• deficit

    Birth Control, The Catholic Church and HHS

    This is the least frightening picture I've ever seen of General Palpatine, I mean Pope Benedict

    Perhaps you have heard that the Obama administration has decided that they have the duty to force religiously affiliated employers to provide their employees with insurance coverage which includes birth control, the abortion poll and sterilization.  The Catholic Church is preparing for a massive show-down on the matter.  Now, before you say, “they should provide birth control! What right does the church have to force their employees to follow church teachings on such matters”, stop.  Let me make a few points:

    1. Not having insurance coverage for birth control DOES NOT deny anyone access to birth control.  I know, I’ve gone without insurance coverage repeatedly and not once did that have an impact on my ability to procure birth control.  Is it easier when I have insurance coverage? Sure - it means not making a trip to a county clinic or Planned Parenthood (which I thought we were providing tax payer money to in order to meet such needs, but any ways).  But I’d also like insurance coverage with no deductibles which would cover dental.  Dental is a real issue.  Millions of people cannot afford to see a dentist.  I promise you, despite all the “easier access to birth control” rhetoric, there is not a single piece of research which has found that an inability to get birth control is leading to more unplanned pregnancies.  An inability to use it properly, well that’s a whole other matter.  It’s an idea which makes intuitive sense to people who don’t have to deal with such things themselves, but there’s no data to back it up.  There is zero evidence that this is a real problem with serious consequences being attacked here, just an ideological hammer looking for a nail.

    2. Catholic Charities is one of the largest provider of medical and social services in this country (the largest in the world).  Um, maybe we outta say “Thank you” rather than forcing them to shut down just to make a point?  It doesn’t matter if you agree with them Continue reading »

  • difficult-coworker

    Brooks, Dreher, DeYoung et al vs “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus”

    True dat!

    Perhaps you have heard about the time religious rulers asked Jesus what the greatest of the commandments was and he answered, “ ’Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”  Did you know that it wasn’t Jesus but another popular rabbi of the time, Rabbi Hillel who was responsible for popularizing the golden rule among first century Jews?  Jesus would almost certainly have been familiar with this man and his teachings.  (Rabbi Hillel was also well known for teaching against judging others and opening the study of the Torah to those who were interested but could not pay.)  In fact, Rabbi Hillel took it a bit farther than Jesus did; he listed “Love your neighbor as yourself” as “the main idea of the Torah”.  Jesus put it next to loving God. 

    I tell you all of this to point out that new, revolutionary ideas do not arrive whole-cloth out of the ether.  They get built on protests and tweaks and half-steps and built-up experience.  And it is in this context that I think we need to understand the viral phenomena that is “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus“.  It’s a spoken word piece by Jefferson Bethke a 22 year old from Seattle which is the subject of David Brook’s (poorly written, poorly executed) column today in the NYT.    Continue reading »

  • Gabriel Santorum and our Rituals of Grief

    Because I am a self-confessed former political junkie in recovery, I sometimes miss stories when they first happen (which, trust me, isn’t really a problem).  Which is why I’m just now hearing about this Santorum, dead-baby deal.  For those of you who like me were fortunate to miss this story as it developed, here’s the brief version:

    In 1996, Rick and Karen Santorum lost a child just past 20 weeks gestation.  The baby died 2 hours after birth.  The Santorums held and spent time with their deceased infant.  They took the baby home for their other children to be able to do the same.  They also had a funeral service and burial.  We know all of this because Karen Santorum wrote about it in her book Letters to Gabriel which came out in 1998. 

    The reason it is in the news is because two commentators – one real liberal and one token “liberal” hired by Fox News to lose arguments – both made reference to this event on TV recently.  Both spoke of this story as being so strange, distasteful and crazy that voters who heard about it would reject Santorum as a disturbed wack-job.  Controversy ensued.  The Fox news talking head claimed in a tweet to have apologized directly to Rick and Karen Santorum who were brought to tears when asked to comment on these fools’ words.  (They don’t deserve to be named.  Fools is name enough.)  Continue reading »

  • What’s in your closet?

    You know how sometimes you go rooting through your closet and come across an item of clothing you forgot you had?  Well, one Japanese man had something much more interesting than an ill-fitting suit hiding in the unused corners of his closet.  After being called to check on a suspected burglar, police found a 58 year old homeless woman hiding in a shelf compartment in his closet.  She had been living there for a year with out his knowledge!  Can you imagine?  That poor man is going to spend the next few weeks obsessing over all the embarrassing/private things which this woman was privy to while hiding in his closet.  Creepy!

  • My quick take on the news

    After putting up 4 fairly long posts in less than 24 hours yesterday, I need to take some time to attend to the kiddies and my gardens. But I’d hate the leave my minions without their Upside Down World fix (that’s a joke, btw :) ). So I thought I’d pass on my take on a couple of recent news events which have been bugging me.

    1. Oil. Obviously oil costs too much. Obviously we need to find ways to cut back. Obviously what we are doing isn’t sustainable in the long term. However, the reality is that our best case scenario right now is to cut back and go through a transition period away from heavy dependence on oil. Which means that for the foreseeable future we will still need the stuff. So, it drives me nuts that we refuse to allow drilling and oil exploration either on or off shore in the USA. Now, I’m not saying we can become self-sufficient by drilling in the USA. However, the main protest against drilling seems to be environmental. Normally, I’m very sympathetic to environmental causes. However, do other oil producing countries not have environments? Are we to believe that Russia and Nigeria and Argentina are taking their oil from lifeless wastelands? Is the USA the only place on the planet where there is an environment worth preserving? Come on people! At least in the USA we can be assured that best practices will be used to protect the environment. Can we really have have any confidence that Gabon will do the same? It seems to me that from a global level, those who really want us to do the least amount of environmental damage possible would be trying to get oil production moved into the places like the USA. IMO, our current approach is silly and selfish.

    2. Scott McClellan, as you have surely heard, has written a tell-all book which repeats the same things every other book about the Bush administration has said (ie he’s an incurious baboon). What I have found amusing about this is the press reaction to the book. Now, I know that the press, having dealt with McClellan as press secretary don’t care for the man. However, they keep saying, “why didn’t he say anything when he was in office?” Yeah, I can see how that would have worked: “Thank you for coming today, ladies and gentlemen of the press. The president has asked me to tell you that things are going well in Iraq and we’re making adjustments on the ground as needed. However, I would personally like to add that the president is delusional and he was picking lint from between his toes during the morning briefing, so I doubt he has any real idea what’s going on. I’ll open the floor for questions now.”

    3. Kathleen Parker, the (I hate to say it) conservative columnist has apparently taken up the use of psychotropic drugs and is now acting as a propagandist for various white-power groups. If you were fortunate enough to miss it, Ms. Parker wrote a column about voters looking for a “full blooded American” to vote for. Continue reading »

  • Gay Marriage in California

    Well, California has gone the way of Massachusetts in having courts rule a right to gay marriage. There is a reasonable chance that the voters in California will amend their constitution to reverse the court. However, in the long term, it is hard to see how gay marriage will not eventually become accepted. This is because while there are compelling reasons not to approve gay marriage, acknowledging those would require us to rearrange our priorities as a society in ways which are not explicitly designed to maximize personal satisfaction, choice and protection from normal consequences of our own behavior. IOW, we would all need to agree to be much more responsible, self-sacrificial human beings and in the culture we live in, it is hard to imagine that happening.

    At this point, marriage has been defined in many people’s eyes as primarily an arrangement meant to affirm and support the love, comfort and happiness of individual adults within it. Given that marriages, particularly marriages with children, involve a great deal of discomfort, many feeling which are far from loving and sometimes long periods of unhappiness, this idea undermines both the long term sustainability of individual marriages and the justification for societal support and encouragement of marriage.

    IMO, the covenant marriage which requires sacrifice of adult desires to the needs of children and in service to the marriage is dead. Society has been and will continue to abandon any sense of obligation for supporting marriages through policy and social norms. (Look at our tax policies, our workplace standards, our social services and ask yourself if any of these encourage the formation and continuation of child centered marriages. Pretty clearly the answer is no.) Given that mother-father marriage is the only form of family which consistently (although not uniformly of course) raises children who become stable, responsible and self-sufficient human beings, this is very much to our detriment.

    In another 30 to 40 years marriage as a permanent arrangement, centered around raising new generations of men and women of character will exist only on the fringes. Perhaps some churches will rise to the challenge and provide the support for marriage which society and law used to. No doubt there will be some social service agencies who will see the damage done to society by raising generations of children outside of stable mother-father marriages and step up to try and counter the abandonment of marriage. But for the most part, marriage will continue to devolve into just another lifestyle choice of no concern to any other than the adult participants of it.

    Of course, it would be idiotic to lay this at the feet of gay marriage. Gay marriage is simply the most startling landmark on the long road we’ve been traveling. Gay marriage is the inevitable result of society’s abandonment of marriage, children and a sense of responsibility to ideas and things larger than ourselves. It’s just a nail in the coffin confirming that we have abandoned the very ideas and things any society needs in order to be successful through generations. And really, all of us who have bought into this ethos of radical adult independence and persuit of personal desire over the good of our families and communities bear as much, if not more responsibility for that than any gay or lesbian wanting to marry another man or woman.

    For a more detailed explanation of why I think gay marriage is bad for our society, see here.

    To read about the French government’s rather traditionalist rejection of the idea of gay marriage see here.

    To read about the self-proclaimed (in a full page ad in the NYT, no less) goals of mainstream gay rights activists which go well beyond the right to marry, see here.

  • See what happens when you work too much?

    If it didn’t involve a real kid, this would be one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard.  Down in Texas, a 13 year old kid whose dad was too busy to remember his birthday, ordered an extra copy of daddy’s credit card and used it to live a poorly socialized 13 year old kid’s dream.  He and a friend got an Xbox, a hotel room, a bunch of junk food and, of course, a couple of hookers to play video games with.  From the story:

    The escort girls who were released without charge, told the arresting officers something was up when the kids said they would rather play Xbox than get down to business.”

    The very best part is this:

    They [the kids] told the suspicious working girls they were people of restricted growth working with a traveling circus, and as State law does not allow those with disabilities to be discriminated against they had no right to refuse them.”

    OMG.  That right there is one of the funniest things I’ve ever read.  Maybe if this kid can get himself together he can eventually go to work as a writer for some trashy-but-very-funny adult cartoon show.

    He’s been sentenced to 3 years probation on a fraud conviction.  The case was probably required by the credit card companies as a prerequisite for eating the $30K in fraudulent charges the kid racked up.  Dad on the other hand, is planning on making up for missing Jr.’s birthday by taking him to Disneyland.  Of course.

    Oh, and my career advice not withstanding, the kid plans to go into the field of work best suited to his talents – politics.

    HT: Reformed Chicks Blabbing

  • God Bless Peggy Noonan

    I mean that really. I hope that God has and continues to bless Peggy Noonan greatly. Because she has stood in the face of the ridiculous demagoguery which has surrounded the whole Obama-Wright debacle and spoken sense where sense has not been welcomed. Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan talks about her indifference to Pastor Wright’s ranting and puts it into some perspective:

    I also think that if Hillary Clinton wins because of the Wright scandal, it will leave a sad taste in the mouths of many. Mr. Obama reveals many things in his books, speeches and interviews but polarity and a tropism toward the extreme are not among them. What happened with Mr. Wright should not determine the race. Mr. Obama’s stands, his ability to convince us he can make good change, his ability to be “one of us,” that great challenge for a national politician in a varied nation, should determine the race. . .

    I do not feel a sense of honest anger or violation at his [Jeremiah Wrights's] remarks, in part because I don’t think his views carry deep implications for our country. I have been watching America up close for many years – if you count a bright childhood, for half a century. I have seen, heard and respected the pain of a people who were forced to come here when they did not want to and made to live in a way that no one would want to. Who could deny them their grief or anger? I have seen radicalism and extremism, too. I have seen Stokely Carmichael, the Black Panthers, the Black National Anthem, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Louis Farrakhan. I came to see their radicalism as, putting the morality of policy based on rage aside, essentially unhelpful and impractical. It wouldn’t work as an American movement, not long-term. Hatred plays itself out, has power in the short-term but is nonsustaining in the long. America, and this is one of its glories, has a conscience to which an appeal can be made. It may take a long time, it may take centuries, but in the end we try hard to do the right thing, and everyone knows it. Hatred is a form of energy that does not fuel this machine and cannot make it run.” Continue reading »

  • Who’s your role model?

    So, I’m reading an article in the Chicago Tribune this morning about the whole Miley Cyrus debacle. If your hiking party left you stranded in a cave for the last week and you have been blessed not to hear about it, young Ms. Cyrus is age 15 and star of Disney’s hit show Hannah Montana. She appears in a Vanity Fair photo shoot this month posed nude with a crumpled bed sheet across her various goodies. Congress is holding hearings and considering approving funding to send out oxygen tanks to help the hyperventilating hoardes breathe. (OK, I made that last part up.)

    Anyhow, so I’m reading this article and the point of the whole thing is how parents are struggling with what to tell their kids because up until now, they have thought that the young actress-singer was a good ROLE MODEL for their daughters! Not a good and entertaining actress. Not an enjoyable singer of teeny-bopper music. But a good role model, showing legions of girls how to be a good, wholesome, attractive young woman in America. From the article:

    So it is not surprising that parents are fuming. They, after all, have been the ones to shell out $500 for Hannah Montana concert tickets. They have proudly sent their children to school in Miley T-shirts. And they have happily watched with their kids the goofy television show in which Cyrus plays a music superstar, all the while patting themselves on the back for steering their children in the direction of a role model so wholesome. ” [emphasis mine]

    So Sandra Day O’Conner and Condelliza Rice or their own mothers are no longer available for the job of role model? Have all the old biographies of Marie Curie or Rosa Parks or Florence Nightingale or Joan of Arc or Eleanor Roosevelt or Harriet Tubman been burned without my knowledge?

    I mean seriously, how far do you have to have shoved your brain into your own behind to think that your daughter should be looking to a celebrity, no matter how apparently well behaved, for a role model?
    I have never understood this whole idea of celebrities as role models thing. Role models for what? Celebrity is a dangerous thing and very few who play with it will be able to come out unscathed. Looking to celebrities for a model of how to a decent young woman is like looking to the Navy Seals for examples of how to be a pacifist. Pretty much by definition, you’re going to be disappointed.

    So my oh-so-compassionate answer to parents who are “struggling” with the Miley Cyrus situation is to remove your brains from your posterior, return them to their proper location, explain that Ms. Cyrus is just one girl who is playing with fire and find a real role model for your daughters. Good heavens.

  • Global citizens of the US of A

    A couple of days ago, I blogged about the food riots around the world and what our response to these problems ought to be as comfortable, well of first world citizens. I mentioned how difficulty it is for us to do the right things because we aren’t being forced to:

    The problem we have is that there is just nothing other than a sense of obligation which would compell us to change our eating habits for the benefit of people living on the other side of the world. And really, how many of us find this sense of obligation compelling enough to spend more or eat less when it is so easy for us to get what we want?”

    This morning I heard a very interesting conversation on Speaking of Faith on Public Radio (you can listen to the show here). The guest was Nobel Prize winning environmental activist Wangari Maathai. Ms. Maathai is best know for her work in planting trees to combat the devastation on the people and landscapes caused by deforestation in Africa. Her group, Green Belt Movement is now present in 20 countries around the world.

    In the conversation Ms. Maathai addresses precisely what I was trying to get at as the trouble we have living in the industrialized world and understanding our role on the larger global stage:

    It is extremely important and especially for people who live in highly industrialized enriched countries, because people who live in such countries have a feeling that even if they don’t have resources within their borders, they can get them from wherever those resources are. But even if you can buy those resources, even there there is a limit to what extent you can get those resources and not create a conflict.”

    None of us wants to cause a conflict. I would hate to think that somewhere a mother’s son was engaged in battle because of what I ate for breakfast this morning. Continue reading »