You know who you are

Some of you may be wondering why I go on and on about fundamentalists. Well, to be quite honest, it’s because my family has been ripped to pieces by religion in general.

My own beliefs are nobody’s business but I’m going to tell you anyway. Here’s where I stand on the matter: I’m not an atheist but my concept of god is pretty abstract. I could be called a panentheist, that is god is ineffable and exists beyond space and time and we exist within that god. My concept of god has been very steady since I was a little kid. Yep, all those years trying to convert me were a waste of time. I don’t believe in a personal god, or an anthropomorphic god and I don’t think prayer is very useful. Meditation is and there’s something to be said for mindfulness. Ironically, I’ve always liked Catholic mass a lot but will never attach myself to a church where half the attendees are second class. As for religious texts, I don’t have any but I have always been drawn to Tolkien who was a devout Catholic who also had a peculiar interpretation of religion and myth with a healthy addition of neoplatonism. That’s about where I am. I’m not a practicing anything and I don’t want to be.

So, when it comes to what tore my family apart, I don’t have a dog in this fight. Since my beliefs do not come with a religious text or tradition, all the world’s religions that do have traditions that are thousands of years old look pretty much the same to me. Worship of Zeus and the pantheon or the Nordic gods once made  a lot of sense and now look silly to Christians and Muslims. But Christianity and Islam and Hinduism are all premised on equally silly things to me. Nevertheless, if that’s what floats your boat, and as long as you don’t stick your faith in my face by either overt proselytizing or covert banding together to reinforce your beliefs and shutting

Luther started it.

others out, I don’t have any problems. What’s in your head should stay in your head and what’s in my head should stay in my head and as long as we don’t insist on everyone else thinking exactly like we do, we should all get along.

Butcha know, it just didn’t work out that way in my family. I blame Martin Luther. Oh for sure, he had some very legitimate points, over 90 0f them from what I can remember. Yes, the Catholic church had become corrupt. Yes, there was a lot to be said about priests keeping the bible out of the hands of common people. But in retrospect, they might have had a point. As Julia Sweeney said in “Letting Go of God” when referring to the bible, “have you read that book??” Sure a lot of people find some wisdom in the bible but that book is also awful in ways that modern humans in this modern world do not approve. And yet, there are people who are willing to kill, shame, pass judgment, and lock into roles other people based on confusing, and brutal texts, taken completely out of context.

Anyway, it started with Luther.

For some crazy reason, there are still people in my family who think that the Pope speaks for all Catholics and they do what ever the Pope says, like mindless automatons. Oh, and priests do all the bible reading and interpretation for Catholics despite the fact that the printing press has been around for 500 years now and Catholics have pretty much given up the battle of keeping vernacular bibles out of the hands of their parishioners. Yes, dear faithful protestants, you can read the bible if you are a Catholic and are free to interpret that nonsense any which way you like. But Catholic masses don’t differ a whole lot from other Sunday services except there aren’t any women at the pulpit and there’s incense and holy water and the communion disks taste like wall paper paste instead of the neat little cubes of wholesome bread you get at a Presbyterian service. It’s all pretty much the same damn service at every mainstream church. Trust me on this. You might even *like* a Catholic mass.

But in my family, we must still believe that there is some gigantic chasm between the protestants and the Catholics, even though, there isn’t. The pope isn’t the dictator everyone thinks he is, most Catholics practice birth control and in many respects, Catholics have a longer history of intellectual thought that many mainstream protestant churches are still struggling with. They have saints and it’s still slightly pagan. And? That just sounds like a brilliant marketing strategy to me and so what? There’s still a thread in Catholicism that reaches back to seasons and nature. But ok, whatever floats your boat. Nevertheless, I’m not going to condemn Catholicism just because Luther uncovered some rather significant problems 500 years ago. As far as I’m concerned, the fight is over. And anyway, I’m just an observer. It’s not personal to me.

But it was personal to others. Religion in my family is like a game of one upsmanship. Lutheranism was superior to Catholicism but not as superior as evangelicalism. Evangelicalism is genuine, until it wasn’t and you had to become a Jehovah’s Witness because THEY had The Truth. But then you had to be born again because that’s where it’s really at. And only if you practice the right brand of Christianity and believe in the signs and condemn the lives of people wholly unconnected to you, can you prove to this capricious, angry, mean and stingy god that you and you alone are worthy to be raptured before the end where you can sit in the clouds and feel smugly superior to all those relatives who didn’t listen to you. Oh, and homosexuals who do all those nasty, dirty things with their body parts (never mind that quite a number of married heterosexuals also do those nasty, dirty things with their body parts, mean spirited hypocritical inconsistencies are required in this version of Christianity), well, they need to be set straight, in more ways than one and it’s the fundamentalists job to be vocal, rude and obnoxious and ruin other people’s vacations.

Like I said before, I don’t really care what you believe as long as you don’t shove it down my throat by either 1.) overt proselytization or 2.) ostracism because you can’t for one second have anyone disagree with you. Both of those things tear families apart.

How did it happen in my family? Well, I think it all began when one family member who was a Lutheran was forced to accept some Catholicism upon marriage. That person wrecked revenge by becoming a Jehovah’s Witness and then relentlessly pursued other family members until they too became Jehovah’s Witnesses. If the whole family had converted, this might have been a different story. But only half converted. Then, when the original Jehovah’s Witness decided to get out after Armageddon didn’t come, the other Jehovah’s Witnesses had to shun her. Yep, no more social gatherings, no more family meals, nada. Scheduling a family event now requires familiarity with GRE logic problems:

“Bob, Sheila and Terry are JW’s and Nina is a JW apostate. Florence is an Evangelical, Ellis is a panentheist and George and Sarah are lapsed Lutheran and Catholic respectively. Bob, Sheila and Terry can associate with Florence, Ellis, George and Sarah but not on any holidays when working people have time off. They can not associate with Nina. Nina is a vocal dissenter of George and Sarah’s gay relatives so inviting her to Sarah’s family gatherings is awkward. Florence can associate with everyone but can’t invite Bob, Sheila, Terry to the same event with Nina. If Nina is not invited to an event, George and Sarah won’t attend in order to protest the JW practice of shunning. Bob, Sheila, and Terry can’t go to the funerals of Florence, George, and Sarah because they will be churches. What day during the year can they all be together?”

I might think shunning is a really stupid and painful practice that Jehovah’s Witnesses use in order to manipulate people into staying in the religion when they otherwise might not but it’s not like you don’t know what you’re getting into when you join the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Essentially, there is no unconditional love or grace with the Witnesses. This is the ultimate truth about Jehovah’s Witnesses that the rest of us have observed even if the believers are in denial about it. Their “friends” in “The Truth” will turn on them in an instant if they even think about putting their families first or decide they’ve spent much of their lives in too much self denial of, you know, just about every thing that brings a family joy.

It should be noted that of all the kids of three siblings that became Jehovah’s Witnesses, not one of us became Jehovah’s Witnesses in spite of the regime of fear mongering indoctrination.

The original instigator went on to become Born Again and watched Jim and Tami Faye Praise the Lord!, which to some of us looked like jumping from the frying pan into the fire but we just had to put up with it. This sibling was the one labeled “Most likely to end up a Buddhist” and, you know, that would have been a relief. But Buddhists are too soft and accepting. No, for this sibling, nothing but the most harsh and demanding fundamentalism would do. We put up with relentless pressure for decades to voluntarily lobotomize ourselves, admit that evolution was a lie, and embrace the end times. And some of the targets of this campaign did eventually give in and became belligerent, judgmental shadows of their former selves while the family continued to atomize. Now, that GRE question has a part B that affects a whole new generation.

Now, one half of us can’t speak to the other half. If we’re not actively shunning because our organization demands it, we’re shunning because the non-believer, and at this point, it looks like I might be the only one, still maintains that women are equal to men, evolution is in fact the way the world works, gay people are born that way and that, in general, all people, even poor ones, should be treated with dignity and respect. For some reason, that makes me the bad one. Well, that and I don’t think the bible is the inspired word of god (“Have you read that book??”) Thus, I am ultimately the one person who can unite the rest of the family in mutual distrust of the heathen.

Let’s face it, you can be a decent person, don’t do drugs, don’t steal, don’t kill people, put up with years of crazy and abuse at the hands of some very selfish people who hide behind their religion and never ask for a penny from anyone but if you do not believe that THAT BOOK is the inspired word of god, you are a baaaaad person and people will feel that it is Ok to not be nice to you.

That book, is subject to their interpretation, whoever they happen to be at the time. They can all contradict each other and ridicule each other’s interpretation, and they do, regularly. But they all agree that That Book is the ultimate authority. Of everything.

This is not mainstream Christianity. I can hang out with Catholics and Presbyterians and even some Methodists and never feel baaaaaad. No, it’s the fundamentalists who absolutely cannot tolerate any dissent. In the US, we don’t do honor killings. But it’s perfectly Ok to demonize anyone who is independent, who thinks for themselves without reference to that book, and who by their very presence threatens to tear a hole in the perfect fabric cover that protects the believer from the anxiety over whether they are good enough to survive the wrath of a god who seemingly does not appear to possess self control. This is a god that throws temper tantrums if gay people get married and smites innocent dying people who accept transfusions to save their lives. This is a god that demands that we disavow the laws of nature and choose deliberate ignorance over intelligent understanding. This is a god that would prefer that women suffer their entire lives for forgetting their oral contraceptives. This is a god that insists that we shame and dehumanize women so that their lives and the lives of those who would help them, are at risk of being snuffed out by a person vulnerable to speech that is nothing but an invitation to do violent things.

That book is not the cause of the problem. The problem is that as herd animals, some of us are still not able to tell when the herd is headed off a cliff. And some opportunists and politicians are all too willing to take advantage of that to attain power. They’ve spent the last half century dragging this country back. Where women are concerned, they’ve been very successful, because fully raw cannibals will have equal rights before women do. They’ve not been so successful when it came to gay marriage, probably because there are more powerful men with money backing that. I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing but it does show what you can achieve if you’re male and have money. The fact that lesbians also benefit is just icing on the cake.

Recently, the Mormon church delivered a killing blow to any progressive Mormon who thought the church’s stance on homosexuality was softening. This new guidance from the quorum of the twelve Mormon apostles says that not only will married gay couples now be subject to disciplinary councils and expulsion for apostasy, their children would no longer be baptized or blessed. Yes, gay mormons do exist, probably in greater numbers than we think, and because the church strongly emphasizes marriage and families, some gay mormons have been compelled to marry heterosexually and have children. Then when they can’t deny their authentic selves anymore, and marry a same sex partner, their children are instantly ostracized from the church. Imagine what kind of message this sends to LGBT teenagers. Don’t tell, don’t step out of line, because we don’t want you here and your families will be condemned. Furthermore, your children will need to disavow your lifestyle when they become adults if they ever want to become members of the church.

John Dehlin at Mormon Stories has interviewed quite a number of people in the wake of this decision. Some people think this is a legal technicality to prevent the church from being accused of alienation of affection from parents because of its strict condemnation of homosexuality. But the only explanation that rings true to me is that the ultra conservative churches have won the battles but are losing the war. They are now circling the wagons, getting less inclusive, forcing out all dissenters, doubling down on the mean and the judgmental and the fundamentalism because that is what distinguishes them as different and purer and better than anyone else. In fact, making themselves more exclusive in some ways polishes their prestige. If you can endure this demand for perfection, conformity and hard edged faith, no matter how ridiculous that faith might be to the rest of the world, then you know the church must be true. You’re the only ones who see it, you are persecuted by the state for these beliefs and you’ll go down fighting all the way.

Fine. Just do it somewhere remote.

Leave the rest of us alone.

The shooting at Planned Parenthood is just the latest outcome from the barrage of hate and dehumanization that emanates from the mouths of Rush Limbaugh and fundamentalist churches and patriarchs and the politicians they support. It’s also the result of wishy washy Tut-tutting from the likes of Barack Obama who can’t seem to bring himself to stand with Planned Parenthood because he’s the father of two females. I find that almost as disgusting as the overt foaming at the mouth fundie speech. The most powerful man in the world either feels no confidence challenging the money fueled consensus reality or he’s just another conservative guy pretending to be a progressive. Either way, he’s no champion of females, not even his own daughters.

And then there is the media that doesn’t want to piss off the religious contingent by telling it like it is: we have spawned our own religious fundamentalist extremists right here in America.

Those of us who don’t have a dog in this fight see very little difference between the Islamic State and the right wing patriarchs in Arkansas who pick their daughters’ husbands so they can churn out “Christian Soldiers” who pray that they will one day enforce biblical law on the rest of us.

It’s not benign. It imposes suffering on people every day from family members to people whose lives are nobody else’s business.

If this is the last charge at the end of the war, then I can not wait for it to be over. And I believe it will eventually end. But not before it has wrecked destruction on our families and ruined what should have been love, support and friendship for some of us for most of our lives.

If there is a heaven, they have a lot to answer for before they get in.

 

 

 

 

Why fundamentalism of any kind is dangerous

I’m sure I’ve posted this before but the video below bears repeating:

 

What Crossan didn’t mention is that fundamentalist religious extremists, regardless of faith, hold God as their ultimate authority. They do not answer to a secular state. All that talk about respecting the law is just balderdash if they think they have to defy it in order to answer to a higher authority. That’s why at least one police officer in Colorado Springs is dead tonight.

They don’t care about anything but their own salvation. They might not decapitate but their victims are just as dead. And they have a lot of guns.

Better not rile them up, eh, Marco? What do you say, Ben? Ted?

Ted?

 

RWNJ’s utterly stupid response to the Planned Parenthood hostage crisis and shooting

So, this is the best they can come up with. It’s not that there’s a shooting at Planned Parenthood. No, it’s a strip mall and the shooter was robbing a bank in the same building. So, see, you stupid libs? You are all wrong about this. It’s just another typical mass shooting in Colorado.

Um, Ok, then.

Women are not simply the sum of their parts

Linda, a breast cancer survivor, explains where the body starts and politics end and where the Komen foundation got it so wrong by deciding to defund Planned Parenthood:

The problem, as I see it, is that the religious right has been extremely successful at reducing women to a collection of parts which they claim to have dominion over.  They’ve been successful because *both* parties have used Roe as a political football going for three downs before they punt it back to the other team.  Lately, the Republicans have been able to commandeer the airwaves to persuade clueless religious voters to vote against abortion in order to slip in legislation that is devastating to the social safety net.

As we saw a few days ago, applying peer pressure tactics can alter a person’s perception of reality.  People who care intensely about being with the group can not tolerate the “pain of independence”.  They aren’t even aware of how they’ve changed or how much they have been willing to swallow.  Personally?  I think appealing to religious voters to knock it off will have zero impact.  While they are surrounded by so much messaging, they are as remote and untouchable as Mars.  They are going to do what they’re told when they march into that voting booth.  I suppose you could attack their messaging machine but we’ve already tried that.  What we might expect is that many of them will meet their maker in the next couple of election cycles, thus reducing their numbers. Yeah, sure there are younger religious wingnuts but television starts to become less important the younger you are.

While we are waiting for nature to take its course, expect the Republicans to redouble their efforts.  It’s going to get ridiculous from now until election day.  But I think they only have a few more election cycles to affect the kind of permanent change they’ve been hoping for since FDR.  And Komen may have backfired on them.  This one is a bridge too far for most women who have been under constant attack ever since Obama and the Democrats pandered to the religious during the 2008 election cycle.

By the way, ladies, if you are ever given a choice to vote for a reasonable female politician again, even if she is not 100% perfect, tell the blogger boys to go Cheney themselves and vote for her.  No man, no matter what his ethnicity, is worth putting your own needs second.

********************************************

More on the religious right, this time in the area of counselling.  How would you like to go to a counsellor for a troubling personal matter with elements of sexuality only to find out that your counsellor was a born-again, evangelical, fundy who is going to tell you *exactly* how she feels about your immoral behavior?  Relax.  Julea Ward would never do that to you.  She would refer you to another counsellor before she would subject herself to the professional obligation to treat you with compassion and respect.

Unfortunately for Ward, her faculty supervisors didn’t think she understood what her future job entails and they filed disciplinary actions against her.  They expelled her:

A federal court dismissed Ms. Ward’s claim of religious discrimination. But on Jan. 27, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ordered the lower court to rehear the case, finding that Eastern Michigan “cannot point to any written policy that barred Ward from requesting this referral.”

According to the Sixth Circuit decision, written by Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton, Ms. Ward counseled her first two clients without incident. But when she “reviewed the file of the third client, she noticed he sought counseling about a same-sex relationship.” Ms. Ward asked her faculty supervisor, Yvonne Callaway, “(1) whether she should meet with the client and refer him only if it became necessary — only if the counseling session required Ward to affirm the client’s same-sex relationship — or (2) whether the school should reassign the client from the outset.”

Professor Callaway reassigned the client, but then began disciplinary proceedings against Ms. Ward. During the proceedings, professors challenged Ms. Ward’s interpretation of Christianity, with one, Perry C. Francis, wondering if Ms. Ward could not give gay men and lesbians “the same respect and honor that God would give them?”

The Sixth Circuit decision turns on how common it is to refer patients to other counselors. Ms. Ward argues that one’s religious beliefs are a reasonable reason to refer a client, while the university argues that it has to train students to work with all kinds of clients. The American Counseling Association filed a brief asserting that to habitually refer gay clients would violate its ethical canon.

Ms. Ward referred questions to her lawyer, Jeremy Tedesco of the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian legal advocacy organization. Mr. Tedesco said that “if referrals are acceptable, including for many nonreligious-based reasons, they can’t deny someone who has a religion-based need to refer.” He said that Ms. Ward was not singling out gay men and lesbians, and that she would also refuse to affirm heterosexuals who sought counseling about their adultery.

 

This reminds me of the pharmacists who don’t want to fill contraceptive prescriptions.  It becomes a real problem when there is no other place to get the services or products you need.

I shudder to think about what would have happened to Ward’s patients when they went to see her about a non-marital relationship they were in.  Extra marital and pre-marital sex are absolutely verboten to the evangelical Christian.  There are no exceptions.  In fact, to some fundies, you shouldn’t have any physical contact at all before you’re married not even so much as a chaste kiss.  Maybe Ward could give out a little card describing her views before the first session and then the patient could decide which one of them was more emotionally disturbed.

What puzzles me is just what it is she was going to do during her counselling sessions.  I guess she could help people with phobias or work related issues.  But imagine how weird it would be if the patient came to her complaining of her nutty, religious fundy family who can’t think logically anymore and is extremely persistent about pushing their over the top religious beliefs down her throat and it’s driving her crazy.  Technically, it’s not a sexual matter.

Expelling her was a public service.

Komen Caves and the Tipping Point

Just announced about half an hour ago on CNN: The Komen Foundation is reversing its decision to defund Planned Parenthood :

The Susan G. Komen foundation has reversed a controversial decision not to renew funding for some Planned Parenthood projects, the group said in a statement Friday.

“We want to apologize to the American public for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women’s lives,” the statement said. “We will continue to fund existing grants, including those of Planned Parenthood, and preserve their eligibility to apply for future grants, while maintaining the ability of our affiliates to make funding decisions that meet the needs of their communities.”

[…]

CREDO, which describes itself as the largest corporate donor to Planned Parenthood, said Thursday that 250,000 of its members had signed a petition urging the Komen Foundation to reverse its decision.

“The move is clearly connected to attempts by Republicans in Congress to defund Planned Parenthood,” the organization said in a statement. “In responding to questions about its decision, the foundation cited as its rationale a sham ‘investigation’ into Planned Parenthood launched by Republican Rep. Cliff Stearns.” who the group called “one of the most militant anti-choice members of Congress.”

When I was on Twitter yesterday, I saw a many, many tweets from women who were fed up with the efforts of the religious right to force their ideology on them.  We may have reached the tipping point.

If I were a Democratic politician, I would use this weekend to reassess my position on caving to the right on just about everything.  The religious right is on its way out and so may be any politician that panders to them.

More on the reversal by Jennifer Preston at TheLede at the NYTimes. Here’s another data point on the Tipping Point hypothesis:

It was the perception that the Komen foundation was inserting politics into providing health care services, especially to underserved women, that helped prompt a firestorm of debate online and offline.

At Planned Parenthood, Heather Holdridge, who is the director of digital advocacy strategy, said there have been multiple online organizing efforts in the past on the organization’s behalf, but this one was different, in part, because people organized themselves online.

“I think this was a tipping point for us,” Ms. Holdridge said. “I think something has happened, where people are upset that two great organizations that have this shared mission were now in this difficult position. And so, we have been seeing that response through our supporters, some of whom, were not our supporters before Tuesday afternoon.”

The Komen foundation said that it would be making calls to its key supporters and affiliates starting this afternoon to figure out how to “get back to doing our work. “We ask for the public’s understanding and patience as we gather our Komen affiliates from around the country to determine how to move forward in the best interests of the women and people we serve.”

Women are tired of this crap.  It’s been 40 years of fighting off these raging religious lunatics who stubbornly refuse to evolve past 1300 BC.  It’s not a coincidence that the number of atheist, freethinker and skeptic groups and online voices have sprung up in the past couple of years.  Since Obama took office, the right has had a free for all because the Democrats absolutely refused to push back for fear of losing the votes of the religious.  It’s been the Conscience Rule, followed by the Stupak debacle in the health care bill, the Mississippi Personhood amendment, Kathleen Sebelius overruling the FDA advisory board on Plan B and the red beanie boys from Vatican Inc.  There’s been very little standing between the rabidly anti-choice inmates who have taken over the asylum and women.  Democrats don’t want to get involved unless they can turn it into some kind of campaign trick.

And reproductive rights are just the tip of the iceberg.  The economy is still lousy and is staying lousy for women who don’t get hired back at the same rates as men.  We still have to put up with discrimination at work because it’s subtle and if a guy’s not groping you, there’s no accountability.  It’s only gotten worse since Obama and his macho guys stomped all over Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin in 2008.  But it didn’t stop there.  They took that assholery and unaccountable behavior into the White House where their dismissive behavior and the refusal of some of the bigwigs to work with women like Sheila Bair, Christina Romer and Elizabeth Warren has lead to the continuation of a lagging economy at the mercy of unpunished bankers.

It’s hard to believe that the majority segment of the population of this country is as besieged as it is.  It’s just one damn thing after another.  Komen was the last straw.

We need a zillion woman march on Washington.  This shit’s got to stop.

Friday: The Stupid Continues

More fallout from the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s decision to kowtow to it’s noisy but small group of elderly ultra religious social conservatives (whose numbers are shrinking at an alarming rate) and drop funding to Planned Parenthood.  This bit from John Raffaelli, a board member, sums up just how smug the social conservatives have gotten:

Her comments directly contradicted those of John D. Raffaelli, a Komen board member and Washington lobbyist, who told The New York Times on Wednesday that Komen made the changes to its grant-making process specifically to end its relationship with Planned Parenthood. Mr. Raffaelli said that Komen had become increasingly worried that an investigation of Planned Parenthood by Representative Cliff Stearns, Republican of Florida, would damage Komen’s credibility with donors.

Komen gave Planned Parenthood $700,000 last year — a tiny portion of its $93 million in grants — to finance 19 separate programs. A growing number of religious organizations had become concerned that donations to Komen would benefit Planned Parenthood and had advised members not to give to Komen. Rather than risk offending some donors with a relatively small portfolio of grants, Komen decided to largely cut off Planned Parenthood, Mr. Raffaelli said.

To Planned Parenthood, that decision amounted to a betrayal of the organizations’ shared goal of saving lives through breast screening programs. Ms. Richards, Planned Parenthood’s president, said her organization was gratified by the support the controversy has brought.

“We provide care to one in five women in America, and over the last two days it seems we’ve heard from every one of them, through Facebook, Twitter, e-mail and all sorts of ways, “ Ms. Richards said. “It’s a true show of women standing for women.”

Over 30 years, Komen became one of the most successful disease advocacy organizations in the world by making pink ribbons and the fight against breast cancer as prevalent a symbol here as baseball and apple pie.

Avoiding this kind of controversy was the very reason Komen chose a quiet ending to its relationship with Planned Parenthood, Mr. Raffaelli said. And he said Komen was bitterly disappointed that Planned Parenthood was using Komen’s decision to raise money.

Notice what is really outraging the board at Komen.  It’s not that they haven’t cured breast cancer or spared one woman the pain of losing her breasts or life.  No, the outrage is that Planned Parenthood is benefitting from the Komen’s ill-advised, boneheaded decision.  How dare Planned Parenthood not take defeat humbly?!  Don’t they realize that the most powerful breast cancer organization in the world has just given them orders to drop their abortion services or suffer the consequences?  Doesn’t Planned Parenthood recognize shame when it is shoved in its face?  Who do these (slightly soiled and socially unacceptable) people think they are by assuming they can raise money for their filthy deeds?

I think we can deduce the kind of people Komen mingles with.  They’re not the kind of people who would ever need to visit Planned Parenthood.  They’re the kind of people who see the breast cancer screening activities of Planned Parenthood as a small auxilliary activity of their pro abortion empire.  They’ve never been a poor college student or working class woman or even middle class woman with a gap in her health insurance coverage.  It is inconceivable why anyone would want to contribute money to THAT GROUP.  In their minds, and the minds of their friends, Planned Parenthood has a reputation that is roughly equivalent of a crack den or a massage parlor.  I think Komen is just now waking up to the fact that millions and millions of American women do not see it that way at all.  This is what happens when growing income inequality separates the moneyed from everyone else.  They just have no idea how the other 99% live.

Sadly, I know exactly the kind of people Komen is trying to appeal to.  I’ve had dinner with these people.  Some of them are pretty well off and are otherwise kind and generous.  They just have this weakness where social issues are concerned and a blind spot about who actually uses services like Planned Parenthood.  Their obsession with homosexuality and abortion tears churches apart and their wealth gives them the power to withhold their money from any organization that does even one teensy tiny thing they don’t approve of.

Komen should have held firm and told these people to back off.  If preventing breast cancer is the goal, all of the money in the world won’t work unless it is put in the hands of the people who can actually detect and prevent breast cancer.  There’s no point sitting on a pile of cash if you don’t intend to use it.

Which brings me to my next item…

Astra-Zeneca announced the layoffs of 7700 people yesterday.  AZ is closing their site in Montreal, Canada.  Pharmageddon is hitting Montreal pretty hard, which makes me more than a little concerned for one of my favorite Canadian computational chemistry vendors.  I wonder how long they can survive in this environment and am hoping they are working on a new business model.

Derek Lowe at In the Pipeline covered the Astra-Zeneca layoffs yesterday and discovered this little nugget:

And AZ seems to be all but getting out of pain/CNS, cutting down to a few dozen people who will do external collaborations. Oh, and they’re buying back 4.5 billion dollars worth of stock, instead of spending that money on what the company tries to make a profit on. So there is that. If you’d like to hear AZ tell you how all this is making them more productive, here’s the press release.

Yes, you read that right, AZ is destroying the careers of almost 8000 scientists and support staff so that they can buy back stock.  Just concentrate that wealth even further.  Don’t dilute it.  And you know, I’m all for it.  I hope my 401K isn’t invested in AZ stock because the company isn’t going to grow any time soon.

Derek has a new post up today about AZ in Waltham, MA.  It looks like the shadow man is hanging over that site as well and AZ is playing the same game that Pfizer and other pharmas have done to their staffs:

Pfizer has done this to their people before, as have other companies in the throes of layoffs, and it’s the only way I know to actually push morale and productivity down even further in such a situation. You come to work for weeks, for months, not knowing if your, your lab, or your whole department is heading for the chopping block. All you’re sure of is that someone is. And will your own stellar performance persuade upper management to keep you, when the time comes? Not likely, under these conditions – it’ll more likely be the sort of thing where they draw lines through whole areas. Your fate, most people feel at these times, is not in your own hands. A less motivating environment couldn’t be engineered on purpose.

But that’s what AZ’s management has chosen to do at their largest research site in North America. I hope that they enjoy the results. But then (and more on this later), these are the people who have chosen to spend billions buying back their own stock rather than put it into research in the first place. It’s not like the score isn’t already up there on the big screen for everyone to see.

Been there.  Done that.  The shadow man hung over our site for about 2 years.  I don’t know what made us think the company would spare us.  In the final months before we were laid off, the lights were dimmed, the labs rearranged, whole departments were abandoned, their gleaming robotics collecting dust.  The hallways were darkened and we navigated our carts down allies cluttered with discarded lab equipment.  Chemists roamed the corridors with pale skin and dark circles under their eyes from lack of sleep, like zombies, with slowed gaits and unfixed gazes, turning inwards towards some bleak vision of the future.  No, I am not exaggerating.  My lab partner and I were so busy we hardly noticed the change around us until we met one of the living dead chemists in the hallway.  We were so caught up in our own research and making such good progress that we had no idea that we would be the first to go.  And no, it didn’t matter that our work was stellar or had gotten praise or that we had gotten Christmas bonuses for outstanding performance.  When the cut came, we were stunned.  But an email from the corporate guys up the street let us know that because our jobs were sacrificed, the company had met and exceeded its quarterly projections.  That was supposed to make us feel better.

There should be a law about sending out tasteless and painful email like that to employees you still want to work for you for four more months.  But it’s almost like the MBAs didn’t know we existed or that we had feelings and children we had to break the news to.  I understand that the AZ folks have been fully informed of the stock buy back program and must be feeling really peachy about it now.  Waltham folks should get their affairs in order.  When you start to work under the shadow man, your site’s days are numbered.

And here’s a little dark comedy production put together by a pharma chemist with YouTube handle ZombieSymmetry.  This is what passes for pharmaceutical research in this country these days.  It is trickle down Wharton MBA:

This is EXACTLY the kind of crap we had to put up with. And this:

I realize there are some smug and resentful liberal types out there reading this who have zero sympathy for pharma workers. Personally, I think you’re lacking a compassion component to your personality or are letting your political dogma interfere with your understanding of a crucial component of your country’s research infrastructure. I won’t call you stupid because that wouldn’t be nice because that wouldn’t be true. But your attitude is incredibly naive.

Pharmageddon should matter to you and you should see it as an opportunity to rejigger pharmaceutical research to work for YOU and not the small evil group that runs everything and to which no one we know belongs. Right now, the research community needs you to grow a clue and help them so they can help you. Without them, you are going to face rising costs in generic drugs and will become reliant on China for any new drugs that get discovered. Is that what you want??

Didn’t think so. Now, grab onto the research that is slipping away and pull hard.

*****************************

In case the politicians start singing about green shoots being just around the corner in yet another recovery summer, here is more evidence that it’s not happening in the pharma/biotech sector where the workers with the best educations are.  This layoff list is from FiercePharma and is just from *this year*.  We’re only three days into February and this is what we’re looking at:

• AstraZeneca puts 7,300 jobs on the chopping block

  February 2, 2012
• Abbott’s round of 700 layoffs doesn’t spare pharma

  January 26, 2012
• Takeda targets 2,800 jobs in Europe, U.S.

  January 18, 2012
• Novartis hammers out deal to keep Nyon plant open

  January 17, 2012
• Novartis to slash 2,000 US jobs, mostly in sales

  January 13, 2012
• Montreal suffers new layoffs by J&J, Sanofi

  January 12, 2012
• Valeant targets $200M in post-merger cost cuts
• January 9, 2012

If I were a politician in NJ, NY, PA, CT, MA or CA, I’d be shitting bricks right now.  The loss of highly paid, technical and biotech jobs has been enormous and we know that politicians have been sticking their fingers in their ears singing “la-la-la”.  Democrats haven’t done a damn thing to stop the job losses.  They have allowed the grasshoppers to hollow out these companies and take everything for themselves.  We’re left fending for ourselves in an environment when money for research is scarce and vulture capitalists are waiting to swoop down and take advantage of any new discoveries we can find from working our asses off.

Everyone will pay for this with higher drug costs, and fewer new and safer discoveries.  What has been allowed to happen is criminal.  Don’t expect us to reward incumbents with our votes.

Don’t get mad at the Komen Foundation…

Get even.  Donate to Planned Parenthood in Karen Handel’s name.  (H/T atrios)

Also, read Violet’s take on this fiasco here.

And Echidne’s sweet little ditty.

The term “out of touch” does not even begin to describe the rationale behind the Komen Foundation’s decision.  It’s just an out and out catastrophe of monumental proportions.  It has sullied the positive perception of the Foundation forever.

Just dumb.  And stupid too.  Would someone please remove the sharp objects from the Komen Foundation’s headquarters before they hurt themselves?

Update:  I don’t think WaPo’s Alexandra Petri gets it:

So I’m also ticked off by the people who say they won’t donate to Susan G. Komen any more. Really? Refuse to donate to the fight on breast cancer on the grounds that some of the people leading it do not share all your beliefs to the letter? That seems woefully short-sighted. It’s almost as short-sighted as the funding decision that shifted the discussion in the first place.

Abortion is one of the few bitterly polarizing issues for which it’s difficult to locate any middle ground. At a certain point, you come down on one side or the other. I’m pro-choice. In no way do I think it’s an easy choice. But if it’s a hard and gut-wrenching choice for the actual women involved, it seems peculiar that it should be any easier for gaggles of state legislators who aren’t there, who in many cases are incapable of becoming pregnant, and who yet seem uncannily certain that they know exactly the solution.

Ok, let me say this very slooooowly: Susan Komen died of breast cancer.  By cutting off Planned Parenthood in one of the most boneheaded moves since New Coke, the Komen Foundation is forcing Planned Parenthood to rejigger the way it allocates its money at a time when most charitable contributions are drying up and Planned Parenthood, in particular, is under attack from some very short sighted bronze age thinkers of the right wing.  If we were to question Susan, we might correctly assume that she would want poor women to be screened for breast cancer. So, if we have to make a donation to either the Komen Foundation or Planned Parenthood, the donation with the biggest bang for the buck that would honor Komen’s wishes more completely would have to go to Planned Parenthood.

This is not rocket science, Alexandra.  Yeah, it would be great if there was a cure but breast cancer is not just one thing.   It could be many different snafus in the cellular mechanism gone awry. And the pharmas that are working on it have plenty of money to invest, now that they’ve laid all of the researchers off.

Finally, the choice between abortion and breast cancer research was not one that had to be forced on anyone.  Karen Handel *made* it a choice because she’s an ignorant twit of a  politician who is pandering to her ultra religious (and shrinking) base.  Let it be the last hurrah of the religiously motivated politicians.  Their audience is dying, literally.  Pretty soon they’ll have to pander to the rest of us and we did not just fall off the turnip truck.

Update2:  Komen Foundation board member Rafaelli explains why the foundation cut off Planned Parenthood and ONLY Planned Parenthood:

For the board, the calculation was simple: “You should as a general rule always pick vendors and grantees that will broaden your base of support and not narrow it,” Mr. Raffaelli said.

Ooooo, major miscalculation.  Ginormous.  Not even partial credit.  You just lost the young suburbanites and educated women with decades to go but gained all of the crotchety, mean spirited seniors who are on their way out.   Congratulations!

Oh, and the red beanie dudes are at it again:

Foes of abortion and Web sites critical of it have criticized the Komen foundation’s financing of Planned Parenthood for years. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St. Louis and several bishops in Ohio issued statements last year raising concerns about donating to the Komen foundation. In December, LifeWay Christian Resources, which is owned by the Southern Baptist Convention, said it was recalling a pink Bible it was selling because a dollar per copy was going to the Komen foundation.

Technically, bishops don’t wear red beanies unless they are also cardinals but whatever.  The bottom line is that they represent a foreign corporation that seems determined to make American women’s lives difficult and miserable.  We really need to poll the pols to find out who they serve: American women or the Vatican.

Update3: H/T Marsha who sent me looking for this story about the hacking that went on last night at the Komen Foundation’s website.   Here’s what googlers found last night when they queried Komen:

{{GASP!}}  Alright!  Occupy Komen.

Update4: Komen’s public health official, Mollie Williams, resigns in protest over the decision to drop Planned Parenthood funding.

Update5:  It’s an unmitigated disaster for the Komen Foundation.  Many former supporters are signing petitions in protest.  As expected, it’s the younger, yuppier, women who are outraged by this.  And here’s a new cartoon that is likely the first of many to come:

Update 6:  Ok, here come the jokes:

@vtlozanoVicente Lozano

The Susan Komen foundation is marketing a new pink gun. It only shoots the user in the foot. #komen

Update7: Why do women journalists do this?  Here is another piece of apologetics and “both sides are guilty” crap about the Komen disaster, this time from Rachel Latimore of Slate.  No, Rachel, you can not make Planned Parenthood look like a bad guy just because some Right to Life group has been successful at relentlessly harrassing them into an investigation.  That’s not to say there haven’t been improprieties and perhaps even indictable offenses.  The problem is that Planned Parenthood has been around since the turn of the 20th century and I’ll wager that every woman I know has some kind of history with them.  Planned Parenthood is where college aged women would go for paps, breast exams and packs of contraceptives at rock bottom prices.   We grew up with Planned Parenthood and know that without Planned Parenthood, our lives might have been profoundly different.  So, go ahead and pull out all of the dirty laundry.  It’s a teensy drop in the bucket compared to the generations of good it has done.  You want to find a crime of the century worthy of this much attention?  Tell the right to lifers to focus their attention on MF Global.

I don’t know about the rest of you Conflucians but I am sick and tired of Planned Parenthood getting shit dumped on them by the clueless religious right.  It’s time to push back.  If you were ever served by Planned Parenthood, say thanks in the comments.