I crossed the country 5 times by car when I was a kid and passed through Indiana on four of those trips. It’s a little unfair to say that Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Iowa are boring states but I just can’t remember much about them except straight roads and a hynotically homogenous landscape. I think I might have left a bathing suit in a motel bathroom in Indiana. The pool was nice, that much I remember.
Other than that? Fields and fields of fields. So, you know, Indiana doesn’t have much going for it to begin with.
Well, at least the religious fundamentalists who were violently oppressed by female pro-contraceptive guerrillas and gay men demanding wedding cakes can sleep peacefully at night now. They can unbar their barn doors and beat their swords into ploughshares, which are much more useful in Indiana.
Terry Gross followed up her interview with Sister Pat Farrell of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious with the view of the church as presented by Bishop Leonard Blair of Toledo, Ohio. Bishop Blair lead the commission that investigated the nuns and wrote a report criticizing the sisters for not sticking to church teachings. The Bishops are planning to take over the LCWR and impose conformity on it. You can listen to Bishop Blair’s interview with Gross here.
I’m at a loss for words. Wait, that’s not quite right. What I mean to say is that the bishops seem to be undergoing a process of self-immolation on a public stage because if what I’m hearing is the “logic” of the church, it is incomprehensible. I find the bishop’s response to Sister Pat’s interpretation of obedience to be particularly confounding. Sister Pat says she interprets her vow of obedience as obedience to God and her conscience. You would think that God’s word would be the ultimate authority. Not so, says the bishop. The sister isn’t allowed to get around the obedience to the church even if it is in contradiction to what the sister interprets as God’s will. The church is a hierarchy and the sister is not in it. She doesn’t have the right to discuss or question anything. She only has the duty to do what she’s told, even if she thinks it’s wrong.
And you know, that’s probably ok. I mean, if you’re going to be a believer of a certain religion and that religion says you must follow us unquestioningly and not rely on your own understanding, then you’d better do what they say or find another church. The Catholic church is particular flavor of Christianity. You need to accept that it’s always going to be lime and never fruit punch.
The bishop has more to say on the church sexual abuse scandal. To me, he is saying that the church doesn’t have a problem with homosexuality and pedophilia (which don’t have to go together but these priests are not mature in their sexuality. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature of their teachings and training). Bishop Blair attributes the sexual abuse cases to an evil that has gotten into the church. And in some weird way he justifies the crackdown on the sisters as a response to that evil. The priests and bishops need to refocus on church doctrine to keep themselves in line and so the first thing they do is make sure the sisters are conforming.
There’s more on human sexuality in marriage and contraception but with every issue, I feel like I’m hearing 2000 years of rationalizations layered into some bizarre accretion. Somewhere back in the 4th century, the Roman empire co-opted early Christianity and Catholic dogma took a hard right turn forcing everything around it to twist itself into knots trying to keep up. It’s like one of those old models of the solar system where the earth is the center and everything around it takes more and more complicated paths to explain observations of astronomical patterns, like retrograde orbits. But hey, this is the Catholic church we’re talking about. It only took them 400 years to forgive Galileo for being right.
This is what Sister Pat is up against. And I have to say that if she stays in the church and complies with this assessment, she will need to lose her own conscience. It will be substituted by some other entity’s conscience. The loss is not just to herself though. All of the people who depend on the assistance of her organization will be harmed by her compliance. She’s going to have to make a choice. She won’t be the first person to have to defy the church. Martin Luther did it and that turned out alright, sort of. But what Martin Luther did to church dogma, Sister Pat would be doing for women in general.
At some point, Catholic women are going to have to ask themselves what’s in it for them that can’t be provided by some other faith. Is it true that God only speaks to one man in Rome and this holy representative made it to the top through piety and not politics? And if there is a political element to his election to pope, doesn’t that undercut his authority in some respects? He’s not the most holy or wise. He’s just the most popular of the cardinals. And if that’s true, then how do we know that they’re operating in the best interests of God? And if they’re using their own judgement and not hearing from God directly, how is their conscience more reliable than Sister Pat’s?
I only ask but *she’s* not allowed to. The Catholic hierarchy is telling her that this is what she signed up for, no matter how self-serving it is for the guys in charge. If she wants to do things her own way, well, she’s not being a good Catholic. It’s sort of like being a woman in the Democratic party.
It’s up to her. Get in line and be silent and subservient forever or listen to God and her conscience, leave and start her own order. This might be the most courageous thing a Catholic woman has ever done. It would be so significant that it would shake the hierarchy to the core. Who knows, the Church might need to start asking some questions of itself. Don’t wimp out, Sister Pat.
1.) Charles Pierce writes that Obama’s press conference yesterday featuring Slutgate and contraception left him uneasy. In Standing Up for Sex, Pierce writes:
Not a simple, mumbling word about the right to decent health-care, let alone the right to choose. Given a golden opportunity to say flatly that he and his administration were foursquare behind these rights, he gave the whole thing a pass. I’m sure he’s got poll numbers that tell him not to say “abortion” in public but, damn, this was disappointing.
This is what I mean when I say that this issue can only be a political winner for the Democrats if they go out and make it one. How hard would it have been for him to say, “Look, it’s probably not a good time in history to be using the war metaphor, but there’s no question that the Republican party is a vehicle in an organized campaigh to roll back women’s rights in the most personal sphere of their lives, and, as long as I’m president, that won’t happen.”?
I’m glad he called Sandra Fluke. I just wish he’d show that he appreciates the incredible political gift she gave him.
Obama thinks his party affiliation speaks for itself and we should read into his statements what his real thoughts and intentions are. And this worked so well in 2008. Everyone thought he was a liberal even though he didn’t embrace liberal or even Democratic or New Deal principles. Everyone thought he was an anti-war candidate even though this was all premised upon what he *might* have done had he actually been present at the IWR vote. Everyone thought he was a feminist, which flew in the face of hard evidence that we watched and heard with our very own senses. In the past four years, he has shown himself to be none of the things he was assumed to be so, and, as far as I’m concerned, we should not assume or presume that he is onboard with sex being guilt free for adult women. More likely, he has no natural empathy for women in this regard so he’s more inclined to do what’s good for him politically and not for women socially. And right now, he thinks it is good for him politically to reach out to evangelicals and the women’s vote will just flock to him because women are assuming he is not as bad as the Republicans.
I think he is just as bad, if not worse, because his attitude encourages complacency. It will all be taken care of, don’t you worry. A year from now, women are going to be kicking themselves for not being more demanding of him. You’re only going to get a commitment from him under duress and until you hear him choke it out in a high squeaky voice, don’t assume anything.
2.) Speaking of beliefs that may or may not have any basis in fact, have you checked out the Richard Dawkins Belief Scale? Unlike women’s rights, you don’t have to commit to a god or atheism. It’s perfectly Ok to land somewhere along the scale. I’m a 5.78324. Some people might round that up. Here it is:
Strong Theist: I do not question the existence of God, I KNOW he exists.
De-facto Theist: I cannot know for certain but I strongly believe in God and I live my life on the assumption that he is there.
Weak Theist: I am very uncertain, but I am inclined to believe in God.
Pure Agnostic: God’s existence and non-existence are exactly equiprobable.
Weak Atheist: I do not know whether God exists but I’m inclined to be skeptical.
De-facto Atheist: I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable and I live my life under the assumption that he is not there.
Strong Atheist: I am 100% sure that there is no God.
Assuming that there are not as many 1’s out there as the Beanie Boys would have you think, why should we allow the 1’s to run the country based on judeo-christian biblical principles?
3.) More on belief. Pat Robertson may have exceeded his stupidity quota. When asked on the 700 Club about why God kills people with tornados, he had this to say:
There ya’ go, tornado victims. Let this be a lesson to you. Don’t buy a farm in the middle of tornado alley. Don’t be a person who earns a living in tornado alley either. And woe to you on the west coast in the earthquake zone. The kinfolk say, move away from there! Californy is NOT the place you want to be. Also, if you are anywhere where you could be swept away by a flash flood, get caught up in a hurricane or Nor’easter, burnt to a cinder in a wildfire, trapped in a heat wave, engulfed in a blizzard, frozen in a cold snap, eaten by wild animals or poisoned by insects and plants, or irradiated by a particularly unusual and strong solar flare, well, it’s your own damn fault. Did God promise you a rose garden? You should have bought one of the time shares in Glenn Beck’s underground bunker cities and retreated to it with your 6 months supply of dried ravioli and Tang.
Now, Viehbacher’s point seems to be that small biotechs and mid sized companies are more nimble and innovative than big behemoth pharma companies so, and here’s the logic of the bonus class in all it’s glory, big pharma scientists just aren’t as good as those in smaller biotechs and therefore deserve to have their jobs eliminated.
This ignores two things that Viehbacher is either denying or completely ignorant of. The first is that those of us who up until recently worked in big pharma until we were dumped for working in big pharma, did not start our careers in big pharma. Nooooo, we were in medium pharma. The first pharma I worked at only had 3 research sites and the one I worked at in Princeton was relatively small having about 400 people total working on about 5 different therapeutic areas. It was all self contained with chemistry, biology, animal facilities, structural biology, analytical, scale up, everything in one building. But then came the mergers and more mergers and we added more facilities and companies and satellite research centers in different companies and then we got consultants to come in every couple of years and rejigger everyone, just to keep it light and breezy. Every time there was a merger, work would come to a screeching halt for two years so the managers could play musical chairs and find a department headship position, usually by doing a real Julius Caesar meets Brutus in the Senate scene. So, big was never OUR idea. It was the bright idea of the finance guys, the consultant guys and the Viehbacher guys who got big bonuses from every merger they made.
The second thing that undermines Viehbacher’s argument is that all of those big pharma scientists that he thought were no good are now working for the small companies and acedemic groups that Viehbacher is planning to rape. Now that they’ve been liberated from the shackles of big pharma wage slavery, they are working more nimbly and innovatively at small biotechs and university labs with vastly reduced salaries and benefits. And this must warm the cockles of Viehbacher’s heart enormously.
5.) Finally, Titli Nihaan, my new favorite internet chef (until #1 child gets her own show), shows us how to make a Cassoulet and gives us some French lessons as a bonus! This is the halal version. I tried it the other night but made some even leaner substitutions. Delicious. Er, Magnifique!
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.
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.
Yeah, it just occured to me that as a well-educated, professional woman who works in a creative field, I don’t really need him anyway. I mean, one of the prime reasons to vote for a Democrat come the fall would be to prevent any more Samuel Alito appointments to the Supreme Court. But abortion rights aren’t really a problem for me anyway. If I need one, I can just hop a jet to somewhere where I won’t be treated like a criminal whore. And I can do the same for my two daughters. I’ve got the money. It’s no big deal. And all of the Obama girls out there can probably do the same. And even if they can’t, it’s not really my problem. I’ve paid my dues, I’ve worked my way up to a comfortable niche in the employment spectra. Why should I care what happens to some young twenty something? Overcoming obstacles builds character!
Same with contraception. I’m assuming that Hillary’s universal healthcare plan would have covered them. But I can afford to buy them even if my employer’s insurance plan doesn’t cover them. No biggy. Oh, I’m sure that the cost will be a bit burdensome to the firm and nubile but they’ll just give up food to buy them I’m sure. Anorexia and contraceptives: perfect together! Just what every Obama man wants.
Oh, sure, if Obama is the nominee and he loses to McCain, the war will go on indefinitely. But people, you worry too much. Surely we will elect enough senators this fall to overcome a filibuster. Surely! But so what if we don’t? It’s not like *I’m* ever going to have to go to war. No, that’s strictly for the young to worry about.
No, I think I’ll just take the fall off, kick back and watch the leaves turn colors, decorate for Halloween and not worry at all about the future. Who needs change? I don’t.
Terry Gross followed up her 
David Adkins, aka ThereIsNoSpoon, tells it like it is on the contraception debate at 
The Confluence 