The Pope Thing

Frankly, I’m surprised that more popes haven’t resigned.  Usually, they hang on way past their sell-by date and this pope is such a hard ass, I really have to wonder if it was as voluntary as they say it is.

What’s amazing is that the comings and goings of this one old dude in Rome still has the power to take up space on the front page of the NYTimes.  You don’t see that with other religious leaders.   Maybe Pat Robertson and the Dalai Lama will get  prominent obituaries.  But in spite of all the progress we’ve made since the 16th century, the pope still has the world’s attention and this one’s  brand of hard line, uncompromising patriarchal authoritarianism has been particularly irksome.

What are the chances that out of the Yes men he has undoubtably surrounded himself with that one will emerge who will modernize the church?

Yeah, I didn’t think so either.

What are the chances we could get the NYTimes to stop paying so much attention?

Red Beanie Boys: nuns help poor too much and condemn sexytime violations too little

Has the whole world’s first and second estates’ completely lost it?  I mean, talk about people who could use a refresher course in the classics.  Don’t they remember what happened to all those kings and princes who insisted on playing god with the power of life and death?

The Vatican is definitely pushing the envelope.  They’ve decided to step in and take over a North American nuns organization, rather imperiously, a la the UVA Board of Visitors, because:

In April, the Vatican announced that Pope Benedict XVI had authorized a takeover of the LCWR, which represents about 80 percent of the nation’s 57,000 nuns and sisters. The Vatican’s “doctrinal assessment” said the group was not sufficiently promoting orthodox teachings on sexuality and gender and was spending too much time focusing on social justice issues.

Although the Vatican has been officially scrutinizing the LCWR for several years — and has viewed the U.S. nuns with some suspicion for decades — the takeover came as a surprise. LCWR leaders requested a face-to-face meeting with Levada, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and Seattle Archbishop Peter Sartain, who Benedict named to direct the Vatican effort.

After last week’s talks in Rome, Farrell and Mock said the meeting had been an opportunity for “open dialogue.” A Vatican spokesman said the meeting took place “in an atmosphere of openness and cordiality.”

But right after the meeting, Levada gave an interview in which he said the talks may in fact be a “dialogue of the deaf,” and said the nuns are associating with people who “aren’t representing the church with any reasonable sense of product identity.” Sartain and another U.S. bishop involved in the takeover also said the investigation was aimed at the LCWR, not nuns in general.

Farrell called Levada’s comment “unfortunate” and in its statement on Monday, the LCWR rejected efforts to try to separate the group from the wider community of U.S. nuns, which it said has “keenly felt” the impact of the Vatican campaign.

Yes, the comment was unfortunate but not nearly as unfortunate as the sentiment behind it.  By the way, when did the Vatican get a marketing department concerned with “product identity”. Can you just imagine the personality statement from the ad and marketing group?

“Our product says tradition.  It is not crunchy granola.  It doesn’t wear jeans or have a vegan diet.  It’s wine in golden goblets. It is not who you want to have a beer with. It says it’s going to be here for another 2000 years. It is gentlemen’s club. It’s about labor and delivery while strapped to a bed, not earth mothers and unassisted home water births. It’s the beauty of shame and the ecstasy of fasting…”

Lovely.  More authoritarianism just keeps coming our way.  This won’t end well.

Meanwhile, here’s a great idea:

Wednesday: What’s wrong with EJ Dionneism?

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.

Here’s the part of Dionne’s column that bugged me the most:

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.

Including Obama.

Vatican: Washing Machines More Liberating than the Pill for Women

1950s Maytag washing machine

Michele Hanson in the Guardian UK:

To mark International Women’s Day, L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s official newspaper, has graciously commented on women’s lib for us. Its editorial decrees that the washing machine has contributed more to the emancipation of western women than the pill, or the legalisation of abortion, or being able to work outside the home. But it would, wouldn’t it? Abortion and pills aren’t allowed over there. Washing machines are.

What a bizarre world L’Osservatore describes, with its “image of the superwoman, smiling, made-up and radiant among the appliances of her house”. It’s more than half a century ago, back in 1953, that the automatic washing machine took off and women apparently went mad in the suburbs, turning to drink and sex. Only I didn’t notice my mother and her chums being radiant and smiling. They may have got rid of their heavy mangles and twin-tubs, but it was still a fairly bleak life, stuck at home fiddling with these new machines.

This is an open thread.