaceful, acceptable way to behave! It’s those dastardly homeowners making more than $250,000 a year who need to be jailed!
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Robert,
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1st – He was in his own home. He had 911 on the phone. The robbers were not breaking in to his home. He told the 911 dispatcher that he was going to kill them, a few moments later he left his home, he initiated contact with them and thus initiated the confrontation and then he shot them in the back as they ran away from him.
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2nd – I greatly dislike Obama right now. I’d love to see Obama get smacked goofy politically right now. I’ve even stated here and elsewhere that Obama has done a few things that I wouldn’t mind seeing him impeached over. I’m only voting Obama this year if the GOP back my vote into the corner by drafting a nominee that’s an even bigger screw up than he is. So, frankly, you can take the second half of your post and shove it up your ášš. You know your ášš, right? That’s the place you apparently like to keep your head most of the time.
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Have a nice life. Done with you now.
Gadzooks! A Communist!
The principal problems in dealing with a jailhouse lawyer are that (1) they have too much time on their hands, and (2) they fancy that, one day, they’ll be paid by the word.
Texas Penal Statute § 9.43 reads:
“PROTECTION OF THIRD PERSON’S PROPERTY. A person
is justified in using force or deadly force against another to
protect land or tangible, movable property of a third person if,
under the circumstances as he reasonably believes them to be, the
actor would be justified under Section 9.41 or 9.42 in using force
or deadly force to protect his own land or property and:
(1) the actor reasonably believes the unlawful
interference constitutes attempted or consummated theft of or
criminal mischief to the tangible, movable property; or
(2) the actor reasonably believes that:
(A) the third person has requested his protection
of the land or property;
(B) he has a legal duty to protect the third
person’s land or property; or
(C) the third person whose land or property he
uses force or deadly force to protect is the actor’s spouse, parent,
or child, resides with the actor, or is under the actor’s care.”
I’ll leave for the reader the responsibility to look up the conditions precedent [sections 9.41, 9.42].
With the caveat that Wikipedia no more is evidence than an account in the Los Angeles Times, this IS what it relates:
“Joe Horn: “I’ve got a shotgun; do you want me to stop them?”
“The Pasadena emergency operator responded: “Nope. Don’t do that. Ain’t no property worth shooting somebody over, O.K.?”
“Mr. Horn said: “But hurry up, man. Catch these guys will you? Cause, I ain’t going to let them go.”
“Mr. Horn then said he would get his shotgun.
“The operator said, “No, no.” But Mr. Horn said: “I can’t take a chance of getting killed over this, O.K.? I’m going to shoot.”
“The operator told him not to go out with a gun because officers would be arriving.
‘“O.K.,” Mr. Horn said. “But I have a right to protect myself too, sir,” adding, “The laws have been changed in this country since September the first, and you know it.”
“The operator said, “You’re going to get yourself shot.” But Mr. Horn replied, “You want to make a bet? I’m going to kill them.”
“Moments later he said, “Well here it goes, buddy. You hear the shotgun clicking and I’m going.”
“Then he said: “Move, you’re dead.”
“There were two quick gunshots, then a third.
‘“I had no choice,” Mr. Horn said when he got back on the line with the dispatcher. “They came in the front yard with me, man.”’
The article further relates:
“Police initially identified the dead men in Horn’s yard as 38-year-old Miguel Antonio DeJesus and Diego Ortiz, 30, both currently resident in Houston and of Afro Latino descent. However, DeJesus was actually an alias of an individual named Hernando Riascos Torres.[3] Torres and Ortiz were carrying a sack with almost $2,000 in cash and jewelry taken from the home. Both were criminals from Colombia who had been convicted on drug trafficking charges.[1] Police found a Puerto Rican identification card on Ortiz. Torres had three identification cards from Colombia, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic, and had been previously sent to prison for dealing cocaine. Torres had been deported in 1999.[6]
“A plain clothes police detective responding to the 9-1-1 call arrived at the scene before the shooting, and witnessed the escalation and shootings while remaining in his car.[3] His report on the incident indicated that the men who were killed “received gunfire from the rear”.[1] Police Capt. A.H. Corbett stated the two men ignored Mr. Horn’s order to freeze and that one of the suspects ran towards Joe Horn before angling away from Horn toward the street when the suspect was shot in the back. The medical examiner’s report could not specify whether they were shot in the back due to the ballistics of the shotgun wound.[7] Pasadena police confirmed that the two men were shot after they ventured into Horn’s front yard. The detective did not arrest Horn.”
This is Jerry’s idea of dastardly homeowners “initiating” force against respectable burglars! The plainclothes cop was SITTING RIGHT THERE and saw the men COME INTO HORN’S YARD rather than raise their hands and surrender — two men involved in narcotics traffic as illegal aliens (one previously jailed, one already deported once)!
Jerry, another constitutional requirement you may not have heard of is proving a criminal case beyond reasonable doubt. The ballistics report does not even confirm the direction of the shot, the officers’ accounts indicate the wound was not received while either man was retreating, and while, “Move [and] you’re dead,” is not quite the same as, “You are under arrest,” it would be close enough in the minds of the overwhelming number of jurors currently suffering a virtual state of siege in South Texas, thanks to Obama’s much delayed and generally incompetent policing of the border.
I’ll let our readers decide where I’ve got my head parked; the evidence is overwhelming, however, as to which one of us is bully full of šhìŧ. This incident has absolutely NO analagous value to a woman aborting a “trespassing” fetus or a cabin owner in Montana evicting a PEACEFUL trespasser merely seeking shelter from a sustained blizzard.
It doesn’t even snow in South Texas.
How the hëll did this ever get on Joe Horn?
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I’ve followed this case since it first made the news, and it divides second amendment activists. The case is surprisingly complicated, and Texas law, not too mention Texans themselves, adds to the weirdness. What saved Horn was that a plainclothes cop down the street saw the confrontation. He testified to four crucial things:
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1) Horn was on his own property when he fired. 2) When he confronted the thugs, they came at him violently. 3) At least one of them was armed with a bludgeon. 4)The attackers spun away the moment Horn brought up his gun, but before could stop his trigger finger. This accounted for why it seemed that they weren’t facing him when the fired.*
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It was the testimony of the cop that cleared Horn in the minds of the Grand Jury, and hence they refused to indict. The LA Times article Jerry linked summarized the testimony as “But a plainclothes detective who witnessed some of what took place later told investigators that the men did not stop when a visibly nervous Horn pointed a shotgun in their direction, and that at least one man appeared to be moving toward Horn when Horn fired.” Reporting like this would be why it seems like a miscarriage of justice.
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Was Horn right in leaving his house to confront these guys? I would say, “Hëll, no!” However, all you need is a reasonable doubt to clear someone and the cop provided it. And honestly, if a prosecutor can’t get a case like that out of a grand jury, there likely isn’t much of a case.
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*Taken from the “Self Defense and the Law” column by Massad Ayoob. in the Feb 2012 issue of Combat Handguns. Normally, I would not quote something in Combat Handguns, but anything by Ayoob is an exception. When it comes to research on the subject of judicious use of lethal force, he is meticulous.
Jerry had scrambled egg for breakfast, kidnapped Jenny’s thread, and took it on hegira to the Southwest.
He was challenged to come up with a single example of a single state in which someone is allowed to initiate deadly force in the course of removing a mere trespasser from, e.g., requisitioning long-term shelter from a blizzard. Texas penal statute section 7.43 and its application to the Horn case was the best he could do. He doesn’t approve of homeowners shooting at burglars, thinks those who do “have their head in their ášš.”
I agree it all is irrelevant to the question of whether form of abortion (as opposed to abortion itself) should be the focus of the debate. Unfortunately, Jenny appears to have abandoned the original direction of the thread, so all we have left is Joe.
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“How the hëll did this ever get on Joe Horn?”
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I made a silly joke at the expense of Texas based on one line he threw out on a post. Crim wanted to turn it into a serious discussion. I’ve stopped playing since he wants to insist that I’m claiming that the Horn case is somehow analogous to abortion when I wasn’t, slightly rewrote a few facts in the discussion and started throwing around idiotic little lines in this discussion (and a cutesy little potshot at homosexuals in another) that indicated that his head is fairly firmly located up his ášš.
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He’s apparently still yammering on even after I ceased to care and made clear that I had no interest in him. If you’d like to discuss the Horn business with him, feel free. I ceased caring enough to bother reading his most recent posts.
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But that’s basically how we hit Horn.
Actually, I had considered cutting it off at my penultimate remark, but when (apparently right before you) I learned that Chandler was not being all that honest about what had happened in Texas, I decided to correct the record, that it finally be made clear to everyone else.
As best I can tell, Chandler is a socialist and a hooligan who tries to get his way by playing fast and loose with the truth, bullying anyone who opposes him, then (that failing), airily dismissing his opponents like some Hitlerian bureaucrat who can’t find a better reason to disrespect the Reich’s enemies.
But, Chandler does have one saving quality after all: He’s rude.
Tell me, Jerry: Do you do anything else, like play with your navel or urinate in the street?
Yeah, the Obama administration didn’t really “cave” on this, they are simply shifting the responsibility to insurance companies. Obama didn’t have the constitutional authority to mandate that religious organizations commit what they believe to be a sin in the first place. His attacks on our freedom continue…
His attacks on our freedom continue…
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Whoa–wha?! From my point of view, President Obama just defended my freedom to make my own decision regarding my own personal health.
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Women shouldn’t be punished for being women.
He didn’t defend your freedom to have an abortion or use contraception since you already had that freedom. What he’s done is attack religious freedom, and even though all the headlines say he caved… he really didn’t: Catholics and other faiths that oppose those things are still going to end up funding them through insurance companies.
The reason why the Left (including those participating here) believe that Obama “caved” is because they’ve been dumbed down by the kind of group-think that permeates our public schools and popular media. The president does not have the constitutional authority to do what he did here… both times. This was the single biggest power-grab on the part of any president in our history… and most of you aren’t even aware of it.
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Jennifer, Darin is an admitted troll who has actually boasted here that his preferred tactic is to say outrageous (and often inaccurate things) and then just ignore facts and reasonable debate and continue to repeat the outrageous garbage.
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Be aware of that before you enter in to any long debate with him.
Jennifer, Jerry likes to cling to the notion that my points aren’t valid and likes to deliberately take out-of-context a bit of sarcasm that I used here some time ago to prove it. You can ignore him. He’s the troll here. No, scratch that. He’s but one of many here.
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Jennifer, Darin is a known liar as well.
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“Darin March 23, 2007 at 6:41 pm
Guys, Guys, Guys….
Havent you figured out what I do on these political blogs yet?
I go in every once in a great-great while, make statements that I know most of you oppose and then when you throw up little links to provide your side with support, I just repeat myself. I ignore your links and just reiterate what I’ve said. It’s what I’ve done every. Single. Time. Here… when there is a political thread.
Sheesh.
Darin”
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http://www.peterdavid.net/index.php/2007/03/22/this-is-all-starting-to-sound-extremely-familiar/comment-page-2/#comment-31387
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And a quick skim through here for his posts will show you that he hasn’t changed his spots since making that statement.
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http://www.peterdavid.net/index.php/2011/04/12/not-intended-to-be-a-factual-statement/
See what I mean, Jennifer? He props up this bit of sarcasm as “evidence” that I… what… don’t believe what I’m saying? Jerry and the rest of this conga line of imbeciles who hide behind it rather than address any point I bring up are cowards who won’t even defend their points ONLINE.
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“Jerry and the rest of this conga line of imbeciles who hide behind it rather than address any point I bring up are cowards who won’t even defend their points ONLINE.”
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Everyone here does that all the time with anyone who is actually interested in having honest discussions or intelligent debate rather than just trolling, bomb throwing and making stupid and outrageous statements just for the sake of making stupid and outrageous statements.
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Which is why no one who posts here regularly and has any intelligence engages you in any real conversation or at least not for any great length.
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Done with you now, little troll.
You look for any excuse not to come up with substantive responses to the things I post here. It shows every single time you prop up that link and feign ignorance to what was intended by it. It exposes your intellectual dishonesty every single time and the more you do it, the more you prove me correct… without even trying.
The key, of course, is what you consider to be “our freedom”. The way I see it, to the GOP, “religious liberty” works pretty much the same as “economic liberty” in that big, powerful organizations should be allowed to do pretty much what they want with little or no government interference for everyone’s own good. As for individual religous liberty, while the governement isn’t supposed to compel anyone to worship a certain way or follow a certain belief system, no Republican is going to step in to stop a church from compeling a non-beliver to act a certain way. Really, for all the lip service the GOP pays to individualism, they leave indivuals with about as much power as a squirrel has against a car. No, no one has to go to a Catholic hospital–just like the squirrel didn’t have to be hit by the car. Too bad, so sad.
It just depends on the type of world you want to live in, really. I would prefer “religious liberty” to me that no one could compel me to worship a certain way or follow a certain belief system knowing full well that my non-belief shouldn’t affect someone else’s belief
You’re right, how dare medical professionals and health care providers apply conviction to their jobs!
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I mean really, PAD. I don’t agree with all the Catholic views on contraception, but it’s fundamentally wrong to force someone to actually partake in it against their conviction, and not only to do that, but to make them pay for it. You’re no longer talking separation of church and state, you’re talking separation of church and mind.
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Philosophical points aside, there’s a practical reality that needs to be addressed. When states have insisted on forcing Catholic endeavors to violate their principles, the Catholic Church has shown qualms about pulling the plug on the endeavor. When Illinois said all adoption agencies had to adopt out to gay couples, the state lost its largest adoption provider. As of October of 2010, 620 Catholic hospitals accounted for 12.4% of the nations hospitals, and 15% of hospital beds. They treat 15.7% of the nations outpatients, and 15.8% of it’s patients. Furthermore, they provide another 1,400 different health care facilities.
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The Catholic church’s recent history shows that they don’t bluff when it comes to something like this. If Obama forces the issue, they’ll fold up shop, and there’s no way Obama will force the issue in an election year. That’s why they initially postponed its enforcement until after the election. The problem is that he didn’t expect people to make hay out of it until it after his reelection. I really think what he’ll do is withdraw it until after November and then reinstate the regulation when he doesn’t have to worry about gaining another term.
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Think of the political reality again. If Obama backs down, will you consider voting GOP? Neither will anyone else who’s offended by his backing down.
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(The source I found from using bing: http://ncronline.org/news/catholic-hospitals-serve-one-six-patients-united-states)
I mean really, PAD. I don’t agree with all the Catholic views on contraception, but it’s fundamentally wrong to force someone to actually partake in it against their conviction.
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No one is forcing anyone to partake of anything. What they are doing is forcing their opinions on others and trying to make it That Much Harder to be a woman in control of her body. I find that offensive.
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PAD
By forcing a religious group to pay for something they are against on moral grounds (and have been consistently since the issue has been around), then yes, they are being forced to partake in it. Just because those nuns aren’t taking the birth control themselves (to use an example), if they are paying for someone else to use it, they are cooperating in it and partaking in it. And in this case, they’re doing so against their will, against their beliefs, and against their consciences. I find that offensive.
Can General Motors say “we won’t pay for/cover contraceptives in our health plans.”
Can a non-religious-nutjob hospital do so?
Why the FÙÇK can an organization that doesn’t even pay taxes get to ignore the Constitution daily?
What’s next? “We won’t cover black people/jews/insert-group-here” and you’ll let them get a way with it too?
By forcing a religious group to pay for something they are against on moral grounds
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Moral grounds? Really?
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By extension, the Catholic church considers all the following conditions to be immoral:
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Irregular or absent menstrual periods; menstrual cramps; acne; PMS; endometriosis, and Polycystic Ovary Syndrome.
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To name a few.
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All of which are routinely treated with birth control pills.
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Which they want to make sure that nobody who works for them can obtain.
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Because that’s what happens when policies affecting women are decided upon by old white men who aren’t allowed to have sex.
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PAD
“Moral grounds? Really?
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By extension, the Catholic church considers all the following conditions to be immoral:”
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Ok, well, you’re exaggerating and building up a straw man here, PAD, and I’m not going to argue you about something that isn’t true and that nobody’s arguing about. Really no purpose to that, as we’ll just end up arguing around each other.
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You can disagree with the Church’s stance on morality and ethics. You can deny the tenets of any faith or the existence of their God. You’re free to do so, and God bless you for it. But it’s not for you to determine what the Catholic Church or any others are to believe.
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And it is not for you — or the government, or overwhelming public opinion, or even other members of a religion who may disagree with their Church’s stance on any of these issues — to be able to force and regulate that a believer in those faith and morals has to act against them and violate their conscience.
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This is not just about contraception (or abortion or any other disputed issue), this is about basic religious freedom. In the title of your initial post you call for separation between Church and state. I agree with you. The state has no right to force the Church to do something it believes to be wrong.
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It’s a basic constitutional issue, and anyone who claims to support the rights listed in our constitution, but ignore them in this case, is not being honest with themselves on how much they truly believe in those rights.
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And before you argue that the Church is trying to take away women’s rights, last I checked women still have every right within the law of this country to acquire and use contraception, procure abortions, etc. Neither the government nor the Church has taken any of that away. The Church simply is against having the government tell them they must participate in these acts or provide these services.
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God bless,
Tim
“No one is forcing anyone to partake of anything.”
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Yes, they are. You are just too blinded by your ideology to see it.
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“What they are doing is forcing their opinions on others and trying to make it That Much Harder to be a woman in control of her body.”
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No. They’re not. They are part of a religious institution that does a lot of good and that under our Constitution – you know, that pesky thing that includes a First Amendment that is supposed to allow religions to practice their faith as they see fit – has a right to not betray what they see as values or ideals they want to uphold.
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This is something very simple for people thinking rationally to understand. If it is non-profit and funded by the Church, they have the right to support or not support something they view as offensive. This is not the church saying state employees should have The Pill and other contraceptives as part of their health plans. This is them saying they get to decide what they offer their employees. Every female (and male) employee is told upfront what will be in their health plan when they accept the job. So this is the government telling people they know the clinic/hospital is funded almost entirely by the church. Which may be fine to you when it’s a position you favor but that’s a horrible precedent.
“I find that offensive.”
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Of course you do. You know what I find offensive? The progressive “benevolence” that thinks it’s fine and dandy to tell everyone what to do, Constitution be dámņëd, that has people frothing at the mouth over nnoble organizations like The Komen Foundation and the Catholic Church while genuflecting at the altar of Planned parenthood in the name of “women’s health”.
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Really? A bunch of wealthy white women and elites defend the trampling of religious liberties in the name of “increased access” to “reproductive services” for “poor women” while defending an organization founded by Margaret Sanger.
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Now that would be funny if it weren’t so offensive.
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Sanger wrote in her autobiography that she founded Planned Parenthood in 1916 “to stop the multiplication of the unfit.” This, she boasted, would be “the most important and greatest step towards race betterment.” While she oversaw the mass murder of black babies, Sanger cynically recruited minority activists to front her death racket. She conspired with eugenics financier and businessman Clarence Gamble to “hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities” to sell their genocidal policies as community health and welfare services.
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Outright murder wouldn’t sell. But wrapping it under the egalitarian cloak of “women’s health” — and adorning it with the moral authority of black churches — would. Sanger and Gamble called their deadly campaign “The Negro Project.”
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How’s that for offensive?
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Mike Perry, a historian, found other writings in which Sanger attacked programs that provided “medical and nursing facilities to slum mothers” because they “facilitate the function of maternity” when “the absolute necessity is to discourage it.” In an essay included in her writing collection held by the Library of Congress, Sanger urged her abortion clinic colleagues to “breed a race of thoroughbreds.” Nationwide “birth control bureaus” would propagate the proper “science of breeding” to stop impoverished, non-white women from “breeding like weeds.”
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This is the legacy you defend while dismissing an institution that does a world of good and literally helps billions of people as being made up of “old white men who aren’t allowed to have sex.” Really?
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As for the Huckabee quote, I find it astounding that someone who has tolerated people who spew some of the most vile garbage imaginable on this board and elsewhere – even toward yourself – in the name of free speech, will then say “then you keep your dámņëd mouth shut when making sweeping statements involving religion.”
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Again, it’s a fairly common rhetorical device to say that, today, we all have a stake in the fight or we all share the pain. I think it was McCaetney who said “we’re all Americans now” after 9/11 and it would be the same as someone saying “We are all Israelis/Jews today” if something catastrophic were to befall Israel. I sure as hëll wouldn’t be offended by something like that and it puzzles me why you continue to convey animus toward Catholics when – from what I know of you – I am comfortable that you don’t feel that way.
What the Church believes, or whether it’s run by 100 old sexless farts from Italy is irrelevant. Under well-established First Amendment law, the Church can believe in the healing power of witchcraft if it so pleases. It can believe in the “abnormality” of conditions which you or I would treat with progestiglandin in a minute, and much to the relief of our patient. While they’re still uttering chants and studying the gizzards of birds.
In a word, the Church has the right to be medically foolish. Your legal solution to this problem is to ignore them. Like no doubt you (and I) do with the Jehovah’s Witnesses (and the Christian Scientists) too.
You’re allowing your judgment to be warped here by the poisoned pawn of “free” medical care sufficiently good in most circumstances to actually do you some good, and common sense tells you there is no such thing as “free” care. Someone has to provide that care. Using government to order people around, obliging them to act in ways they otherwise wouldn’t (where the rights of no third party are infringed) is the very definition of slavery. The irony in all of this is that the first freely elected black president in the history of this not always so noble country has set himself irrevocably on a course of making ņìggërš of everyone else (starting with the doctors).
Or did you believe that your physician’s cotton balls were contributed gratis?
Malcolm, Tim, and Jerome –
Would it be right for a Catholic employer to forbid his employees to use their wages to buy some product or service that violates Catholic dogma? The Catholic employer pays the wage, but it’s up to the employee to decide if he wants to use it to buy his wife a new dress, or to hire a høøkër.
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I don’t see how offering health coverage is any different. The employers supplies the coverage, but it’s up to the employee to decide if he wants to use it to get contraceptives. The “sin” is all on the employee. He is the one deciding to use the coverage to get contraceptives.
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If my Catholic uncle gives me a library card and I used it to read FANNY HILL, it’s not my uncle’s fault. He is not in any way “partaking” in my sin.
It may be that “it’s fundamentally wrong to force someone to actually partake in it against their conviction, and not only to do that, but to make them pay for it” but, there are a lot of times where we, as tax paying citizens are forced to do just that. We pay for wars, we pay pay for welfare, we pay for NEA, prisons, death penalty, prosecution of minro drug offesnes, tobacco subsidies, pay raises for congress. (To try to take a broad spectrum of contested uses of the public funds.
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Again, people keep insisting on arguing outside the parameters.
Of course, there are times when we are obliged to pay for things with taxes that we don’t support. But, the health-care debate (and this subplot in it) are not about taxes.
In a normal employment relationship, the employer and employee bargain over compensation, including wages, benefits, working conditions, grievance procedure, &c. Once the employee actually receives his wages, they are not the employer’s, nor does the employer have any claim to how they are used. If the employer offers a health-care package, and the package is without restriction, then the employer cannot, after the fact, say he opposes abortion, birth control, acne cures, or whatever, so (by the way) the benefit can’t be used for that.
Of course, the priest or bishop never will make that kind of deal to begin with. They will say, in effect, “We are medical idiots when it comes to treating ‘[i]rregular or absent menstrual periods; menstrual cramps; acne; PMS; endometriosis, and Polycystic Ovary Syndrome’ [plus whatever else they believe is an ‘immoral’ disease],” and they simply never will offer the benefit (the status ante). Jenny, it’s YOUR job then to say, “My Nuvareen (or whatever) costs $1,000 a year, and if I don’t get it in the package, I need an extra $1,000 of pay to buy it.” At that point, you have a deal or you don’t, and if you don’t, you seek other work.
That is not a denial of your rights; that’s an assertion of them.
Obamacare is completely the reverse. In the first place, it provides no care, just insurance policies. It says everyone must buy an insurance policy, which has to cover not just abortion (which I generally oppose) or contraception (which I don’t care about and clearly don’t need) but a whole host of other ailments (including, e.g., type 2 diabetes, which I don’t need either). The clear, unambiguous objective here is to socialize the care, so that the “Pauls” (those primarily health-care consumers) can force the “Peters” (those with resources to pay for the care) to pay for PAUL’S care.
If this were not the case, there would be no fight over “pre-existing conditions” (as a matter of practical reality, one cannot insure a pre-existing condition, since the chance of it occurring are 100 per cent).
Understandibly, Peter does not want to participate (for economic reasons, not religious ones). Since the Constitution provides no jurisdiction for the federal government to engage in general policing (see Amendment X), and since “regulating” “interstate commerce” must be “commerce” which SOMEHOW crosses a state line, Peter is under no legal obligation to buy the policy (NOT buying a policy not only is not commerce, it’s not anything).
The circumstance of the Catholic Church is a special condition. Here, in addition to the GENERAL denial of jurisdiction (no “commerce”), there is the SPECIFIC denial of jurisdiction (“Congress shall pass no law…”). To avoid the latter prohibition, Obama has to argue that the insurance requirement is an “unfocused” condition — a general employment regulation — which no more “disestablishes” Catholicism than a murder statute would “disestablish” cannibalism. Unfortunately, such only highlights for the reviewing court the slavery element in the legislation, which is endemic to all socialist ventures. In the final analysis, you’re still robbing Peter to pay Paul, and you’re doing that not via general taxation but as an effort to “regulate” something which (a) isn’t commerce, and (b) does not cross a state line.
That’s unconstitutional, which makes the statute void at its inception. Whatever the obligation of the Church to obey general business regulations, that’s irrelevant where there is no INTERSTATE business.
“it’s fundamentally wrong to force someone to actually partake in it against their conviction, and not only to do that, but to make them pay for it.”
And it’s fundamentally stupid to jump into a debate without even the most basic of facts on hand.
When I said “pay for it” I wasn’t referring to taxes, though that bugs me more than a little. I meant they’re forced to actually be the ones to buy contraceptives, and then distribute them.
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This is being handled so poorly by the Obama Administration that it’s almost funny. They opened themselves up for attacks, blow-back and criticisms that they never would have had to deal with if they hadn’t handled this so dámņëd ineptly.
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And the thing is even more ridiculous given that the rule in question isn’t even a solid rule. It’s still being hammered out and yet to be finalized. It’s a work in progress that could have been handled and discussed by Obama and his people so much better and now it’s creating an issue where if they keep the rule in place they hurt themselves for doing so and if they pull back on it the Republicans will play up Obama’s “defeat” on the matter and their “victory” for all it’s worth.
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This was so ineptly handled that, frankly, if it bites Obama in the ášš and hurts him it’s because he deserved it.
It’s beginning to look like the Obama Administration handled this entire thing so dámņ eptly instead. Go fig.
Meh. This is ALREADY the rule in 28 states (including Arizona).
I have no truck with an organization that conspires to enable and collude with child rapists. They have NO moral authority with me.
The difference between these state requirements and the federal requirement comes down to religious exemption. Of the states that require birth control or abortion expense be covered, there are stipulations exempting religious institutes from being required to pay for them. The religious exemptions in Obama’s plan are so strict and narrow, the majority of religious institutions don’t qualify. They are so narrow, Jesus Christ himself would not qualify for a religious exemption.
You’re entitled to your personal feelings on the Church and past events. That doesn’t change the facts of the matter that the White House is trying to force religious institutions to act outside their beliefs, which goes against the first amendment.
Um, the religious exemptions are for religious organizations, NOT for the secular organizations the religious organizations run. There is a big difference here that is being obscured, deliberately.
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This is not a problem for places like DePaul University, the nation’s largest Catholic college.
The religious exemptions in Obama’s plan are so strict and narrow, the majority of religious institutions don’t qualify. They are so narrow, Jesus Christ himself would not qualify for a religious exemption.
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Wow. That is not true. Where did you get that information?
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The Affordable Care Act does exempt Catholic churches where the majority of the staff are Catholics (ex: priests, nuns).
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The ACA does NOT exempt Catholic *businesses* like hospitals and clinics which do not employ a Catholic majority on its staff. This is just, because it’s not fair to force non-Catholic nurses and doctors to conform to the Catholic beliefs of their employer.
I’m not just talking about a secular organization that happens to slap the name Catholic on it and goes for religious exemption. Under the new directives, any religious group that doesn’t minister almost exclusively to members of its own religion do not qualify for religious exemption. So while yes, that would disqualify a secular business waving a religious banner from claiming this exemption, it goes much much deeper. A Catholic Church (to stick with the example, though it would apply to any religious group) that runs a soup kitchen or food pantry to serve their community would be disqualified unless they turn away people who are not Catholic. A Catholic school would be disqualified from religious exemption unless they kick out all non-Catholic students. While you may question just how religious a major Catholic university is, this applies equally to Catholic elementary and high schools who are trying to pass on a Catholic education to their children.
If you want to tighten the rules so secular organizations cannot claim religious exemption, fine. But taking it to the point that no one qualifies is too far.
Wow. That is not true. Where did you get that information?
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The Affordable Care Act does exempt Catholic churches where the majority of the staff are Catholics (ex: priests, nuns).
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The ACA does NOT exempt Catholic *businesses* like hospitals and clinics which do not employ a Catholic majority on its staff. This is just, because it’s not fair to force non-Catholic nurses and doctors to conform to the Catholic beliefs of their employer.
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Jennifer, re-read what’s out there. The religious exemption clause requires (among other things) that a religious employer both employ and serve people of its religion in order to qualify. So the examples in my previous comment stand.
Just my two cents, but hospitals are to the benefit of all society, and should be run accordingly. Not to the greatest benefit of a select religious organization.
“You’re entitled to your personal feelings on the Church and past events. That doesn’t change the facts of the matter that the White House is trying to force religious institutions to act outside their beliefs, which goes against the first amendment.”
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More to the point, even if this is a “cave” they still claim they have the right to do it. They’re just saying that the president is being sensitive and not exercising the right to enforce it.
“The difference between these state requirements and the federal requirement comes down to religious exemption.”
Not precisely. Although the jurisdictional prohibition of the First Amendment can apply to the Church, the primary difference between Obamacare and, e.g., Romneycare is that Massachusetts possesses “general” sovereignty and the Federal Government doesn’t. Romneycare is an equally dumb idea, and equally immoral, but legally it’s a whole different animal.
I strongly suspect that part of the reason for Obama’s decision is because out of the nine Justices who will decide on the constitutionality of the ACA (“Obamacare”) later this year, six of them are Catholic.
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That said, I cannot wait for a Scientology-affiliated organization to deny mental-health benefits on religious grounds (or for that matter, for a Jehovah’s Witness-affiliated organization to deny coverage for blood transfusions).
To clarify: Part of the reason for Obama’s decision to compromise is because of the SCOTUS’s religious makeup.
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Craig “But to say that the unity makes everybody a Catholic? That deserves ridicule.”
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No it doesn’t. It’s a fairly common rhetorical device to say that today we all have a stake in the fight or we all share the pain. I’d no more ridicule Huck over it than I would the people who said that “we” were all Americans in the wake of 9/11 or any other such comment like it.
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roger tang: “Meh. This is ALREADY the rule in 28 states (including Arizona).”
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Actually, it’s not. Amazingly, Chris Matthews of all people pointed out last night why this is a partial lie and not as the White House and the Left are selling it. I’d explain more now, but I have to be out the door in five minutes to go work some overtime.
And we weren’t all Americans after 9/11 either. This is particularly evident in how quickly and easily those who were not American who were also killed have been forgotten.
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Sorry, I’m just not much for “you’re in this with me whether you like it or not”, regardless of where it comes from or why.
Show me one iota of proof that those who were not American and who were also killed “have been forgotten”.
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It’s been repeated multiple times the number of nations of origin and races, etc were “represented” in the attack.
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But it doesn’t matter, because on that day we truly were all Americans. For those who feel America represents an ideal – which is the reason all those diverse people were here in the first place – this is hardly an insult.
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But yet again, you find another reason to bìŧçh about something innocuous.
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Yeah, well then take it like this. Huck wasn’t talking to you. Generally, when one uses that turn of phrase, they’re addressing a like minded group of people. Going to, again, the 9/11 example; when that was said by some world leaders, they were speaking to and on behalf of the like minded listening to them. Somehow, I doubt that they said that while seriously believing that OBL and crew considered themselves “Americans” that day. Huck was essentially talking to his audience and the people who also opposed this idea.
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It’s a rhetorical bit that works fine for the speaker and the people being spoken to who agree with the speaker. It really isn’t something that makes the speaker or the listeners dumb or deserving of ridicule.
People can like Obama or hate Obama, but you know what they love?
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Guts.
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Here’s President Obama’s compromise: contraceptive coverage to be offered directly from insurers. Health insurance companies “will be required to reach out directly and offer her contraceptive care free of charge. The religious institutions will not have to pay for it..”
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I’m cool with this.
While I agree with Jim “Spooon” Henry above — we don’t get to decide how our tax dollars are spent, deciding what we do and don’t ay for based on our beliefs — I’m okay with the compromise. If it enabled women to get birth control *and* placates the people who have a moral problem with some types of birth control, then it sounds like everyone wins.
And who pays the insurance company? At my employer, I pay a co-pay and a percentage for the covered procedure and the insurance company pays the rest, but my employer pays the insurance company. This is a distinction without a difference.
And who pays the insurance company? At my employer, I pay a co-pay and a percentage for the covered procedure and the insurance company pays the rest, but my employer pays the insurance company. This is a distinction without a difference.
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Do the math, George.
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A Nuvaring prescription costs $1000/year.
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A baby costs $22,000+ to deliver.
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The insurer will save over $21,000 for each woman of child-bearing age who chooses to use contraception.
Jennifer, I think you’re misinterpreting what George is saying. And what George is saying is correct: if the insurer offer a plan that includes birth control, and a Catholic business/hospital/whatever contributes to the premiums for that plan, then they are in effect also contributing for the payment of that contraceptive.
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When you get down to it, if the Catholics don’t want to have to still be paying for contraceptives, then they’ll have to get plans that don’t offer to pay for them. But, what are the odds of that happening, when contraceptives are so widespread? So, on the other hand, I’m not sure if what George is saying really matters, because they’ve probably been paying for them all along anyways.
Jennifer, I think you’re misinterpreting what George is saying. And what George is saying is correct: if the insurer offer a plan that includes birth control, and a Catholic business/hospital/whatever contributes to the premiums for that plan, then they are in effect also contributing for the payment of that contraceptive.
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If that’s what George truly thinks, he is misinformed.
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The Catholic business will still have the choice to use health coverage that does not cover birth control.
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If this happens, however, the insurance company is mandated to reach out to that worker and offer free birth control under a separate plan.
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Source:
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The way it works is this: Insurers will create policy not including contraceptive coverage in the contract for religious organizations that object. Second, the same insurance company must simultaneously offer contraceptive coverage to all employees, and can not charge an additional premium. This provides free contraceptive coverage to women. The reason this works for insurance companies is because offering contraception is cost-neutral and cost-effective; companies realize the tremendous cost benefits of spacing pregnancies, and limiting unintended pregnancies, planned pregnancies and health benefits of contraception.
Jennifer,
Craig is correct that I meant that the insurance company is still paid premiums by the religious organization so they are still paying for something that is an anathema to their religious beliefs. Furthermore, employers like the archdiocese and many Catholic hospitals here in St. Louis are self-insured, so the Church is the insurance company.
Your example citing the difference between the cost of birth control and delivering a baby is only relevant if you can put a price on your principles.
And regarding the exchange with Darin above: I suspect Darin regrets what he says was a sarcastic post he made 7(!) years ago. But regardless of that post that Jerry consistently holds over his head, it does not negate everything he posts. When he makes a good point, it is disingenuous to ignore it because of that.
The problem that this contraceptive issue illustrates is the entire problem with the government forcing employers to provide health care. Health care is not a right like freedom of speech or religion. It is commodity and commodities cost money. No one at Catholic hospitals is being denied contraception currently. They are being denied contraception that someone else pays for. The company that my wife worked for did not include contraception in its insurance plan and that company was a electrical parts distributor.
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George Haberberger,
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“And regarding the exchange with Darin above: I suspect Darin regrets what he says was a sarcastic post he made 7(!) years ago. But regardless of that post that Jerry consistently holds over his head, it does not negate everything he posts. When he makes a good point, it is disingenuous to ignore it because of that.”
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George, if it had a been a one off thing and just an odd statement from 7 years ago, then it wouldn’t be something that anyone, myself included, cared about. However, it wasn’t just a one off. It’s just easier to point to his gloating post before he bugged off for a while than it is posting a link to a thread from then or as recent as 2011 and telling one to read through the entire thing.
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Darin would pop in ever so often and play the exact game that he outlines in his little gloating post that I cite. People would stop talking to him at all and he would disappear for a long while and come back to start over again.
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The last break he took was a rather long one. It didn’t stop him from diving right back into his same games last year when he came back again. In several cases, he stated point blank that certain politicians never said something or allowed their people to say something that they did in fact say or that they allowed their people to say. Then video links were provided showing that the politicians in question and their people did in fact say what he claimed was never said.
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Did he blame faulty memory? No. Did he say that he made an honest mistake and missed something? No. He declared that it was hilarious seeing the flimsy attempts of the people here to desperately grasp for anything to claim he was wrong… and went on to say the same things again despite video evidence to the contrary.
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Jon Kyl told a lie (interestingly given the present topic) about Planned Parenthood and the number of abortions they perform on the floor of the congress and during official debate. People here were discussing the fact that Kyl told a lie and that his office sent out an official statement that flat said that, yeah, he meant to say what he did but that it was never intended to be taken as a factual statement.
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Darin comes along and claims it wasn’t a lie. Why? Because blacks in New York have a higher than average rate of abortions. It had nothing to do with what Kyl said and it really had nothing to do with Planned Parenthood specifically. He then started declaring that everyone else’s problem was that only he knew what the definition of a lie was.
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It got to the point that the hardcore conservatives here who hate abortion where asking him to get the hëll off of their side of the issue in the discussion.
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And he finally overreached and started repeating a few things he had a few years earlier like declaring that this blog needed his presence so that because everyone here needed his truths. Things clicked in my brain and I remembered some of his shtick and went back to where I thought I remembered it from pulled his little gloat from where he bugged off the prior time.
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He’s played this same game here for years. He throws stuff out, occasionally sane but more often than not over the top, and people respond. Once they respond, he just pretends that they have put forward no facts (even when they provide documentation and links) or that they have said nothing and just repeats the same crap while turning it up a notch each time. It’s all he’s done here on and off for well over seven or eight years.
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He’s a troll. He’s an admitted troll. And pretty much everyone here who has tried to engage him in discussion has found that out.
Jerry,
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Wow. Apparently it requires more dedication to the backstory to post here than it does to read the X-Men, and I gave up on that years ago.
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Frankly, I just don’t have the time, (or the inclination), to devote that much effort to posting to a comic writer’s blog.
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From now on I’m only going to post my opinion about the current subject if I really think I have something to contribute. Darin, you’re on your own.
Both the Catholic Health Association and Planned Parenthood are A-OK with the compromise. That’s good enough for me.
Yeah, I’m sorry Peter, but I don’t see where Obama folded on this. I would agree with you saying that Obama folds under pressure, that churches that want to tell the government how to do things should give up their tax-exempt status, but I don’t see it here.
Health insurance companies offering contraceptive care directly to the insured, the religious institutions not having to pay for it…if all of Obama’s compromises were like this I’d be happy. And it’s well thought out and respects everyone’s rights.
Here’s President Obama’s compromise: contraceptive coverage to be offered directly from insurers. Health insurance companies “will be required to reach out directly and offer her contraceptive care free of charge. The religious institutions will not have to pay for it..”
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Some “compromise.” Instead of actually, you know, having people talk things over with the parties involved, Obama’s idea of compromise is to simply order insurance companies to pick up the tab. “Hey, Church, how’s this? We’ll just tell the insurance companies to cut the final check — like they were going to anyway. We’ll just pretend that the premiums you pay them won’t be applied to this, and they’ll pretend to eat the costs. It’s all just accounting smoke and mirrors, but it’ll look good. How’s that sound?”
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Insurance companies: “Excuse me? What did you just volunteer us for, Mr. President?”
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“Don’t worry, guys, just sneak the costs into the bill somewhere and it’ll all be cool.”
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And what is this “free” you speak of? In my world, There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Those pills ain’t being çráppëd by unicorns, they have an actual cost involved. What Obama is doing is saying we’ll just hide who actually foots the bill so no one has to feel bad about paying for it.
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And if it goes like it usually does, then they’ll be paid for two or three times over, with the smartest player pocketing the difference. (My money’s on the insurance company, since Obama’s volunteered them to rig the paperwork.)
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I’m cool with this.
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Color me unsurprised.
“Here’s President Obama’s compromise: contraceptive coverage to be offered directly from insurers. Health insurance companies ‘will be required to reach out directly and offer her contraceptive care free of charge. The religious institutions will not have to pay for it..’
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“I’m cool with this.”
Until one of two things happens: (1) The insurance companies, with a wink and a nod, secretly pass the cost back to the Church (in which case the bishop will realize sooner or later that he’s been had); or, (2) the insurance companies, to avoid the federal jurisdiction, reconstitute themselves as, e.g., State Farm of California or GEICO of Illinois (in which case the insurance providers will opt out of assuming the cost, since they no longer are selling insurance across a state line).
It is beyond the scope of the thread or the post to turn the discussion into a quest for the origin of “rights.” I gather you believe that you are a “spirit” trapped in a female body, and since “rights” are matters attendant to spirit, yours can’t be less than those of a man. Strangely, could you pin him down, Newt Gingrich might be obliged to agree. One also could argue that rights are fundamental characteristics of creatures of the earth, wherefore they CAN’T be independent of your femaleness (which is the polar opposite). One also could argue that rights are structural, i.e., conditions precedent within a democratic polity, or that they don’t exist at all (sovereignty knows no limits save those it imposes on itself, and “must” is not a word one uses in the presence of a prince).
We can’t come close even to sketching the parameters of that one.
What we can agree on is that, now that Obama has his “compromise” position, he will have to back it up somehow. The Church will not voluntarily acquiesce to the regulation, no matter what its dimension.
So, what next? Do we close the clinics? Do we make them available ONLY to Catholics? Do we force them to fire anyone who isn’t Catholic?
What of the services? Financial dragooning into paying for abortions would be bad enough. Will Catholic hospitals eventually have to offer non-Catholics abortions? What doctor is going to perform them in this facility? What doctor who would perform them will be allowed into the facility? Or will we, as in the desegregation cases, just send in the U.S. Marshals? What happens when the marshals are resisted? Do we murder a priest? Beat him to death like Jerzy Popieluszko?
No one is being terribly prescient here.
I was in Solidarnosc for 11 years (you remember us — we overthrew Communism in Eastern Europe). The Catholic Church LED that fight. You think Obama can make credible threats to these people? They will eat him alive!
Liberals love to say: “We’ll force you to do it!” OK; Force me to do it!
I wonder if Obama may have made the initial decision knowing he’d have to compromise with the second decision.
He knows the upcoming election – like most – is a fight for the independents in the middle. Independents like compromise.
He got the conservatives to breathe their fire over an attack on religion many in the middle, and most of the left, wouldn’t view as an attack on religion.
Then then provided a compromise that assured the women employed at these religious hospitals, charities, etc would get their coverage, just offered by the insurers instead. So everyone should be happy.
But the Conservatives are left to either admit it’s a fair compromise – which they are loathe to do in an election year – or argue that these women shouldn’t receive the healthcare from anyone – which is a position that will alienate them further from many.
As opposed to a stupid mistake, it could work to his advantage, and could even have been planned.
I wonder if Obama may have made the initial decision knowing he’d have to compromise with the second decision.
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If 2 steps forward, 1 step back was his strategy, then I’ll just quote Jerry from above:
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“This is being handled so poorly by the Obama Administration that it’s almost funny. They opened themselves up for attacks, blow-back and criticisms that they never would have had to deal with if they hadn’t handled this so dámņëd ineptly.”
It has not worked to his advantage and if somehow it does it will be an accident. No one could be that stupid/brilliant.
It has worked to Obama’s advantage, and it very plausibly wasn’t an accident. It’ll be fun to see what the GOP’s next move will be.
“It’ll be fun to see what the GOP’s next move will be.”
If I were a good Catholic like Rick Santorum, I’d write the Pope and advise him to bull the law. Because it’s political suicide for Obama so to declare war on the Church.
You know what I think is really bothering Peter about this? I’ll tell you. I think he can not believe the GIFT that President Obama gave Rick Santorum here.
I don’t think this “gift” to Santorum is bothering PAD at all, but I’m sure as Hades certain that it’s driving the Romney campaign nuts.
I’m not a fan of the compromise, but at least he made sure women can get birth control at an affordable price, which was the goal.
My big worry ultimately is stuff like this will either just push Santorum into the nomination or force who ever wins the nomination into Santorum as VP
@Peter David-
or what Obama should’ve said, “I’m sorry for the government trying to force products down your throat without any authority granted by the constitution to do so and that you never even wanted in the first place and excuse me and my nazi compadres for being such áššhølëš!”
That this has even gotten to the stage where people are discussing separation of church and state and tax-exempt statuses is so ridiculous…it should have never even gotten to this point in the first place…
What an abysmal failure our government is becoming!
“Give a mouse a cookie and it will want a glass of milk to go with it.” Once it gets the “glass of milk”, the cookie will invariably be finished first leading to the inevitable request for yet another “cookie” while the “glass of milk” is getting lower and lower. The cycle never ends.
Catholic leaders and, by extension, conservatives got themselves a “cookie”. How long do you suppose it will be before they are going to want a “glass of milk”?
By cookie, you mean the right of a religious institution not to act outside of it’s beliefs in accordance? Yeah, what will those crazy Constitution lovers want next…
By cookie, you mean the right of a religious institution not to act outside of it’s beliefs in accordance?
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As long as the Catholic Church builds and runs those hospitals with government money, those hospitals should follow government law.
Funny, Liam. I was thinking of this same example, in the opposite direction. The Obama administration is making a grab for a cookie, the ability to ignore the Constitution of the US by regulating and forcing religious groups and Churches to act against their faith, morals and consciences.
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Once they get that cookie, what other religious cookies are up for grabs? And what glass of milk in the constitution might they reach for next?
Out of curiosity, what is your opinion concerning the previous administrations’ grabbings for the ignore-the-law cookie?
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I just find this all hysterical. Both sides are getting so red faced and looking so foolish.
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The first problem with how this was framed is that it would not have made Catholics do anything that weren’t doing already. I know a lot of Catholics and knew quite a few “good Catholic girls” growing up and they were all using contraception. And a lot of the various stats floating around out there on the matter back the idea that a lot of practicing Catholics are using some form of contraception. The number being thrown around a lot right now is that 98% of Catholic women are using or have used birth control. That may be a wee bit high, but probably not off by much.
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I also find it hilarious that this was played up as something that was going to force the Catholic Churches or businesses to do anything they didn’t want to do. I’ve been looking up some stuff about this on and off all day and from what I can see of this regulation, you only had to provide contraception coverage if you wanted to use an insurance policy purchased from the exchange that’s being set up in 2014. If the businesses wanted to, they could out together Consumer Operated and Oriented Plans that would not fall under the guidelines of the plans that will be offered through the exchange.
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I’m also amazed that the Catholic Church and the Republicans can say all of this with a straight face and not think that they look a bit like buffoons right now.
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This is the Catholic Church we’re talking about here. This is the church that’s made news headlines in recent years for threatening to invoke excommunication against prominent politicians (usually Democrats) because they would not vote on legislation based on Church doctrine and belief.
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These are the Republicans and the conservative talkers. These are the people that use the name “God” as every third word when talking about why we have to pass some bills and laws (especially abortion related bills and laws.) These are the guys who will (and have in the past) tell you point blank that there is no separation between church and state in the Constitution. These are the same people who will tell you that we have to run our country and our lives in accord with the will of God and the Bible. These are the same people who will tell you that having the phrase “under God” added to Pledge was not unconstitutional despite the fact that the how and why of it being there is in direct conflict with the same part of the constitution that they’re howling about right now.
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Seriously? Now the separation of church and state is real and important to you? Now you want to act like it means something to you? And you expect to not look like total hypocrites?
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Yeaaahhhhhh…
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Hey, Tea Party supporters, here’s one of your pet candidates questioning whether there’s a separation of church and state in the US Constitution.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYUvDjLPcwY
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And what happened in the days that followed that? She repeated the idea that it didn’t exist and she had dámņëd near every Right Wing talker out there saying that she was right.
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So now it’s important to you?
Now the separation of church and state is real and important to you?
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Kind of like how suddenly Americans’ civil rights are suddenly important again, eh?
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I am a little curious about one angle on this that I’m not yet seeing discussed in many places.
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My wife’s family is Catholic. The members of that family in my general age range (my wife’s sisters and cousins) are mostly females. My wife also has a female cousin and a niece who are just entering college. I also have several female coworkers who are fairly regular, church going Catholics.
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In the last year-plus, I’ve seen many of them reacting to what seems almost like a Republican war on women’s reproductive rights. In the last day I’ve talked to several of them about this latest flap and interestingly, while leery about what Obama may have been doing since they didn’t have any solid info at the time, they seemed to all be bothered or downright disgusted by some of the comments and ideas coming out of the Presidents opposition in this.
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For all of the talk about how this is going to hurt Obama with the religious set, I’m wondering how much the last year-plus capped with this will hurt the Republicans with the female voter base.
Depends on how precisely it is presented, but it probably won’t be costless.
Birth control is not a true issue in the United States of America; most recognize the genetic difference between the fertilized and unfertilized egg and therefore see no sin simply in blocking the union. It’s the Catholic heirarchy which has a problem with that.
But, Griswold led directly to Roe, so if the focus is there, or if the focus is kept narrowly on the slavery element in Obamacare, the issue more likely will divide women than unite them against the Republicans.
Clearly, a lot could depend on precisely what the Supreme Court says this summer.
Here’s my take.
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Any buisness (religious or not) that employs people should have to provide coverage for everybody in the manner set forth by the law.
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If a religion or religous organization or buisness wants to preach its various beliefs and reccomendations on how a person in their employ should behave, they are free to do so. Be it use birth control or not.
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But that employee should be free to choose to follow that advice or not. I.E. if they want birth-control they should get it.
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It should not be the employers choice, once they hire an employee who does not share their same views.
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If the catholic buisnesses don’t want to pay for birth-control then they better be dámņ sure they don’t hire workers (or worker’s families that they may also be covering) who do.
Let’s cut right to the ugly truth.
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The Catholic Church owns 18% of all hospitals and 20% of all hospital beds in the US. And they provide outstanding care — the one time in my life I had to be hospitalized, it was in a Catholic hospital — and I’m an agnostic with no love of the Church. The Church has declared in the past (when the subject was abortion) that should the government attempt to force those hospitals to violate Catholic principles and beliefs (which are NOT set by majority rule, but the established Church hierarchy), they will not only shut down the hospital(s) in question, but also level the buildings to keep them from being re-opened under new management for what they consider a grave sin.
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That’s their big gun. The only alternative the Obama administration would be to seize the hospitals under eminent domain (or, more likely, executive order — Obama seems to like doing things by simple decree, examples available upon request) or lose all those hospitals and their beds.
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That’s the end game if no settlement is reached.
That’s the end game if no settlement is reached.
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Big whoop.
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Catholic-run hospitals are built and supported with >secular taxpayer dollars, not collections from churchgoer plates on Sundays.
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Our government can just find another group to redirect those taxpayer dollars towards health services for the public.
Interesting “opinion column,” Jennifer. I find myself asking questions that the author doesn’t address.
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Just how much of the hospitals in question’s funding comes from the feds? My suspicion is not a determining amount, as the church ran hospitals for a long time without government support.
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Did the author notice that the citing of the Catholic Charities/gay adoption Illinois fight shows a very disturbing precedent? The Church, when it lost its fight, simply got out of the adoption biz entirely. They shut down their entire program rather than violate their religious beliefs. By that example, they could simply shut down every single operation that would be required to comply with the contraception rules. Would that be a net gain or loss for the nation? I’m leaning towards big loss.
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Back to the hospitals. The Catholic authorities proclaimed a few years ago that if they were ordered to perform abortions at their hospitals, they’d shut them down. And then, to make certain that the abortions weren’t performed at those facilities, they’d raze them. They would do everything they could to keep the abortions from taking place at the hospital they built and ran.
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I’m not arguing that they’re right to do so. I’m saying that they have the right to do so. And the pretty much the only way to stop them would be for the government to seize the hospitals in question under Eminent Domain.
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They’re drawing their lines in the sand. “This far, and no further.” I sincerely believe they’re not bluffing. Further, I sincerely believe that they have the legal right of it, under our Constitution.
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So while I disagree with their position, I have to respect it. And I have to defend it. Because it’s not about whether I agree or even like the Catholic Church, but because they’re in the right. They have the right to be wrong.
Considering that the head of the Catholic Health Association, the organization that actually runs the hospitals in question, is on board with the Obama compromise, your doomsday scenario isn’t going to happen, Jay.
Sasha, that worthy gentleman’s job is not to set Church policy, it’s to interpret and apply it. Should the actual heads of the Church decide they aren’t on board with the deal, he can either go along with their decision or quit.
And one more point: as I understand it (not that I agree with it), the official Catholic Church’s position on life is that it begins at the moment of fertilization. Sperm and ova are not human beings; a zygote is — even before it’s implanted. If it doesn’t implant, then it’s essentially a very early miscarriage — God has chosen that it not come to term. So those forms of birth control that prevent implantation are, in the eyes of the Church, no different than an abortion — and just as evil.
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Again, I don’t agree with them, but that’s their belief and I respect their right to hold to their belief. And the Church is not saying, in this case, “make it illegal.” All they’re saying is “we won’t pay for it or support it in any way.” But as we saw with the Susan B. Komen/Planned Parenthood dustup, simply refusing to support something isn’t an option when it comes to such causes — you’re not allowed to stay neutral. You’re either with them or you’re against them.
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Gee, where have I heard that before?
Yes, but we all know they’d love to make it illegal, if they could get away with it.
But as we saw with the Susan B. Komen/Planned Parenthood dustup, simply refusing to support something isn’t an option when it comes to such causes — you’re not allowed to stay neutral.
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Komen did stay neutral for years. They could have stayed neutral for many more years, but they didn’t. Komen chose to get political and muck around with the health of poor women by denying them access to breast screenings. They did this by withdrawing the funds for those breast screenings from the only health provider in town for those women.
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“Komen did stay neutral for years. They could have stayed neutral for many more years, but they didn’t. Komen chose to get political and muck around with the health of poor women by denying them access to breast screenings. “
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Not surprising given some of the details to come out in the last week. I already knew Karen Handel’s history. Failed Republican candidate and Sarah Palin backed Tea Party critter who ran for governor of Georgia in 2010 on a platform of, among other things, being against abortion and making statements that she was very much against Planned Parenthood. But now it seems that Ari Fleischer, Bush Administration vet who is against abortion and against Planned Parenthood, has been an unofficial adviser to Nancy Brinker and will not deny, but dances around admitting, that he helped recommend Karen Handel for the job that she got and then used to push for Planned parenthood to get its funding yanked.
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So, no, in retrospect it’s not surprising at all. Still, from the “You Have to Laugh” department, as far as being publicly stupid on the matter of Planned Parenthood and having hissy fits about them, no one else right now beats John Fleming, Republican Representative from Louisiana and Tea Party Congressman. Representative Fleming read an internet news piece on Planned Parenthood’s brand new, $8 Billion (not a typo on my part) medical complex that they themselves dubbed the “Abortionplex” and would be a “state-of-the-art facility, which features an IMAX movie theater as well as multiple fetus incinerators.”
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The piece quoted Planned Parenthood reps who talked about how this Abortionplex and “new state-of-the-art fetus-killing facility” would allow them to offer “quick, easy, in-and-out abortions to all women, and represents a bold reinvention of the group’s long-standing mission and values.” It quoted the rep as they told reporters that they would still focus on the other things that Planned Parenthood has always done, but that this new Abortionplex would allow them to “devote our full attention to what has always been our true passion: abortion.”
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He was amazingly alarmed by some of the quotes such as these.
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“The Abortionplex’s high-tech machinery is capable of terminating one pregnancy every three seconds,” Richards added. “That’s almost a million abortions every month. We’re so thrilled!”
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“We really want abortion to become a regular part of women’s lives, especially younger women who have enough fertile years ahead of them to potentially have dozens of abortions,” said Richards, adding that the Abortionplex would provide shuttle service to and from most residences, schools, and shopping malls in the region. “Our hope is for this facility to become a regular destination where a woman in her second trimester can whoop it up at karaoke and then kick back while we vacuum out the contents of her uterus.”
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And the thing that really made him snap was that the whole press conference was held with the spokesperson standing under a banner emblazoned with Planned Parenthood’s new slogan, “No Life Is Sacred.”
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Now, I’ve quoted from this article quite a bit and did so for a reason (although there’s about three times as much just like this that I didn’t quote.) I did it for a reason. You, Jennifer, and most of the other sane posters here have likely read those quotes bits and thought that this could only be an elaborate gag. Those quotes, let alone the price tag on the facility, should scream to anyone with two IQ points to rub together that something just isn’t quite right about this. And, in case there was any doubt, the source of the reporting should have been a major clue.
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http://www.theonion.com/articles/planned-parenthood-opens-8-billion-abortionplex,20476/
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Apparently, not enough of a clue for Fleming and his staff. He went off the rails about it and even posted it (now deleted) to his Facebook page and urged followers to read about Planned Parenthood’s “wholesale” approach to providing abortion.
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So, insane quotes, insane story information, now writer byline, no other news reports on this thing anywhere despite a large “press conference” held to announce the Abortionplex and a web address that not only would tip off a blind man that it was a joke, but a webpage with links to other stories that would tip off a blind man in a coma that it was a joke.
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And he fell for it. Oh, and what makes someone falling for this even funnier? Before he was an elected Republican, he was known as John C. Fleming, M.D., a family physician from Minden, LA. Yeah, he was a doctor and couldn’t pick up on the clues.
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This is your Tea Party Republican, anti-abortion elected official. Someone who gets so unhinged at the sight of the word abortion that they lose all common sense and suddenly have an instant IQ drop to a degree that takes them into negative numbers. Given that this is an example of one of the ones that they would deem good enough to elect, is it any wonder that the one who failed at her election bid isn’t bright enough to figure out that she wouldn’t be able to pull off grinding her personal ax against Planned parenthood without looking foolish, catching blow-back and maybe stain the name of and damaging an institution that does some good? Hëll, do you think she even cared that she might hurt Komen so long as she could hurt Planned Parenthood?
Again, I don’t agree with them, but that’s their belief and I respect their right to hold to their belief. And the Church is not saying, in this case, “make it illegal.” All they’re saying is “we won’t pay for it or support it in any way.”
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That may sound good on paper, but the problem is that for some people, $$$ == access.
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If a woman cannot afford to pay for birth control out-of-pocket, she’s not going to be able to “choose” to use birth control.
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The same goes for male non-Catholic staff with female dependents like a wife and teenage daughters. If that family can’t afford birth control out-of-pocket, they can’t “choose” to use birth control, either.
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The bishops want to financially force their staff to conform to Catholic beliefs, even though the money used to pay that staff comes from secular taxpayer dollars. That’s not fair.
I recall seeing somewhere that 1 in 6 health-care dollars comes from the federal government, as part of some program or another. These would include, e.g., Medicare and any portion of Medicaid the government picks up, WIC, &c., all paid for by Catholics and non-Catholics alike, whether they want to participate or not. Which all goes to show why the federal government shouldn’t be in health care at all. It’s not government, and it inevitably leads to conflicts over what concept of morality will govern public determination of what is and what isn’t “therapy.” Not to mention that taxation is “theft” (in the wertfrei sense).
“Fairness” is a word which cuts many ways, depending upon the standard one employs. I see little justification in allowing government, under the banner of mere “fairness,” to justify theft. It’s certainly not fair to use the illusion of taxation to divert massive amounts of personal wealth away from private health-care purchasers, then use dispensation of such “taxes” to substitute, for the private decisions of citizens, the public morality (or want thereof) of bureaucrats.
The argument against “religious” use of such public funds has vitality only when we DON’T consider the real process by which all of those funds are created. After all, of itself, no piece of paper makes robbery legal and resistance to robbery illegal.
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Rockasockee: “or what Obama should’ve said, “I’m sorry for the government trying to force products down your throat without any authority granted by the constitution to do so and that you never even wanted in the first place and excuse me and my nazi compadres for being such áššhølëš!””
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And what you should have done before posting was checked the facts rather than embracing the talking points that make you feel good.
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Fact #1 – A huge number of Catholics in America actively use contraceptives.
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Fact #2 – A fair number of Catholic run businesses already provide health insurance plans that include contraceptives.
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Fact #3 – This wasn’t even finalized policy at this point. It was still being hammered out and would have been debated and tweaked over months. That’s why it was so easy to alter it this morning.
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Fact #4 – No church run business wold have to offer insurance to their employees that included free contraception if they did not want to. This rule would have only applied to insurance purchased through the exchange being set up for 2014. If they didn’t want it, the businesses could set up other insurance through various available ways.
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Fact #5 – Your Nazi comments? You’re an f’n moron.
Fact #1: The Catholic Church ain’t a democracy, it’s a hierarchy. It’s actually pretty close to a monarchy.
Fact #2: The difference is a matter of coercion. Plus, the proximity to what the Church considers its core interests.
Fact #3: That’s exactly the best time to fight a proposal — before it gets hammered out and tweaked. Which, sadly, wasn’t done with ObamaCare; as then-Speaker Pelosi said, we wouldn’t find out what was in the bill until it was passed into law.
Fact #4: The insurance policies outside the exchanges have to meet federal standards to qualify as acceptable outside the exchanges. The whole point here was that the contraception angle was being considered as mandatory in those outside-the-exchanges plans.
Fact #5: Rock is, indeed, being a hysterical moron. How fitting that he is being called out by another hysterical moron.
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Jay, let me save you some time and Peter some bandwidth. Don’t bother, I’m not reading it.
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I thought I was fairly clear before, but apparently not. I really have no interest in discussing anything with you in political threads. Where politics are concerned, you’ve long ago proven yourself to be far more often than not a chronically factually challenged annoyance who is capable of little more than regurgitating talking points and playing silly games where you show outrage at Democrats for actions you won’t comment on or even defend when done by Republicans. You are incapable of intelligent and honest discussion or debate where politics are concerned.
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You are a waste of time and bandwidth, but feel free to waste bandwidth without me.
That’s fine with me, Jerry. Truth to tell, I have little interest in discussing things with you — I know you’ll just get all snotty and condescending and ignore the actual issues to engage in petty insults.
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No, my intention is to talk past you and give the readers some indications that you’re not only completely wrong on things, but incredibly arrogant and insulting in the process. Some idiocies simply cannot go unchallenged, out of fear that someone actually might take them (and you) seriously.
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That’s why I pretty much ignore your insults and whatnot — they do a fine job of showing your character; they don’t need spotlighting. But your spouting bigotry and other idiotic claptrap… that could actually cause serious harm.
And this is part of the reason why a great many people on the outside looking in, wish the U.S. would finally wake up and tell religious zealots (of all stripes) to go away and stop bothering them. Not holding our breath for sanity to take over any time soon, however.
The Slate has a very interesting take on the subject.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/02/10/obama_riled_up_republicans_on_contraception_and_then_delivers_a_knock_out_punch_.html?wpisrc=slate_river
Not sure i completely agree, but they do make a point where having the republicans attacking access contraception will hurt them when it comes to women especially young women who are moderate.
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Interesting. I asked basically the same question, whether this will end up hurting the combined with the last year’s actions on contraception and women’s reproductive rights and services, above.
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http://www.peterdavid.net/index.php/2012/02/10/see-this-is-why-theres-supposed-to-be-a-separation-between-church-and-state/comment-page-1/#comment-649507
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I do disagree with this though.
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“That’s the nitty-gritty. The fun part of this is that Obama just pulled a fast one on Republicans. He drew this out for two weeks, letting Republicans work themselves into a frenzy of anti-contraception rhetoric, all thinly disguised as concern for religious liberty, and then created a compromise that addressed their purported concerns but without actually reducing women’s access to contraception, which is what this has always been about. (As Dana Goldstein reported in 2010, before the religious liberty gambit was brought up, the Catholic bishops were just demanding that women be denied access and told to abstain from sex instead.)”
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I’m sorry, but Obama and his team are just not that bright and no where near that crafty. If anything, he’s handled this so badly that it’ll take a good bit of luck on his part to have something good come out of it for him.
The Catholic Church’s position on contraceptives is moronic, but yeah, they do have a right to be moronic, and I defend their right to be moronic.
But what really bothers me is the hypocrisy of it. Christians and/or Conservatives are never so eager to stand up and defend the rights of other groups.
It’s pretty simple.
You play in the big kids’ yard (providing insurance for your employees), you play by the big kids’ rules.
Don’t like it? Don’t employ people.
Well, you just can’t please some people. And if you’re a member of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, you’re probably going to oppose this, regardless, until your dying breath.
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Apparently even a majority of Catholics think birth control should be covered. But don’t tell the old white guys. I’d tell ’em to go and get laid, but that’s part of the problem in the first place.
Wow, it’s even worse than I thought:
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McConnell: GOP Will Fight To Let ANY Employer Deny Birth Control Coverage
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/02/mcconnell-gop-will-push-to-let-any-employer-deny-contraception-coverage.php?ref=fpa
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Dear GOP, if you didn’t realize it already, you are a walking, talking, worthless fûçkìņg joke who doesn’t represent ANYBODY these days.
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Yeah, I saw this but was going to leave it alone. It felt a bit like beating a dead horse. Sadly, the dead horse isn’t the topic but rather the GOP. The unfortunate thing with the GOP right now, as I said in the Jehovah’s Witness thread, is that this is all that they have left.
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They can’t really run convincingly on fiscal matters. All they’re offering are the same things they offered when they were in control for the majority of the last decade and that ended with the massive crash that we’re in now.
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They can’t run on the military and the war on terror. They were in control for the majority of the last decade and they gave us mismanaged wars and bad ideas. And, honestly, the last few years of the war on terror have looked like they’ve been fought a lot smarter and more effectively than the previous years from this century.
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Their two big guns have been stripped from them and replaced with small arms and their new ammo has a lot of dud rounds mixed in. All they have left that they can still make a big noise with is pushing fear on social issues.
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It’s really rather unfortunate. I actually liked the Republican Party at one point in my life. I could actually say that they had a lot of things that were supportable. But the last 15 o 20 years has just been a descent into extremism and madness for them as a national party. Hopefully they’ll be smart enough to reevaluate a bit and maybe much back a bit toward their saner years before they bottom out completely.
They can’t run on the military and the war on terror.
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But that doesn’t stop them from issuing gems like this:
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“Ladies and gentleman, we have a president who not only apologizes for America, but consistently makes our country less safe,” Santorum told the 750 people gathered here for a Lincoln Day Dinner on Friday.
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Facepalm. Then facepalm again.
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Well, if the GOP thought that this was a great weapon to play up against Obama, they appear to have thought wrong.
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Fox News has Obama ahead of Romney (47% to 39%) and quite comfortably ahead of Santorum (48% to 38%) in the key swing states that will decide the election (CO, FL, IA, NV, NM, NC, OH, PA, VA, & WI).
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CNN has Obama running ahead (but with tighter leads) in general election match-ups against Romney (51% to 46%) and Santorum (52% to 45%). CNN also has Obama’s approval rating reaching 50%, its highest level in months.
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A number of other polls are showing much the same thing right now a well.
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Interestingly, Obama seems to be polling better now than before this all started. Still almost a full year from the actual vote and, duh, anything can happen, but this is an interesting development when you look at some of the political “conventional wisdom” thrown around the last two weeks.
I saw a comparison to the birth control ‘debate’ and the Terry Schiavo situation a few years ago, which also blew up in the GOP’s face.
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Not to mention weren’t people here making comments about how Obama didn’t focus on jobs early on, but instead on the health care bill, and how that should be held against him?
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And yet, apparently jobs are the last thing on the minds of many Republicans.
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Btw, PAD, in response to your Twitter comment:
“This just in: Chris Christie announces to the right wingers that he’s running for President in 2016 by blocking gay rights in 2012.”
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He can scream it at the top of his lungs, but he’s going to be even further on the wrong side of this issue in another 4 years, and this will certainly be remembered.
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“Not to mention weren’t people here making comments about how Obama didn’t focus on jobs early on, but instead on the health care bill, and how that should be held against him?
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And yet, apparently jobs are the last thing on the minds of many Republicans.”
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Primarily me I think. I was pointing out a part of how I would go after Obama in that national campaign and I still think it can be made a factor against him depending on who gets the GOP nod. However, I also pointed out that some of how you would effectively make such an argument would be by playing on appearances rather than reality.
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The Republicans in congress have been more focused on social issues, but they parade them as fiscal matters. They want to cut federal spending and claim that the Democrats are blocking much needed cuts, but most of the cuts they want are cuts to funding social programs they’ve been attacking pretty much by playbook for my entire adult life.
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I think most people can see through that. I just think Obama would be in a better position if he had seemed more focused on the economy in his first term than he was. And he could really have an issue with that if the economy falters or stumbles in between now and election day.
I just think Obama would be in a better position if he had seemed more focused on the economy in his first term than he was.
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Yeah, it’s a question I’ve been asking for his entire term: where the hëll are the jobs?
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But at this point I’m not sure what anybody can do, whether it be Obama or the GOP (if they actually cared, and they don’t). This country has moved so far away from manufacturing and such, that those jobs might never come back. Meanwhile, more and more are forced to rely on WalMart and fast food as a *career*.
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And he could really have an issue with that if the economy falters or stumbles in between now and election day.
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Maybe, but could the Republicans even be bothered to capitalize on such a situation?
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I think back to the ’08 election, and McCain, in mid-September, saying that the economy was “fundamentally sound”. I felt it was the beginning of the end for him – he had nfc what to do with an economy doing a face-plant. And the GOP hasn’t really bothered to try and pick itself up out of the mud on the economy since.
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Oh, sure, they’ll blame this and that. As you said: it’s all the fault of social programs. Regulations are always evil, “free markets”, and “trickle down” bûllšhìŧ.
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But to actually do anything to IMPROVE an America’s lot in life? Well, their fiddling of thumbs isn’t going to win them any votes in the one group they desperately need but are doing everything they can to scare off by any means possible: the independents.
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I don’t think that they can offer anything to truly make it better. If anything, I think guys like Newt and Paul would make things dramatically worse. Santorum might make things worse or just do no better, but he’s extreme Right on most all of the social issues that many see as important to them and I think most moderates will end up not voting for him based on that.
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That leaves Mitt. Honestly, I don’t know if he’ll make things worse, be no different or make things better insofar as the economy. I don’t know if he’ll be better or worse socially. And I think that’s the issue that the conservatives have with him right now as well.
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Mitt, more than any of the others, Obama included, has no true center. None of us know what the hëll we would get with him. What that will translate to in November, should he get the nod, is really anybody’s guess.
“Fox News has Obama ahead of Romney (47% to 39%) and quite comfortably ahead of Santorum (48% to 38%) in the key swing states that will decide the election (CO, FL, IA, NV, NM, NC, OH, PA, VA, & WI).”
Of course, gotta keep the repubs fired up. The Republican News Channel is going to play up Obama’s “lead” to whip the troops into a frenzy instead of thinking and reasoning for themselves…
“Yeah, I saw this but was going to leave it alone. It felt a bit like beating a dead horse. Sadly, the dead horse isn’t the topic but rather the GOP. The unfortunate thing with the GOP right now, as I said in the Jehovah’s Witness thread, is that this is all that they have left.”
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Unfortunately, I somehow missed the other thread, so I’ll just comment here since this thread is still active..
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This isn’t all the GOP has left. It’s not the GOP that injected the contraception issue into the debate; it was George Stephanopolis when he asked Romney whether he believed states should have the right to ban contraception. Romney was rightly confused by the question since he knew of no one trying to ban contraception. He dodged the issue, which might be the one smart move he’s made on the campaign. Those who think Romney is the only one who can beat Obama really need to look at the steaming pie that has been his primary campaign.
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On the issue of contraception, neither I nor most conservatives really have an issue with it. I may vehemently oppose abortion, but I’m okay with contraception. However, I also lean libertarian when it comes to business, so I have really have problems when the government dictates to private businesses the who, what, and when of any services provided. Religious affiliation isn’t really the issue for me, it’s a question of liberty in general.
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From what I’ve seen, it’s the left that’s making this an issue. If the issue remains the economy, the Dems are sunk this election. Their only play right now is to try to portray the Republicans as sexual prudes.
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There is something amusing about this, and it was Andrea Mitchell’s interview with Foster Friess that opened my eyes to it. It went like this:
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FRIESS: Back in my days they used Bayer aspirin for contraception. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn’t that costly.
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MITCHELL: Excuse me, I’m just trying to catch my breath from that, Mr. Friess, frankly.
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Friess was factually correct, and Andrea was so taken aback by this she had to catch her breath? I’m only forty, but I can remember a time where certain circles became morally indignant at the mention of sex. I remember the reruns where Rob and Laura Petrie slept in separate beds. The overreactions to the smallest hint of sex were hysterical. But now we’ve come to the point where the slightest hint of abstinence sets progressives aflame with self-righteous lectures on how abstinence never works and shouldn’t even be mentioned. Meet the new boss: we’ve gone from moral indignation to immoral indignation.
From what I’ve seen, it’s the left that’s making this an issue.
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Which is why the state of Virginia just signed into a law another ridiculous “How can we stop abortions without banning abortions” laws that now includes borderline rape.
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Which is why in a hearing in Congress in the last couple of days on the issue of Obama and contraceptives, the GOP allowed NO WOMEN to be involved in the proceedings, while allowing SEVERAL Christian religious leaders to stop by for testimony.
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Which is why earlier this week, the GOP introduced a bill that would allow ANY employer to be a wannabe-Catholic business and not offer contraceptives. Nothing like trying to force one’s sudden Catholic-inspired morals on everybody, eh?
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If the issue remains the economy, the Dems are sunk this election.
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I can’t wait to read your thesis on this, since the GOP has no interest in saving the economy. They never have, they never will.
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Their only play right now is to try to portray the Republicans as sexual prudes.
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The GOP has done a mighty fine job of that all on their own. The GOP has played the culture-family-moral war for the last several decades, and they’re losing; they just refuse to acknowledge the fact.
The more I think about it, the more I realize I’m wrong: Obama IS a genius for making this an issue.
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Specifically because it has caused the Right to overreact to this. They’ve come out in force on this at the expense of *everything else*.
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The Catholic bishops come out screaming bloody murder about contraceptives… only to find out that the majority of Catholics, much less Americans, support the use of contraceptives.
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You get Santorum all but saying that Obama isn’t the right kind of Christian, an old argument that will gain him NOTHING. (Not to mention, showing that Santorum shouldn’t be in politics since he’s apparently more interested in being a preacher.)
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Yes, they’ll lose this battle, they’ll lose the White House, and then they’ll find that they’re going to lose the war.
“Which is why earlier this week, the GOP introduced a bill that would allow ANY employer to be a wannabe-Catholic business and not offer contraceptives. Nothing like trying to force one’s sudden Catholic-inspired morals on everybody, eh?”
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And that’s a willful misreading of the situation. Where in the Constitution does the phrase, “Right to free contraception” occur? Where is it in the bill of rights or any of our associated founding documents? Why the hëll should anyone else have to pay for it if they don’t believe in it? Do you really think that this issue is just about the right of Catholics to freedom of conscience and no one else?
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“If the issue remains the economy, the Dems are sunk this election.
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I can’t wait to read your thesis on this, since the GOP has no interest in saving the economy. They never have, they never will.”
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Just because our answer to a sagging economy is economic freedom doesn’t mean we don’t care about the economy. Planned economies don’t work. If anyone doesn’t care about the economy, it’s the Dems, and specifically the Obama administration. They deny Boeing the right to build a plant in a right-to-work state, even if not a single union job would be lost. They deny the Keystone pipeline and the jobs it would create. They shut down Gulf drilling, despite the fact the courts told them they couldn’t. They use the stimulus money to bail out bankrupt green energy firms that then went bankrupt anyways. Every time Obama is given the choice between ideology and private sector jobs, he chooses ideology.
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“Their only play right now is to try to portray the Republicans as sexual prudes.
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The GOP has done a mighty fine job of that all on their own. The GOP has played the culture-family-moral war for the last several decades, and they’re losing; they just refuse to acknowledge the fact.”
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Which is my point. You’re really engaging in the same behavior that you loathe in them. You’re more self-righteous than any 1980’s televangelist. The only difference is that you approve of the behavior they condemned.
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Craig,
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.There are people to the left of me on this board that I respect. Jerry Chandler, for example, always marshals his facts extremely well to support his opinions. I usually disagree with his interpretation of said facts, but I respect the man.
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OTOH, most people here rightfully condemn Darin for being a bomb-tossing troll, but I’m always amazed that no one calls you out for being the same stripe of idiot.
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I know that was harsh to say, and if there was a gentler way to get my point across, I would do it. When you post here, are you just preaching to the choir, are do you genuinely hope to influence the way people think? If you just want to do the former, keep going the way you are. If you hope to at least get people to understand you, then please rethink your strategy.
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I say this because you have a lot of passion, and I respect that. However, passion without restraint or reason makes you look like a fool. I realize that you probably don’t realize this is said in love, but it is.
Do you really think that this issue is just about the right of Catholics to freedom of conscience and no one else?
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Yes, this is all about the right of Christians and their inflaming a supposed ‘war on Christianity’, as well as their desire to shove their beliefs down our throats.
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And, perhaps more so, it’s about trying to fire up a base because they’ve run out of cards to play.
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Every time Obama is given the choice between ideology and private sector jobs, he chooses ideology.
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I’m not familiar with the Boeing situation. As for a couple of the others you suggested, complete reliance on oil has gotten us into the mess we’re in now; continued reliance won’t get us out.
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You’re more self-righteous than any 1980′s televangelist
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Gee, if only I were rich and could lobby Congress with my religious beliefs as a result.
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The only difference is that you approve of the behavior they condemned.
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I know, it’s just SO WRONG to want others to have the same rights I have. If that makes me self-righteous, then I’ll know that I’m a better man than those who oppose such rights.
And call me a troll if you like, Malcolm, but you didn’t even address part of my concern: if you think the Dems are so bad on the economy, what, exactly, are the Republicans doing that’s so much better?
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Do you really think the GOP’s supposed economic message isn’t getting lost in all the stuff about abortions, contraceptives, and whether Obama worships the right brand of Christianity?
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I don’t know about you, but I actually have seen people working and projects instituted under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. He continued the auto industry bailout that Bush started, and that seems to have paid off in terms of keeping who knows how many people, not just those working directly for the auto makers, employed.
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The ‘hands-off, remove regulations, let the big corporations approach’ that more on the Right approve of than the Left (they both have their hands in it, just to different depths) no longer works, if it ever did. And a lot of Americans are a lot poorer as a result.
Okay., these points were more reasoned, so I’ll happily respond to them.
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“‘Do you really think that this issue is just about the right of Catholics to freedom of conscience and no one else?
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Yes, this is all about the right of Christians and their inflaming a supposed ‘war on Christianity’, as well as their desire to shove their beliefs down our throats.”
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But what are you doing if not that very same same thing? You’re basically asserting that others should shove your beliefs down throats.
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“I’m not familiar with the Boeing situation. As for a couple of the others you suggested, complete reliance on oil has gotten us into the mess we’re in now; continued reliance won’t get us out.”
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But with “green energy” not yet showing anything effective, what are we left with? Like it or not, oil is the blood of our economy in many ways. Sure, I’d love to see something other than oil or coal (which is an industry Obama has actually stated he wants to destroy.) used, but there’s not anything out there that works as efficiently. Until there is something that works, we need oil. You may not like oil, but every time you buy something from the store, chances are pretty good that oil brought it to you in one way or another.
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“Gee, if only I were rich and could lobby Congress with my religious beliefs as a result.”
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Any law is religious in nature, because it must draw its power from a higher authority. Whether this authority is “the will of the people” or a religious text. Its why the earliest sets of laws always said the lawgivers were given the laws from gods. Chairman Mao recognized this when he famously stated that power is derived from the barrel of a gun.*
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Don’t fool yourself into thinking that because you don’t believe in a god, or you’ve separated religion and mind, that you’re less religious, especially when it comes to law. I know it makes people feel superior to believe that they’ve transcended religion, but few, if any, truly do. In most cases, people revert to a form of pantheism that places the state as messiah.
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But this is also why I’ve always been of the federalist opinion that most laws should be left to the states, so that people can live under the laws that they’re comfortable with. And if people don’t like said laws, they can move to another state.
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*I always wondered why feminist phallus theorists ignored that quote.
The fundamental problem with the economy derives from a 300-year-old flaw in banking and embezzlement law, and the Republicans aren’t going to fix that, but neither are the Democrats, since neither party is prepared to challenge the perquisite of bankers to print their own $100 bills. Ron and Rand Paul at least have brought some focus on the role played by the Federal Reserve; however, we had economic meltdowns throughout the Nineteenth Century, and the Fed dates from only 1913, so that can’t be all of it.
The fact remains that Obama has not done well at managing what legally he can manage in this situation, and the fact the Republicans won’t be able to do that much either if they get in is no good reason to keep an incompetent at the helm.
But what are you doing if not that very same same thing? You’re basically asserting that others should shove your beliefs down throats.
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I’m very much a believer in the title of this thread. I’m also very much a believer in the fact that the Constitution not only guarantees that, but it also guarantees a freedom FROM religion. So, no, I don’t react well to the constant push to make our nation less secular and more Christian.
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But with “green energy” not yet showing anything effective, what are we left with?
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A lack of patience? 🙂
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With the pipeline, I can certainly see the environmental concerns. One of the phases is to pass over one of the largest aquifers in the world. I’m not sure anybody should trust the oil companies on an issue like this after what happened in the Gulf (which also lead to the moratorium). And this is an industry that constantly fights and lobbies for FEWER regulations and rules and such, which will only encourage such incidents again in the future.
I’m a big supporter of the ethanol movement, but it’s looking more and more like a waste. I was near a gas station recently that sold E-85, and it was all of $.20 cheaper than regular unleaded. Considering it’s estimated to be 30% less efficient, only people who have money to burn would consider buying it.
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Any law is religious in nature, because it must draw its power from a higher authority.
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That only applies if you believe in a higher authority, or that said authority cares. So, no, I don’t buy the whole “without religion there is no morality/law” argument.
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Throughout history people have written some pretty awful laws (as well as done some pretty awful things) because they thought their religion told them it was OK. Or simply because they wanted to, regardless of what their religion was.
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And this brings us back to Republicans and their values. Abortion, contraceptives, saying safety nets should only be provided by churches… those are religious issues. But a lot of other things, like allowing corporations to do whatever they want and oh well to anybody who gets in their way? There’s nothing religious about that, unless you need a convenient front to explain away the indefensible.
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Don’t fool yourself into thinking that because you don’t believe in a god, or you’ve separated religion and mind, that you’re less religious, especially when it comes to law.
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Well, I’m a cynical agnostic: if there’s god, he, like the honey badger, don’t give a šhìŧ. You may need a god to be your conscience, but I neither need nor would want him to be mine.
“So, no, I don’t react well to the constant push to make our nation less secular and more Christian”
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I don’t know if you realize it, but secularism is a religion. It is the religion of man. It has every hallmark of a religion. creation myth*? Check. Eschatology? Check. Code of conduct? Check. Internecine squabbles about the previous things? Check. I could go on with many more fulfilled requirements.
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“With the pipeline, I can certainly see the environmental concerns. One of the phases is to pass over one of the largest aquifers in the world. I’m not sure anybody should trust the oil companies on an issue like this after what happened in the Gulf (which also lead to the moratorium). And this is an industry that constantly fights and lobbies for FEWER regulations and rules and such, which will only encourage such incidents again in the future.”
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The courts ruled that Obama had to lift the moratorium, and the administration ignored it. From the Trail of Tears to this, it always annoys me that only time the checks and balances work against the courts is when they shouldn’t.
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“I’m a big supporter of the ethanol movement, but it’s looking more and more like a waste. I was near a gas station recently that sold E-85, and it was all of $.20 cheaper than regular unleaded. Considering it’s estimated to be 30% less efficient, only people who have money to burn would consider buying it.”
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I’m glad to see you have a clear view of it. The use of ethanol also pushes the prices of food upwards, and thus hurts the poor.
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*Please note that I use “myth” in the academic sense of it being a bedrock belief. I am not trying to address the veracity of the belief.
I don’t know if you realize it, but secularism is a religion.
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Lemme guess: you think atheism is a religion, too?
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secular – of or pertaining to worldly things or to things that are not regarded as religious, spiritual, or sacred
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I think at this point we might be working from completely different dictionaries.
Atheism is a religion, at least per the First Amendment, according to none less than the Supreme Court of the United States.
I feel like I am in GROUNDHOD DAY or something. Sooner or later, in any thread related to religion, right-wingers ALWAYS will claim secularism and atheism are religions, right? WTH?
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Secularism is merely the belief in the separation of church and state. How can that be a religion? It’s fully possible for Christians to be secularists, by the way. That means they have two religions?
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Atheism also is merely a lack of belief. That is like saying someone who hates baseball and never roots for any team is actually a baseball fan, and not rooting for a team is the same as having a team. Makes no sense.
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I could even agree that certain philosophies might me equivalent to religions. Humanism, perhaps. Marxism, certainly. But atheism and secularism are too specific for you to possibly build a whole lifestyle around them.
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I and I also have to wonder why. Why is is that religionists always claim such things? Once upon a time, religionists were proud of their faith. Nowadays it seems like they’re ashamed, when they rant that those atheists fellows are no better than us, they’re a religious movement too!
right-wingers ALWAYS will claim secularism and atheism are religions, right?
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I’m not sure it’s done intentionally all the time or not, but IMO it often feels like an attempt to insult atheists. An attempt to show what is probably perceived on the believer’s part as the ultimate disrespect to one who doesn’t believe: by telling them that they believe in a higher power, regardless.
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Or, as with Malcolm, apparently everything is related to religion in some way or another. Therefore everybody worships whether they like it or not, everybody must be like them whether they like it or not.
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Side note: I’m starting to feel like there’s a corollary with Godwin’s Law regarding the fixation some have with socialism.
No, Malcolm. Progressives have absolutely no problem with abstinence. We do have a big problem with people telling other people that abstinence is THE WAY, though.
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I respect the hëll out of people that practice abstinence themselves because they believe it’s the right thing to do for themselves. Great for them! It’s their live, they should live it the way they see fit.
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But the second they start to trumpet that abstinence is the correct way for everybody, and they back Presidential candidates that have been on record as saying sex for pleasure is a cause of grave concern and should be a matter of public policy, then I will denounce them as the authoritatian thugs they are.
I am an atheist. What am I supposed to do: Tell you that the Supreme Court, for First Amendment purposes, does NOT consider atheism a religion, when that is not true?
I don’t think I agree with the Supreme Court. I mean, I agree with them to the extent that I believe that atheists and secularists must have the same rights as religionists. If the way to do it is to rule atheism a “religion”, then so be it.
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But in any case, I was actually responding to Malcolm. He said secularism is a religion, in that it implies a code of conduct, a creation myth, etc. And that is simply untrue.
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My brother is a devout Catholic, and he is also a secularist, since he believes in the separation between Church and State. His code of conduct, creation myth, etc. are derived from Catholic teachings, but he would never want to impose that on others, and believes in a secular state.
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My father was an atheist in his youth due to indifference to religion, but he wasn’t a learned man, scientifically speaking. He was a secularist, but he had no belief in any scientific creation myth. He simply had no oppinion about how life originated.
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My girlfriend is a student of Engineering and she is an atheist that holds a scientific paradigm of life, the origins of the universe, etc. Though she has a “creation myth”, I couldn’t say that her code of conduct is derived from science or “secularism”.
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My point is, all those very different people that I know are secularists, but they don’t have ANYTHING in common except for their belief that the state should impose no official religion. How could secularism be a “religion” when three secularist people I know have absolutely nothing in common in their beliefs except for one thing?
But, the First Amendment is not “secularism” as such — this is where the Theists err as a matter of law. Six of 9 justices are Catholics; none are atheists. It is inconceivable that they are supporting “secularism” when they order a county government to take down a creche. The Court’s order neither affirms NOR DENIES the religious symbol “attacked.” Rather, it simply says that expression of that value, however true or false it might be, must come from other than public funds — a political doctrine originally incorporated into the Constitution merely to remove from the force of government an issue over which passions always were strong and about which there never could be any agreement.
At the same time, you and I do believe in SOMETHING. If we don’t believe that humans are “spirits” or that their “rights” are the rights of spirits trapped in physical bodies, then we believe something else, e.g., that rights are essential conditions attendant to creatures of the earth (Ayn Rand) or that rights are structural elements within a political system designed to assure the continued operation of a democratic polity (James Madison). Or even that they don’t exist at all, since “sovereignty knows no limits save those it imposes on itself.”
This is what makes the baseball analogy not quite right: The universe readily can exist without baseball (and did for billions of years). So, yes, you cannot be a baseball fan if you don’t like baseball.
But, the fundamental problem of theology does not go away so easily. Consider two sentences: “God created the universe”; and, “the universe created itself.” Both sentences say EXACTLY the same thing to the extent one cannot distinguish between “God” and “the universe.” The fundamental problem of theology is, first, that theists must define what “God” is, and in a way that DISTINGUISHES it from “the universe,” (otherwise I never could say whether I believe in “God” or not). Beyond that, theists must show some form of proof, i.e., an epistemological regimen, by which I can distinguish between a CLAIM that God exists and the ravings of a lunatic. After all, if all we fight over is what WORD to call the sky at night, then that impresses me as pretty much a waste of time, since one has to call it something, and beyond that, who cares? And, if there is no method by which one can prove this CLAIM of God, how can anyone not know that the claimant is someone more properly belonging with the guy the cops bagged here yesterday, who claimed he needed to detain a woman at the bank because he was the Director of the CIA and on leave from just having rescued the American ambassador to Iran?
For reasons too difficult to detail here, science and scientific method not only do not but cannot work here (there is an epistemological barrier to using science in any effort to prove existence of “God”). The Catholic Church substitutes for that an expensive search for “miracles”; but, even that presents its own problem. Consider, for example, the Biblical incident of the loaves and the fishes (a classic theistic claim that Jesus created food from thin air). Well, maybe Jesus’ advance team, aka “disciples,” suggested that would happen when they went ahead to advertise the visit (“Come and see the elephant!”), but reread the passage carefully in all three Gospels. Consider that all sorts of people must have come to the Hill, rich and poor alike, with the rich bringing their servants and their food and their picnic supplies, and everything else for a day at the park; and, the poor coming just as they were merely to hear what Jesus had to say. I find it much more probable that Jesus, rather than defy the laws of physics, instead gave a sermon about the fundamental difference between the psychology of politics and business (with the restrained personal relationships appropriate to the world of Caesar), and the “greater” psychology of men brought together as in the world of battle, where “war has a way of distinguishing between the things which matter and the things which don’t.” Jesus then did not pull fish from thin air; rather, he took what he had and shared it with his disciples and the few people in the first row, then prevailed upon the others present to share theirs likewise, in a ritual repeated every Sunday, in every church I’ve ever been in, where the minister or priest asks the parishoners to turn around and introduce themselves and shake the hand of the person sitting behind them.
Some miracle!
Now, I ask you, who has heard and at least understood Christ’s message? The atheist who does not believe in miracles, or the theist who does? And, that kind of mixes things up concerning just who isn’t and who can be the Believer.
Secularism has many faces, but so does Protestantism. The bottom line is that, unlike in the circumstance of baseball, we are compelled to believe something about how the world fundamentally works. If we don’t accept the miraculous, then we have to search for something else or elect to remain ignorant. I also would not call ignorance “secularism” (I’d call it ignorance); but, there has to be something which generally refers to the process by which we will to a state of knowledge. You believe either that “God” (whatever that is) created the universe or that the universe created itsef. Baseball exists solely by the will of Man, but at minimum, one of those two statements is true.