I offer you, after suitable drum-roll, the Full-Meal Deal on the last acceptable prejudice:
- Question begging: check (“women’s health and human rights”)
- Snarkiness: check (“good Catholic girl”; “nunnery”)
- Paranoia: check (“the Supreme Court is getting good and ready to strike down Roe v. Wade”)
- Ipse dixit: check (“put her religion ahead of her jurisprudence”)
- Smoke-filled room speculation: check (“The seemingly innocent Little Sisters likely were likely not acting alone in their trouble-making. Their big brothers, the meddlesome American Roman Catholic Archbishops are bound to be involved.”)
- Allusion to pedophile priests: check (“squelching women and girls – even when they should have focused on their own men and boys”)
Not one word of legal analysis. No discernible qualifications to critique any legal decision. Just an ignorant screed from a mercenary who can write ignorant screeds in complete, grammatical sentences.
Would that it were from some marginal internet echo chamber, or even from Cosmopolitan, but nay, it’s from the once-reputable U.S. New & World Report. Hat-tip to the Center for Law and Religion Forum, the title of whose item alludes to the anti-Catholic equivalent of the hoax Protocols of the Elders of Zion (which sadly still fester in the fever swamps, as here and here).
[H]ere I veer off the liberal reservation — there is also a tendency toward hyperbole on the other side. Treating contraception as a preventive service makes moral and economic sense. It will result in fewer abortions and lower medical and other costs.
Yet even if the Little Sisters and Hobby Lobby were to win, the vast majority of women with insurance coverage would enjoy access to contraception without a deductible or co-payment. Some women would have to pay out of pocket — as, presumably, they did pre-Obamacare — and that would impose an economic burden.
But not necessarily an insurmountable one. Target and Wal-Mart offer generic birth control pills for $9 a month. Planned Parenthood puts the monthly cost at $15 to $50. So when the administration contends “that no one, including the government or for-profit corporations, should be able to dictate [health-care] decisions to women,” this seems a bit overwrought.
Denying contraceptive coverage is not, as the White House asserts, coming “between a woman and her doctor.” It’s coming between a woman and her insurance company. That’s a difference worth remembering.
(Ruth Marcus at the Washington Post)
In the interests of full disclosure, Marcus stayed safely on the liberal reservation in the preceding portion of her column (though not so far as to claim that abortifacients aren’t abortifacient), dismissing arguments of the Little Sisters of the Poor and Hobby Lobby as Hooey and Hooier, respectively. And I think the White House locution is even more overwrought than Marcus does: denying contraceptive coverage doesn’t come between a woman and anything. She continues having full access to all the insurance her employer paid for.
Given the odd facts (the Little Sisters of the Poor are insured by a Church Plan that wouldn’t have provided contraceptives even if the Sisters had signed the certification), I tend to think they’ll ultimately lose. Marc O. DeGirolami at the Center for Law and Religion Forum thinks otherwise (“on the legal merits, I am persuaded that the statutory argument in favor of the Little Sisters of the Poor as to the issue of accommodation of non-exempted nonprofits is strong–stronger than the arguments the government advances”).
I would not bet against Hobby Lobby, though; the argument for religious freedom of a closely-held corporation is more powerful than I first realized.
Anyone paying even cursory attention to U.S. foreign policy in recent decades will recognize that Washington’s response to Egypt and Syria is part of a much bigger story. The story is this: America’s national-security elites act on the assumption that every nook and cranny of the globe is of great strategic significance and that there are threats to U.S. interests everywhere. Not surprisingly, they live in a constant state of fear …
… This grim situation means the United States has a lot of social engineering to carry out, leaving it no choice but to pursue an interventionist foreign policy. In other words, it must pursue a policy of global domination if it hopes to make the world safe for America.
This perspective is influential, widespread—and wrong. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the United States is a remarkably secure country. No great power in world history comes close to enjoying the security it does today …
Interfering in countries like Egypt and Syria and turning the world into one big battlefield has significant costs for the United States. The strategic costs are actually not great precisely because the United States is such an extraordinarily secure country. It can pursue foolish policies and still remain the most powerful state on the planet. (This is not to deny that America’s interventionist policies are the main cause of its terrorism problem. Nevertheless, terrorism is a minor threat, which is why Washington is free to continue pursuing the policies that helped cause the problem in the first place.)
(John J. Mearsheimer, America Unhinged, The National Interest January 2014)
This one might have slipped by my pretty sensitive irreligion crap detector, but the good folks at the Center for Law and Religion Forum were kind enough to bring it to my attention and to debunk it all in one swell foop:
Christianity dominates the United Nations and a more inclusive system must be introduced at the world peace-making organisation, according to a new study.
The report Religious NGOs and The United Nations found that Christian NGOs are overrepresented at the UN in comparison to other religious groups.
Overall, more than 70 per cent of religious NGOs at the UN are Christian ….
We, yeah, but the West is sorta kinda Christendom still, and the West is pretty wealthy and things and stuff. Y’know?
No need to shilly-shally with such rationalizations, as the story is pretty bogus:
Just so you know, according to the article, religious NGOs make up only 7.3% of the total number of NGOs at the UN.
So 70% of 7.3% is – Wow! With 5% of NGOs, Christians dominate the UN! Good job, Jesus!
[Body:] what the Rise of the Independents really means is the Downfall of our Republic.
[First Comment, by Brian:] Most of those new independents are conservatives who don’t like the GOP. So many of us have completely given up on them, and are tired of voting for losers who are either incapable or unwilling to confront the problems we face. We’re all doomed, and the GOP can’t or won’t do a thing about it, so to heck with them. (It should be noted that one can recognize all this quite cheerfully–it’s quite liberating to know that all the bombast in DC is completely irrelevant.)
What Brian said. Every word of it. As someone said in a much different context, “relax and enjoy it.”
We seem to have reached “peak road,” un-noted, a few years ago, peaking at 2,734,000 centerline miles.
What does it mean for a country built around the car to run out of road? That’s what David Levinson at his “Transportationist” blog indicates may have happened while our national attention was consumed with the Great Recession, somewhere between 2008 and 2011….
Mobility allowed us to escape the strictures of place, as Deneen described, attenuating our connections to home as we built new ones around the nation. Shrinking, though, can make for a very different kind of smallness than that championed by the localists mobility left behind. As the open road recedes, how will the restless American spirit take to density?
From George Mason University’s History News Network, some helpful context on Pope Francis’ economic pronouncements.
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 