Marriage is, of course, a vitally important institution, and one supported by the federal government through benefits and other programs that rely on marital status. An interest in preserving marriage as limited to heterosexual persons, however, does not justify Section 3. Tradition, no matter how long established, cannot by itself justify a discriminatory law under equal protection principles.
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Friday proposed yet another compromise to address strenuous objections from religious organizations about a policy requiring health insurance plans to provide free contraceptives, but the change did not end the political furor or legal fight over the issue.
The proposal could expand the number of groups that do not need to pay directly for birth control coverage, encompassing not only churches and other religious organizations, but also some religiously affiliated hospitals, universities and social service agencies. Health insurance companies would pay for the coverage.
The latest proposed change is the third in the last 15 months, all announced on Fridays, as President Obama has struggled to balance women’s rights, health care and religious liberty. Legal experts said the fight could end up in the Supreme Court.
Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, said the proposal would guarantee free coverage of birth control “while respecting religious concerns.”
Now, I am delighted that the LGBT community’s argument that traditional marriage is just “traditional” is getting the recognition it deserves. That tradition is usually based on religious principles that many of us don’t subscribe to and in actuality, those religious principles undermine marriage and family integrity.
But I can’t for the life of me figure out why women are so damn powerless with the Obama administration and why the argument “Tradition, no matter how long established, cannot by itself justify a discriminatory law under equal protection principles” gets no traction with the White House when applied to over half the Americans in this country . Tradition is destiny for women in Obama’s America.
Where is NOW now that their Feminist in Chief is traditionalizing the religious role of women in American society? And why are people like Culture of Truth mum on that subject?
Death of a Princess was a docudrama that was released in 1980, two years after the execution of Saudi Princess Misha’al for adultery. You can watch the movie on youtube where it has been broken into parts.
Up until the year the film was released, most people living in Saudi Arabia didn’t know the details of what had occurred, even though the execution was carried out in public. The documentary filmmaker, Anthony Thomas, was only able to ferret out the truth by speaking to a few people in Saudi Arabia who knew the royal family personally. There were many strange details about the execution that didn’t make sense. For one thing, judicial executions usually happen in a particular square. There’s a formality about it. But in this case, the execution of the princess and her boyfriend happened in a parking lot that had been hastily prepared with a pile of sand.
Thomas finally did get to the bottom of this story and when the movie was released, it caused quite a stir in Saudi Arabia where copies of it had to be smuggled in. People identified with this girl who chose to live a free life for a few days, something most Saudis only dream about. In 2005, the PBS program Frontline looked back at that movie and the controversy surrounding it. As with most things Frontline does, there is a thorough cache of supplementary material including interviews with journalists, cultural experts and activists.
The interview with Ali Al-Ahmed is particularly enlightening. Remember that this interview happened in 2005, back in the Bush era when Condoleeza Rice was Secretary of State. But what he says about how the Saudis conspire with conservative religious fanatics to keep the public’s eye away from what is really going on in their country is very relevant today here in America. We have learned from the Saudis. Here is a piece of the interview:
You wrote that, in fact, women to some extent are the line in the sand between modernization or remaining a medieval kingdom.
It’s true. You cannot really go forward and progress as a society when 50 percent of your population are oppressed. And it is the tipping point. This is the line you have to cross. It’s the frontier we have to conquer in order to tell ourselves we are walking straight.
This is, to me, like a man walking with half his body paralyzed. This is our society, a paralyzed society, because half of it is not moving, and the other half is trying to move. But we are dragged back by [the fact that] half the society is paralyzed, and this is not going to change internally. External help must be offered, especially from the United States.
Is the United States playing that role?
The U.S. has one thing in its mind, which is [its] interest. And I think it has been harmful for the U.S. There is no harm that the United States can do to itself by encouraging — not forcing, encouraging — one of its closest allies to allow women their freedom. It’s not against Saudi culture or society to have women attain these freedoms that I talked about. It is against the government’s policy, yes, but it’s not against the culture or the religion of that society.
And the U.S. has not been vocal. And this is the last country in the world besides Kuwait where women cannot vote. This is the last country in the world where women cannot drive and cannot attain these freedoms that I spoke about. And it is very easily done if this is a priority. I asked a U.S. official recently about it: “Have you ever had a program to encourage the Saudi government to allow women more freedom or to improve their status?” And the answer was, “No.”
Because?
“It was not important to us.” And I said that “Well, I think I’ve started to rethink my appreciation of a democratic system.” If a democratic government [or] society does not think it’s important to have its own values protected and promoted to its own friends, then there is something wrong with these values.
The role of women in Saudi Arabia is in some ways a concession to the religious conservatives who are so important in propping up the royal family, correct?
The religious conservatives in Saudi Arabia consider women one of their most important issues. They are obsessively concerned with women. The royal family uses these extremists to suppress society and to preoccupy them with fictitious issues, from “How long is your beard?” [to] “Can I say ‘bye-bye’?” I’m not kidding — “Can I say ‘bye-bye’? Is it OK to say ‘bye-bye’ instead of ‘salaam’? Is my robe longer or shorter?”
So they figure out that if you make women an issue, then you have 50 percent [of] society paralyzed and part of the other half concerned, obsessed about suppressing the 50 percent. … The conservatives of Saudi Arabia feel the need to control society and guide it, and they use women as a means to control that society. And that pleases the royals, who would like a society that’s obsessed with long beards and short robes rather than a society focused on equal rights, democracy, human rights and education and so on.
Has 9/11 changed that?
Absolutely it did. Society has now realized it has been fooled all along, and the religious conservatives are nothing but a tool in the hands of the royal family to suppress society. At the end of the day, the same people who issued fatwas against elections turned 180 degrees and said, “Oh, elections are good.” Two years before they said, “Elections are evil; they are imitations of the infidels.” The Saudi government decided to have limited elections; then suddenly it became a good thing. They figured out the game, and I think more people are figuring out the game, and the religious conservatives very soon will have very little influence in the country.
So what’s the game?
The game is, “We are doing this to protect our religion, to protect you.” … They don’t think democracy means you will participate. They equate democracy with sexual promiscuity, with rapes. That’s why, as long as society is obsessed with women and the fact that they have to be covered and suppressed, then we won’t have a democratic society, a society that’s looking for participation in government.
It puts the recently renewed battle over contraceptives in a whole new light, doesn’t it? And now we have people fighting in state legislatures over whether it is proper to say the word VAGINA in public. The hits and obsessive battles over trivialities are coming fast and furiously now. I don’t think we will start making women wear veils but in a very short period of time, the religious conservatives have successfully taken women back to the 60’s. It’s hard to believe that my daughters will have *less* freedom than I did and that we are reintroducing shame and restrictions. But this has happened in countries like Iran and Afghanistan where the ruling mullahs rejected modernity for women after a period of relaxation of strict tribal rules when bare faces and miniskirts flourished.
It’s seems futile to point out to American religious conservatives that they are being used to suppress democracy in this country but that appears to be what is happening. I see the mission of the Catholic bishops and the “religious freedom” meme in a whole new light. I also see *both* parties conspiring to distract the public with attacks on women. None of this is really that surprising. It’s just strange to see it distilled as succinctly as Al-Ahmed has done.
Prove me wrong, Democrats. Why don’t you come right out and say what’s going on? Let’s hear Obama get up and make a truly significant, meaningful, emotional “Reverend Wright-esque” speech in defense of American women. Let’s see him lay out to the American public what the game is, pledge to stop playing it and challenge the other side to stop too.
Remember, national women’s groups are meeting in Baltimore at the end of June. I challenge them to demand that both parties stop using women as a distraction and route to suppress democracy in this country. They should refrain from endorsing ANY candidate for president until they get a firm committment from both parties to stop using women and to tell the religious nutcases and Catholic bishops to back the fuck off.
This is not a game and we’re not going to play it.
David Adkins, aka ThereIsNoSpoon, tells it like it is on the contraception debate at Digby’s Hullabaloo:
These things don’t happen by accident. The conservative establishment decided early on that this was going to be a hill for them to die on. They weren’t forced to die on that hill. They could have let the Bishops stand alone. But they didn’t. They decided to run this ball all the way down the court.
And guess what? As Digby points out, it’s working. What just a few weeks ago was considered so mainstream as to an afterthought (providing contraception) is now seen as some sort of controversial touchstone, even as “religious freedom” has become a buzzword in the press.
Democrats can high-five one another about Republican overreach and laugh hysterically at the increased number of votes Barack Obama will receive in 2012 over Mitt Santorum. But ultimately the joke’s on us. It’s been on us ever since the Obama Administration decided to concede an inch to the misogynist conspiracy of extremist fanatics that are the Bishops, rather than mock them immediately for being out of touch with their own flock, to say nothing of the mainstream American public.
The political ground on contraception has suddenly shifted to the right faster than I have seen on any social issue in my lifetime. It’s incredible.
I think my tinfoil antenna were picking up the “Religious Liberty” meme a couple of months ago (damn, I really should be more thorough with tags) and wondered what the heck the Republicans were up to. For some strange reason I thought it would have something to do with Faith Based Initiatives or something like that. Definitely, this was going to be The Big Deal during the 2012 election season, The Wedge Issue of the Year. Who knew it would take the form of a War on Contraception?
When are Democrats going to realize that the Republicans have a crack operation of skilled psychmetricians and marketing people who have have done expert data analysis and have strategized the best way to get their voters to the polls in November? Democrats SUCK at this. Yes, all you Kool-Aid addled Obots, Barack Obama didn’t win because he was some kind of wonderful. He won because part of the Republican war machine got behind him in 2008 to take out the real Democrat. He’s a fricking one-off. His election was historic and that was the wedge issue of 2008. Now, he’s no longer historic. He’s just a lousy president.
So, while the feminists are justifiably tearing their hair out over the loss of more bodily autonomy, let’s examine why this is such a phenomenally successful wedge issue. First, Obama and his entourage went on a rampage in 2008 and slashed and burned their way through the Democratic base. Misogyny went unchecked and even gained a foothold. Congratulations Democratic party! You’ve just made a substantial portion of your base second class citizens. Any woman who jumped on this bandwagon seeing a ticket to ride to the top of the access list should really have her head examined and none of us should be forced to listen to her or read about her anymore. For damn sure, she should not be sitting on panels in places like the local branch of NOW in Kansas. (H/T Katiebird)
It goes without saying, even though some women are apparently dumber than a box of rocks, that women should NEVER put their own interests second to the political ambitions of any man. No, no, no. Not until we have achieved full equality, which means not for the forseeable future. If you have an opportunity to vote for a reasonable woman, even if you do not agree with her 100%, you should vote for her if she represents your interests as a woman and is willing to fight for your equality. Your focus should be on what she will do for women because we are the majority of citizens in this country and what is best for us, tends to be best for everyone else as well. You should not be distracted by someone else’s priorities and unless she is personally leading the convoy into Baghdad on the top of a tank like some modern day Boudicca, her views on war should be put into the same context as other candidates. In the future, I hope that women will hold each other accountable for maintaining unity. Any stepping out of line should be met with swift and thorough correction. We need to be a voting bloc to be feared, uncompromising and retributive. Let’s learn from the Christian coalition playbook, shall we?
And let’s dispense with the idea that the Republicans are ignorant of the scientific method. What did the Republicans learn by observation from 2008? They learned that Barack Obama is a self centered, ambitious guy. He’s a guy who doesn’t have any particular interest in women’s rights. His fealty is to the banking class. That’s who’s footing the bills. Unfortunately for Obama (and this is what makes him such a lousy politician), he still needs women he’s been blowing off in order to win. He needs their votes. He doesn’t need banker votes because there aren’t enough of them to make a substantial dent in the electoral college. And what do bankers care about contraception? Do they even have an opinion? No. The only people who really care about contraception are the conservatives and Obama’s not going to get their votes anyway, unless he intends to kiss up to them. And the only reason he would bow to their votes would be if he was intending to blow off his base and go right.
This is where we are. Obama had a choice. He could either stick up for women’s equality and bodily autonomy and tell the religious they were being intrusive. Or he could try to be all things to all people and hope that the bishops would negotiate with him in good faith so he could grab the religious while keeping the women relatively quiet. Remember, this is no-drama Obama we’re talking about. He’s not into confrontation. He prefers quiet little negotiation sessions where no one raises their voices and everything is on the table- because that’s worked so well in negotiations on our behalf with the bankers in the recent past {{rolling eyes}}.
(Note to loyal Democrats: Once you experience the “Pain of Independence“, you’ll never be able to look at Obama in the same way again. The nausea and disorientation can be alarming but your perspective will change and you will be almost desperate to get him out of the Oval Office.)
The Republicans see this as passivity, which it is. In the corporate world, we have management training courses on personal power and dynamics. The facilitator would describe Obama’s modus operandi as a losing strategy. Imagine there is a passive-aggressive scale from 1-10 with passive on the lower end and aggressive on the higher end. To be truly effective as a negotiator, you should stay in the sweet spot of 5-7. A 4 or below is too passive; 7 and above is too aggressive. Ideally, both parties want to stay in the sweet spot. But if you normally operate as a 4 and your opponent is at 7, you need to go up to level 7 to be effective. If he goes to 8, you need to go to 8. He has to see that you’re not backing down so that he must in order to strike a deal.
The problem with Republicans is that they are always at level 8. And if you don’t come right back and smash them at 8 or above, they’ll escalate. We are now at escalation. They’ve gone to 11 and Obama et al are at level 5. Great, just great.
That’s why ThereIsNoSpoon is disconcerted by the way Republicans have dominated this issue. They went from 8 to 11 and now anything Obama does is going to look defensive. If he had come out swinging in the first couple of days and told the Republicans that they were setting new precedent and moving the goalpost back on women’s rights and he, Obama, was not going to yield on contraception unless Jesus tapdancin’ Christ came down personally to negotiate on behalf of the bishops, he would have ruled the day and even *I* might have had some kind of grudging respect for him.
But he’s a baaaaaaad politician. Craven, selfish, indifferent, calculating and a poor decision maker with equally bad political consultants. So, now, the idea that a religious institution can have a say over whether or not you get birth control when 98% of its own adherents ignore said religious institution’s very clear, very unambiguous proscriptions against it, suddenly, that idea looks pretty reasonable. Americans don’t tend to think these things through very carefully these days because they are overwhelmed with personal and financial obligations, so they rely on the media to tell them what’s going on. Obama managed to be so ineffective at stopping the meme through his own inept handling of the matter that the right wing noise machine’s religious liberty meme is just hitting its stride. It’s going to be repeated and repeated and repeated until it seems normal until suddenly, women will start having a devil of a time getting their prescriptions filled without some byzantine procedure.
And let’s not forget that the only people who really care about denying people contraceptives are highly conservative seniors and their church hierarchy. No one else gives a damn. The wedge issue is just a clever way for Republicans to separate a few more women’s votes from Obama when they realize that, once again, he threw them under a bus and doesn’t seem to understand how much harder he has made their lives. In the meantime, the religious right will think they’re being persecuted (oh PLEEZE) and will have a very good reason to show up at the polls this November to toss the Democrats out on their asses.
Now, I could be wrong about this but I don’t think that there is anyway *this* president is going to be able to fix this particular issue at this point in time. He may go on to win as a result of some other catastrophe but he’s lost the edge he had on the contraceptive issue. Maybe another player will be able to change this around but not Obama. So, the Democrats better have something else up their sleeves or the Republicans will eat their lunch.
Just because they don’t like their present candidates doesn’t mean the Republicans can’t get their voters spitting nails by November. And Democrats shouldn’t count on independent liberals to save their bacon at the last minute. We’ve got our eyes on a different prize these days. We’ll just sit on the sidelines and watch the bloodbath. We’re into solving problems and this election isn’t going to solve any problems. If I were the Democrats, I might have curbed the impulse to squash OWS and women and ignore the unemployed for so long.
And don’t look now but the Republicans are going to turn off the gas spigot this summer and stop UI bennies in September. If the Democrats had stored up some goodwill over the past four years, the impending pain and chaos wouldn’t look so horrible. But they didn’t and it will. If I were them, I’d pass on the White House and work like madmen to elect new faces to Congress.
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More of Titli’s Busy Kitchen. This recipe is for Caramel Shortbread. Stick with it.
So, does anyone believe that the red beanie boys lost their case against no-cost contraceptives in the health insurance plan because Barack Obama has a deep commitment to women’s reproductive freedom or equality?
Or does he have a problem with women and he needs to throw them *just* enough of a bone to win their votes but not enough to piss off the religious too much?
While the percentage of Democrats who describe themselves as liberal has also increased since 2000, rising ten points, the Democratic Party remains much more ideologically diverse than the G.O.P. Roughly forty per cent of Democrats call themselves “liberal,” forty per cent call themselves “moderate,” and twenty per cent call themselves “conservative.”
“Such numbers explain why liberals seem destined to perpetual disappointment in Democratic presidents, who cannot lean too far left without alienating the party’s moderate-to-conservative majority,” Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute argues in a recent report.
So, if moderates are still crucial to Obama’s election, what do they look like? Over at Third Way, Michelle Diggles and Lanae Erickson take a deep dive into the data to show that the real swing vote for Obama is a group they call Obama Independents—voters who “liked and voted for [Obama] just 3 years ago… were the most ideologically moderate segment of the electorate,” and “are true swing voters, with one-quarter voting Republican in 2010 and one-quarter voting for President Bush in 2004.” This group, which we are likely to hear a lot about in the coming months, is disproportionately young, female, and secular, and it was hit hard by the recession. One quarter of its members are non-white.
If Obama goes, so does the free Lo-Ovral.
This is the problem with politicians who do not have a coherent worldview, and Obama never has had one. He has not made any effort to craft policy that will advance women’s equality in the workplace or the doctor’s office. It’s not one of his goals. Failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on his. The problem with Democrats is not that their factions are all over the place. The problem is that they try to cater to these factions without providing a coherent vision for the future. There is nothing that sticks Democrats together under one united idea of how the country and world should work. So, Obama careens from one interest group to another trying to thread the needle between pissing off the religious nutcases, who do have a particular worldview, whether we like it or not, and the rest of us. Plan B is a contraceptive too far. Women should get a majority vote from their family and pastors before an abortion. But contraceptives are probably ok, according to the data mining algorithm.
He’s done the same on the banker/financial sector fiasco. Instead of developing policy and solutions based on an understanding of what is wrong with the economy and having a vision of how it should work, he has taken an ad hoc approach and tries to cut deals with each player individually. That is more of the Teddy Roosevelt model but it leaves us open to more misbehavior by the banks because there still aren’t any rules to keep them from gambling our money away and then expecting the government to bail them out. He should have started with the premise that it is wrong to compensate gamblers for their losses and then figure out how to prevent that from happening again.
Well, you know the rest. Obama is pandering here to his swing voters, who happen to be moderate, secular women of childbearing age, in order to get votes. He’s going to save them a bunch of money between now and November. But that won’t get them better jobs or jobs at all. It won’t prevent Walmart from subtle sexism that prevents women from getting ahead. It won’t make measurements of workplace parameters to prevent “he said/she said” accusations about discrimination that no one will take seriously. He’s not interested in equality. He’s interested in getting re-elected.
No, Obama’s decision to cover contraceptives is a one time only deal. There’s no systemic change to the culture. He is not an agent of change. He is an agent of Obama and women are the worse for it.
I realize that I am about 36 hours late to this party. But did you ever have a topic that has been swishing around in the brain for a couple of weeks but didn’t quite know how to write it? It’s not that the topic doesn’t have a theme song or plenty of examples. In fact, it’s just the opposite. This topic has so much material to work with it’s hard to know where to start. Sort of like cleaning a very cluttered and dirty house, but I’ll get to that at the end.
So, EJ Dionne, one of the few ostensibly “liberal” bloggers wrote a silly, misguided, male-centric column the other day in the Washington Post about the campaign year decision that the Obama administration made to enforce the “free contraception for all!” rule for women with insurance regardless of who was providing the insurance, including the Catholic church. The red beanie guys have been on Obama’s case for months now trying to get him to back off on this. But Obama, smelling an opportunity to get back in the good graces of women, has decided to make this a campaign issue. You can bet that this will be cited in the campaign literature delivered to the houses of women between the ages of 17-52 who have been data mined with pin-point accuracy as caring about these kind of things.
For Dionne, the Catholic schoolboy, this was an unwise decision for the president to have made. If Obama wants to increase his chances of winning this year, he should have appealed more to the religious right. Never mind that women requiring birth control outnumber Catholic bishops and cardinals, it is much more important to the Dionnes out there that we not upset the beanie boys. In actuality, Obama tried to work out a deal with the bishops so that they didn’t have to provide the contraception but they would have to inform their female enrollees how they could get it. They wouldn’t budge. So, the administration told the church there would be no exceptions. I don’t know why this is a praiseworthy act. It should be so routine that none of us should even be aware of it. Birth control is good. Free birth control even better. No one would have batted an eyelash about this in the 70’s. But that was before the religious had to be appeased.
Speaking as a Catholic, I wish the Church would be more open on the contraception question. But speaking as an American liberal who believes that religious pluralism imposes certain obligations on government, I think the Church’s leaders had a right to ask for broader relief from a contraception mandate that would require it to act against its own teachings. The administration should have done more to balance the competing liberty interests here.
Yeah, you know, as an American liberal, I don’t see it this way at all. I don’t think religious pluralism imposes ANY obligations on government. The only rights that religion imposes on government is the right to exist without having anyone shoving stuff down the gullets of the individual members of that religion. For example, the church must offer contraceptive coverage. The individual members of that church don’t have to use it. No one can force you to prevent pregnancy in this country. But EJ has it backwards. EJ thinks that it’s OK for the religious to force certain people, specifically women, to obey its proscriptions whether they are Catholic or not or even whether they believe in God at all. When did the Constitution allow for the 4th century thinking of a collection of men in a different country to direct the lives of women here in the US against their own consciences?
It is unacceptable for any religion to direct the consciences and behavior of American women against their will. It is especially egregious when the fallout of this coercion affects their ability to choose the number and timing of their family. It violates their first amendment rights of freedom of religion. It probably violates their civil rights as well. It’s just wrong, EJ. The Catholic church has a right to exist in this country and conduct worship services that are open to the public and that’s it. I don’t remember any other parts of the constitution where it was allowed to impose any other obligations on government.
But let’s take EJ’s theory to its logical conclusion. Let’s say that religion is allowed to impose obligations on government. We’re not talking Taliban or Wahabbi territory here where there is only one flavor of religion. This is America after all and we still have a religiously plural society. Let’s think of another example where there is religious pluralism where the fundamentalists have been pandered to in the manner that EJ suggests. How about Israel? Recently, the ultra orthodox fundamentalist Jews have been having a field day in Israel screaming and spitting at little girls, having fits over women singing in public and denying female scientists the right to receive professional awards at ceremonies or speaking about their expertise. These last two examples were the decisions of the governmental minister of health. All of the ugly details about what Israeli women are experiencing even though most of them are not ultra orthodox, can be found in this NYTimes article, Israel Faces Crisis over Role of Ultra Orthodox in Society. And here’s the money quote that shows just how wrong EJ is:
They have generally stayed out of the normal Israeli politics of war and peace, often staying neutral on the Palestinian question and focusing their deal-making on the material and spiritual needs of their constituents. Politically they have edged rightward in recent years.
In other words, while rejecting the state, the ultra-Orthodox have survived by making deals with it. And while dismissing the group, successive governments — whether run by the left or the right — have survived by trading subsidies for its votes. Now each has to live with the other, and the resulting friction is hard to contain.
In other words, if you start making deals with the religious right for votes, they’re going to want something in return. And this *something* tends to bite women in the ass. Give them an inch and they’ll start humiliating female scientists at professional conferences. The reason why the religious right have been able to get away with it for some time now is because of men like EJ and Chris Matthews types who never have to live with the results of those deals.
But nevermind. Women already know this. And they know it will get worse the more politicians pander. Now it’s birth control, pretty soon, it will be allowing employers to discriminate against women without cover. They do it now anyway and I could swear it got worse after the 2008 election because after all, the president and his party got away with vicious misogyny and discrimination without being held accountable. What women in the private sector is going to be able to successfully challenge the old boys club now? Party on, boys! That’s why the layoffs initially hit men hardest but spared women in public sector, education and health care jobs, but when it comes to hiring back in the corporations, it’s helpful to have a penis and a male supervisor or director who lunches only with other males and doesn’t see the women in his groups as real people needing real jobs. That’s why it is not uncommon for the majority the women in a department to lose their jobs in a layoff but not the men. Yes, this really happens. I have witnessed it myself. That’s why men get internal job interviews and not women. I thought I was crazy until the company doctor told me that she heard the same complaint from many, many women in my company. They are passed over, shoved out, laid off and never heard from again. It’s partially because no one challenged the shit that happened in 2008 or laid down the law in subsequent years or formed an exploratory committee to find out why it’s happening. No one gives a shit. It’s just women.
And why doesn’t anyone give a shit? Have you seen how many male column writers we have in major American newspapers compared to females? Have you ever read the evening round up on The Plum Line when male blogger after male blogger is cited with a bare sprinkling of female opinion thrown in as a garnish? We hear mens’ opinions 24/7 ad nauseum. And their stupid, clueless opinions usually give a pass to the religious right and their stubborn insistance that we all obey the writings of another bunch of male columnists from the end of the fricking Bronze Age who swear, without any proof at all, that they were taking dictation from God himself.
Enough, already. There are many of us who no longer believe in the god of the bible. There is a growing movement of non-believers, atheists, panentheists, freethinkers, skeptics and agnostics who do not agree that the religious impose ANY obligations on government outside of the right to exist. At the very least, the religious should have to prove to everyone that what they believe is real and rational beyond a shadow of a doubt before they impose any obligation on anyone.
So, until the red beanie guys can show conclusively, incontrovertibly and with all of the tools of the scientific method at their disposal that there is an actual God and that this God actually cares and does not want women to put substances in her body to prevent the conception of children, they should keep their unfounded, harmful, discriminatory impositions to themselves. At the very least, God should be required to make an appearance in a form other than a talking herbaceous wildfire hazard before we are forced to pay any more attention to the religious right or any politician who panders to them.
Take a good look at this picture. These are the representatives of a global organization that is dictating the terms by which a woman’s uterus will operate.
These guys, and they are ALL guys, have been in business for 1600 years. Well, longer than that when you consider that what really happened was that the Roman emperor Constantine conducted a merger of the polytheistic religious hierarchy with Christianity. Yep, one day all of the pontiffs were worshipping Jupiter, the next Jesus Christ. Constantine did it for pragmatic reasons. No one’s certain that he gave up pagan ways entirely. I’d be curious about the priests who suddenly had to make a choice. Do they continue to read entrails at the Pantheon and believe Minerva emerged from the head of her father and the head god shows up to empregnate beautiful young mortal women as a shower of gold or do they embrace a new religion based on “The belief that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.”? (That last definition of Christianity is courtesy of the Urban Dictionary)
We know the answer to this question. The priests switched sides but kept much of their old corporate culture. For example, there are no women in their executive offices. Nope. Not one. In 1600 years and counting, there has never been so much as female intern in their ranks. I’ve heard unofficial stories of female popes but they were disguised as men so it doesn’t count. They cornered the market on book learnin’ but tended to revere tradition, naturally. So when Galileo Galilei showed that the earth went around the sun and mocked them for ignoring the evidence, they made him pay. He was forced to eat those words (sort of). The Roman Catholic Church did a “talk to the hand” on the subject of Galileo and his heliocentric theory. Eventually, the church “softened”. One hundred years after stuffing a sock in Galileo’s mouth, it quietly allowed publication of his astronomical works. It has never formally apologized but it has expressed “regret” over the whole unfortunate incident. It only took until 1992. No one can accuse the Church of being hasty.
It must be nice to wear the same uniform every day and pronounce the rules by which others will live. That would include the lives of women who don’t even believe in your religion. Those women have, what?, 80 years on earth to make their mark and make a difference in their lives and the lives of others? They have to get educated and get jobs, they get married or not. They are in most “civilized” countries, complete, independent, PERSONS, with unalienable rights endowed by their Creator, whoever that may be. But according to these stick in the mud throwbacks from the 4th century, they have no right to decide when and under what circumstances they will be parents. It is the Church’s bishops that call the shots here in the US. They have the right to overturn the personhood of every woman in America whether those women give a $#@% about their exclusive boy’s club or not.
I would love to hear Ben Nelson and Bart Stupak explain why the women of this country are having their personhood stripped from them by a bunch of color coordinated old guys from the smallest country in the world. And can someone please tell me if Ben Nelson, Bart Stupak, and Marcy Kaptur (fergawdsakes, Marcy!) even believe that women are persons? Aren’t they entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Are women allowed to have their own belief systems? Are they allowed to follow the religion of their choice or is there one overarching religion that applies solely to women? Men can follow whatever creed they wish. Women are subject to The Church. Poor women are doubly subject but are middle class women to join their ranks? And does the amount of money you have affect the kind of liberty you are entitled to?
Are women persons? If you are in Congress and you don’t move heaven and earth to get rid of the Stupak Amendment, then you don’t believe they are. You don’t believe we women will move heaven and earth to get rid of you. Maybe you even believe that the sun goes round the earth.
You may come to “regret” that and a lot sooner than 350 years.
Death of a Princess was a docudrama that was released in 1980, two years after the execution of Saudi Princess Misha’al for adultery. You can 
David Adkins, aka ThereIsNoSpoon, tells it like it is on the contraception debate at 
So, does anyone believe that the red beanie boys lost their case against no-cost contraceptives in the health insurance plan because Barack Obama has a deep commitment to women’s reproductive freedom or equality?
Take a good look at this picture. These are the representatives of a global organization that is dictating the terms by which a woman’s uterus will operate.
The Confluence 