And as for Karen Handel, she’s no longer with the Komen foundation. But none of this has come as a surprise. Everyone fully expected to be punished.
But they spoke out anyway which suggests that the power of liberal orthodoxy, while still awesome, can no longer completely intimidate. The results are that orthodoxy has had to retreat, be it ever so slightly. “(Reuters) – As soon as the news hit, the deluge began.”
Catholics from across the country began calling the White House within hours of the Obama administration’s announcement on Jan. 20 that religious institutions would be required to offer free birth control to employees as a health-care benefit.
AdvertisementBut these calls weren’t protests from conservative bishops or the rank-and-file in the pews. They were calls from a kitchen cabinet of informal political advisers that President Barack Obama had relied on for years — allies who had worked with him on various social issues and in some cases, campaigned for him.
They had access, and they intended to use it to drive change in a policy they said they saw as a clumsy, provocative and an unnecessary infringement on religious liberty.
All legitimacy, even that of authoritarian regimes, is fundamentally based on an accepted belief. In dictatorships, it is the belief that the secret police are all powerful. In the liberal West, it is the myth that the elites are the all-wise source of public approval. Just as Syria’s Assad is suffering from a growing realization that he can’t stop the rebels, the biggest danger facing the liberal orthodoxy is a growing awareness that they can’t stop the heretics from speaking out in the public square.
Like Assad, the problem facing the ruling orthodoxy in the West is how to restore the myth. In Syria the Assads first tried ignoring, then selectively suppressing, the opposition. Lately, they’ve been using artillery and tanks. Now, according to the Washington Post, there are “growing signs that the Syrian elite, including people close to President Bashar Assad, are increasingly worried and beginning to prepare exit plans.”
The Western orthodoxy remains very powerful. But recent events prove that it is not invincible; it is mainly founded upon bluff, which despite the recent outbursts by heretics remains largely unshaken. But a confluence of factors — economic difficulty for the most part, and growing awareness in the street that the elites are not all they are cracked up to be — suggests that the hairline fractures will grow and grow. Until … well, who knows?
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.
How to Publish on Amazon’s Kindle for $2.99
The Three Conjectures at Amazon Kindle for $1.99
Storming the Castle at Amazon Kindle for $3.99
No Way In at Amazon Kindle $3.99, print $9.99
We can’t have this! People must behave! Be civil! Or else!
Fortunately the government is taking care of this:
Homeland Security is monitoring the web for anti-government sentiment and signs of social unrest
http://www.infowars.com/group-forces-congressional-hearing-on-big-sis-twitter-drudge-spying/
“AGW Science” has lost its credibility because it is not Science. It is a religion that has adopted a scientific tone, using equations and graphs, but based on selective data cooked through handcrafted computer programs.
The Difference between ‘True Science’ and ‘Cargo-Cult Science’
07/27/10 – pajamasmedia by Frank J. Tipler
The great Nobel Prize physicist Richard Feynman defined science this way, in extra large type, in his article “What is Science?”
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts
Feynman: “When someone says, ‘Science teaches such and such,’ he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn’t teach anything; experience teaches it. If they say to you, ‘Science has shown such and such,’ you should ask, ‘How does science show it? How did the scientists find out? How? What? Where?’ It should not be ‘science has shown.’ And you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments and after hearing all the evidence, to judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at.”
Feynman also observed that real science was a method for discovering facts about our world, and required bending over backwards not to fool others, and especially not to fool oneself. He said it was particularly easy to fool oneself, and so required the greatest dilligence and openness to criticism and disproof to avoid being that fool.
EasyOpinions.blogspot.com
Yah. Insert here comments about the straw the broke the camel’s back, the sandpile slumping, and nonlinear catastrophe theory.
But what it comes down to is this, I think that politically the Obambus regime has overstepped badly. Listening to the Hannity radio show today, of course Hannity is saying Obambus has no argument. No, that is not the case. He committed a worse sin than having no argument, he tried to make a major change, which will nearly always cause huge turbulence. Agents of change buy the ticket, take the ride, and that usually moves them out of office in a nice new coat of tar and feathers – even when the change is substantially beneficial.
(I think the argument that religious freedom requires that even religious organizations respect the religion of their employees by providing contraception is respectable, especially from the leftist POV. It’s the kind of thing to hold an election on. The problem is not really the contraception, it’s the dictate. If there were no dictate, the problem would not occur at all.)
In this case – just today Romney is out there saying what a consistently conservative governor he was. OMG. Who is going to vote for that? He must hear the piter-pater of Santorum feet. The knock against conservatives, somewhat justified, is that they tend to stand foresquare for doing nothing. Even when *that* is justified, it is often a poor political position. Romney has gotten where he is (wherever that exactly is) by saying nothing. Best he stay with that strategy, and don’t let blabbermouth Newt tempt him to try to compete with words coming out of his mouth. But he can hardly argue with the dictate, can he?
Global warming has been a pile of bad science, secular hysteria, rent seekers and fat-headed politicians, but must eventually succumb to the evidence, which foreseeable or not now seems to be trending towards cooling. We’re going to have to install methane-burning jets on the tips of all those windmills. Maybe over a few centuries we can coax the Earth a few million miles closer to the sun. That should help with solar power, too. Oh boy.
On the Susan B. Komen / Planned Parenthood flap, wotever. Worth a small chuckle. Even progressive leftist humanists scratch each others’ backs, when they aren’t stabbing instead. ‘Even’.
Evidently some taboos are still more equal than others– from the Grauniad:
“Interpol has been accused of abusing its powers after Saudi Arabia used the organisation’s red notice system to get a journalist arrested in Malaysia for insulting the Prophet Muhammad.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/10/interpol-journalist-arrested-muhammad-tweet?newsfeed=true
Follow Wretchard’s link:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,813814-2,00.html
You will read the following:
“I am perfectly aware of the defamation I will have to listen to in the near future. The climate debate also has some of the trappings of an inquisition. I’m curious to see which truth ministry will now initiate proceedings against me…”
This “heretic” has failed to see the “elephant in the room”. It’s the “red button” for him, refer to:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfnddMpzPsM
Germans pay an average of 36 cts/kilowatt hour for their electricity. The avg American family pays less than 10 cts. The cost of worshipping Gaia.
All beliefs are equal, but the left’s beliefs are just a lot more equal than everyone else.
I don’t think it is surprising that those who tell the one percent what they can do with their money are now telling the rest of us what we can do with our religious beliefs — stick ‘em where the sun don’t shine.
I drove past a Catholic church in a small town in Ohio and the sign that usually announces parish events read: “The Federal Government is at war with religious Freedom in America.” I went, woe, strong words. I know some of the people who belong to that Parish and they ain’t exactly radicals — in fact they often vote for Democrats (this is in the Democrat controlled part of Ohio) and it wouldn’t surprise me if Obama carried that Parish in 2008.
The incident actually shows how American Health Care has now become part of the Democrat’s Political Spoil system — those who help keep the Democrats in power collect the Spoils. Obamacare should be called Democrat Spoil Care. Because they treat the healthcare system like their spoils — and the entire system will be spoiled as a result.
If birth control pills are free, and help prevent cancer, why not require women to take them? And while I would never recommend a one child policy for America, such as the Socialist put in place in China, isn’t two enough? After all, who is a bigger threat to the planet: An American child or a Chinese one? Given the stakes, shouldn’t family planning be mandatory? And planned for you?
Nothing is really “free”. What isn’t paid for in a co-payment or deductible gets paid for in the premium. The Congressional liberals just don’t get that.
hdgreene;
Over half of American women are overweight, which will likely lead to diabetes, heart disease, and some cancers. Perhaps Obama Inc could force insurance companies to pay for gym memberships, aerobics classes, walking clubs and so on … because it’s good for women’s health.
Steeple @ 6 said:
“Germans pay an average of 36 cts/kilowatt hour for their electricity. The avg American family pays less than 10 cts. The cost of worshipping Gaia.”
It’s better than that. The Krauts are in the process of getting rid of all of their nuclear power and trying to replace it with solar panels (this is in a region that is almost always overcast). Pretty soon there will be rolling black outs in Deutschland. Fortunately, the Germans will be smiling while they are cold and shivering in the dark because they’ll be serene in the knowledge that they are “green”.
I have for a long time disagreed with the Church’s policy of debating the contraception issue under the rubric of “religious freedom,” as if religious freedom was the real matter at stake. They ought rather to engage the substance of the thing itself, i.e. is contraception right or wrong, good or bad. A little plain speaking on this subject would be quite refreshing.
However, the Church has elected to play the modernity game of hiding its substantive position within the folds of a general principle—the liberty of consciences and creeds, itself a very liberal idea and not at all compatible with orthodoxy—which is held to be of a more sacrosanct and universal nature.
This sort of hypostasis is, in the long run, a losing proposition for the Church, which will have no answer to the obvious rejoinder made by contraception proponents, viz. “You cannot force your religious beliefs upon others.” The latter group will always have the stronger claim to be truly cashing out the idea of “religious freedom,” no matter what sort of positivistic redefinition the Church tries to lay to those words; and therefore they will always win the ideological battle for as long as religious freedom itself remains the subject under consideration.
Only when the Church finally decides to distinguish herself by adhering to the substance of her own teachings, will the Culture Wars be resolved in favor of Christian belief and practice. But that will mean that the Church will have to bite the bullet against religious liberty, declaring herself to be resolutely against it (as, incidentally, she always did in the past); and that is not a gauntlet which our current crop of milquetoast bishops have been willing to pick up.
#7 hdgreene
I don’t think it is surprising that those who tell the one percent what they can do with their money are now telling the rest of us what we can do with our religious beliefs — stick ‘em where the sun don’t shine.
Have you seen Mark Steyn’s comparison of Teh Won to Henry VIII? “Obama Goes Henry VIII on the Church”:
“As Philip Klein pointed out in the American Spectator two years ago, the Obamacare bill contained 700 references to the Secretary ‘shall,’ another 200 to the Secretary ‘may,’ and 139 to the Secretary ‘determines.’ So the Secretary may and shall determine pretty much anything she wants, as the Obamaphile rubes among the Catholic hierarchy are belatedly discovering. His Majesty King Barack ‘shall have full power and authority to visit, repress, redress, record, order, correct, restrain and amend all such errors, heresies, abuses, offenses, contempts and enormities whatsoever they be.’ In my latest book, I cite my personal favorite among the epic sweep of Commissar Sebelius’ jurisdictional authority:
‘The Secretary shall develop oral healthcare components that shall include tooth-level surveillance.’
Before Obama’s Act of Supremacy did the English language ever have need for such a phrase? ‘Tooth-level surveillance’: From the Declaration of Independence to dentured servitude in a mere quarter-millennium.
Henry VIII lacked the technological wherewithal to conduct tooth-level surveillance.”
http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/church-339789-one-catholic.html
Obama is not Assad. Let me say it again: OBAMA IS NOT ASSAD. Wretchard, your argument is just a special case of Godwin’s law. You don’t have to like Obama or what he says or does. But he’s not Adolph Assad.
OK, some catholic bishop didn’t like the idea that he should have to pay for birth control for someone. Him and about twenty of his friends agree on that. The rest of the US does support the idea that health insurance should pay for birth control. And even if it didn’t, this is politics, not some liberal plot to take over the world.
TECTONIC PLATES
Time is always running out, time is always of the essence. Is time more precious to a leatherback turtle than it is to a Mayfly? Time, to man, comes in seventy year increments, with each believing that whatever needs be done must be done within that time frame. Will the American experiment end with a violent lurch to the left, as the populace votes for continued bread, circuses and free ice cream? Lord Macaulay, who knew something about holding the bridge against fearful odds, thought so, and so do I. The America I came of age in, post WW2 America, a man on the moon America, is gone, and will never again be. We can only do our best, but time, as usual, will tell the tale. But the question then reverts to the age old, What is time?
Time is not a passing stream
Of man and man’s events
All measured by our inner clock
In order to make sense
Tectonic plates move without cease
And seem to go so slow
We think of them in eons time
Yet how are we to know
For time is an illusion
Time is massless, tied to space
With different tempos, different times
For every different place
And so it is with man’s affairs
We see with childlike eyes
The passing seasons come and go
The stars glide through the skies
And still we think in lifetime terms
Believing all things last
Not knowing that the present
And the future are the past
The plates of history are swift
Like shadows on the wall
As ships of state once seen as great
Fly as before a squall
Dictators fall, dictators rise
Republics do as well
The plates of time decide the end
But what end? Who can tell?
I never argued that Obama was Assad, but that like Assad he depends on myth. Assad’s myth is that his secret police is all powerful. The elite’s myth is that the ideas they represent have a moral authority which they actually lack.
Where both are alike is that once the myth begins to crack both start to lose legitimacy. But even strongmen like Assad must rely on assent; and therefore the key factors in their eventual downfall are not insurrectionary but political. It is when their bluff loses its force that the end begins.
The other difference is that while Assad is personally losing legitimacy it is not Obama who is losing his individual mojo but the elite system. The distinction is important because Assad’s fall will be personal; his replacement will be yet another authoritarian. Another person, but not another system. But since it is not Obama’s, but elites prestige which is failing in this case, Obama’s fate will be secondary to the political change. Obama is ultimately unimporant. It is not because he is President that the crisis has come. On the contrary, it is because the crisis has come that he is the President.
What accounts for the difference between Syria and the United States is political tradition and culture. Authoritarianism has been hallowed by long practice in the Middle East. But it has long been illegitimate in the US; thus the elite system President Obama represents is in many ways an alien thing. Therefore in some respects ‘breaking’ the elite myth is often indistinguishable from asserting the earlier, foundational myths. The Left understands this better than conservatives, who are often wondering why the innocent mention of the “Constitution” or the Flag induces paroxysms of rage on the other side. That is because it suggests something that is too near the scandalous mark even though the utterer is unaware of the reference.
Naturally the polemic between the opposing sides becomes a battle of ideas. “Right to women’s health” vs “freedom of religion” are the competing memes in this case. But that is only a disguise. It is really about more than that. The Left is ironically more aware of their alien-ness than conservatives and that is why they take care taken to cast themselves as being in the “mainstream”. The mask is worn consciously because the wearer knows more than anyone else what his visage really looks like. The onlookers can only guess, but their guesses get better as time wears on.
Yes wretchard.
That is why they cultivate their ideas in the all pervasive media, especially television and film. And have inserted themselves into the education system, which shapes young minds….the minds of other peoples (conservatives) children.
The real war is the culture war, in the media and education system…which is why the Left targeted those institutions. As Lenin said…
“Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”
@ 6. Steeple & 9. Eggplant
You need to include the 19% sales tax, gas at average $7.50 a gallon, taxes and fees out of the wazoo.. and you find all your earnings go to buy energy and food. There is no savings. Those with any Euros left are to busy trying to buy Swiss Francs or purchase property as everyone on the ground knows the Euro is doomed.
Regarding “green energy” here, keep in mind former SPD chancellor Schroeder helped push through a North Sea pipeline project in order to pipe in Russia gas and oil. After he lost the election in 2006, he walked straight from Berlin into a position with Gazprom, the state owned Russian energy giant. No one in the media or the street even blinked. He hooked Germany up to be energy dependent on Russia and his party is killing off nuclear power and the Germans just sit and take it.
Follow the money. These people are weak, shallow and evil.
We have to be careful about whose part of the Religious Freedom aspect of this we are discussing – If you are a Catholic Hospital, you are committed to the Catholic position on this. “No Way Out” unless you renounce The Faith, in which case you would no longer be a Catholic hospital.
If you are an atheist nurse or a Lutheran cafeteria worker who needs contraception or abortion coverage, there are other hospitals in the area you could work in (you don’t even have to work in a hospital, actually, there are all kinds of other opportunities) that would be more in tune with your moral universe. In rural, Central PA here there are 3 hospital systems witin commuting distance.
Susan Lee
yeh UP#12 play it down its just a couple of folks that have an issue with the dictate…
From CNS:
Even Pres. Obama’s alleged “compromise” on his contraception mandate is unconstitutional, a House Republican leader and the chairman of a public policy research center said today.
Republican Study Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) says Obama’s revised version of an ObamaCare mandate still violates the Constitution:
“This ObamaCare rule still tramples on Americans’ First Amendment right to freedom of religion. It’s a fig leaf, not a compromise. Whether they are affiliated with a church or not, employers will still be forced to pay an insurance company for coverage that includes abortion-inducing drugs.”
“This is not just a problem for church-affiliated hospitals and charities. Under these rules, a small business owner with religious objections to abortion-inducing drugs and contraception must either violate his religious beliefs or violate the law.”
“The liberal Obama administration thinks its political goals trump the religious faith of American citizens. That isn’t right, fair, or constitutional.”
Amy Ridenour, chairman of the National Center for Public Policy Research, agrees:
“Isn’t the compromise just a big spin and an insult to churches, because it implies that they just want an ‘out’ to permit them to pretend that they aren’t providing coverage they believe is immoral?
The HHS mandate is an unconstitutional infringement of the First Amendment. The compromise is, too.
Krauthammer:
“Catholic soup kitchens do not demand religious IDs from either the hungry they feed or the custodians they employ. Catholic charities and hospitals — even Catholic schools — do not turn away Hindu or Jew.
Their vocation is universal, precisely the kind of universal love-thy-neighbor vocation that is the very definition of religiosity as celebrated by the Gospel of Obama. Yet according to the Gospel of Sebelius, these very same Catholic institutions are not religious at all — under the secularist assumption that religion is what happens on Sunday under some Gothic spire, while good works are “social services” properly rendered up unto Caesar.”
This…
Krauthammer:
“Catholic soup kitchens do not demand religious IDs from either the hungry they feed or the custodians they employ. Catholic charities and hospitals — even Catholic schools — do not turn away Hindu or Jew.
Their vocation is universal, precisely the kind of universal love-thy-neighbor vocation that is the very definition of religiosity as celebrated by the Gospel of Obama. Yet according to the Gospel of Sebelius, these very same Catholic institutions are not religious at all — under the secularist assumption that religion is what happens on Sunday under some Gothic spire, while good works are “social services” properly rendered up unto Caesar.”
Been arguing with Josh Scholar over this for months.
#14-Wretchard: Battle of Myths – good title for a future article perhaps?
12. Thus says the Lord, “I, the Lord, am your God, you shall not have any other gods besides Me, nor make unto yourself any graven image.” What you ask is that we show deference to a strange god, whom our fathers have not known, a god called the State. There is a lot the government can require of us, but it cannot require of us our worship, and yet that is precisely what it asks when it commands us to commit evil, for if we obey the government and disobey God, we are worshiping the State as our god, which is forbidden.
Buckeye
Have you seen this? Germany is bringing coal back online
http://www.eureferendum.blogspot.com/2012/02/fantasy-of-wind.html
————-
However, it now seems that the nuclear element of the story might be wrong. Instead, courtesy of the Vancouver Sun, again via AFP, we get a revised story that the reserve generators are coal-powered plant in southern Germany and two plants in Austria. A [coal-fired] station in the southern city of Mannheim, is also in use.
That is bad enough but, for the warmists, it gets even worse. Although we reported last January that an additional 11GW of coal-fired capacity was coming on-stream in Germany “this year or next”, we now learn from the Union for the Co-ordination of Transmission of Electricity that there will be a net addition of 20-22 GW of fossil fuel-fired capacity by 2013.
Domestic hard coal consumption by EU nations through the first six months of 2011 was 64.9 million metric tons, up from 59.7 over the year-earlier period, and Germany was on track to import up to 48 million metric tons of coal for 2011- a total expected to increase as nuclear power capacity is phased out. Eight of 17 reactors have already been switched off and the nine reactors currently on line are due to be turned off between 2015 and 2022. One assumes that these will go only once the coal capacity is on-line.
————
Buckeye Abroad,
Germany is now planning to cut back its subsidies for solar installations. They can’t afford it. It doesn’t provide enough electricity. They have to buy nuclear-generated electricity from France to compensate for sunless days. The green panel-manufacturing jobs have gone to China. All of this was predicted, and no one listened.
As to Sigmar Gabriel, the SPD chief: he was Schroeder’s mini-czar for pop music.
W, Is Assad, like Assad, pretty much the same thing. It is certainly true that as heads of state they rule/lead by the assent of their citizens. It is ironic that even in tyrannies there is a separation of powers. No one man could rule over millions without help and that help comes at a price. Assad and other dictators spread around the wealth and power to a small number of followers so they have a reason to support him and keep receiving their spoils. That doesn’t make a dictator like a democratically elected leader.
Liberals object to conservative use of using the constitution, mom, and apple pie because they believe the conservatives are doing so simply for jingoistic reasons. It may or may not be true but that’s the reason. There’s no hidden reason.
I’m sure you’re right that this is one battle in the continuing culture wars. The fact that most presidential elections are won by only a few percentage points suggests that most people aren’t that far apart on the issues.
I don’t like the current administration and I’m happy to see it run afoul of a religious group who are well represented among its closest supporters. I can’t wait to vote for any Republican candidate except Ron Paul who is an under-the-radar Lyndon Larouche.
That said, I don’t like politics from the pulpit, Rabbinical or Ministerial, and I get the willies when Roman Catholic Bishops make their muscle felt in the public square.
At issue is private vs public morality. An individual woman’s rights over an organism connected to and feeding upon and in every sense a part of herself and herself alone vs the moral perception by large numbers of good people of conscience that the organism is separate from the woman, individual and distinct and deserving of societal protections from its mother.
Hairy question. Small wonder that Americans, the most thoughtful and generous of people, are morally conflicted. The essential question being one of life and death, there are inevitably strong passions on both sides.
The loudest voices in support of the individual right of a mother to decide whether or not to destroy her fetus are women. The loudest voices in support of preventing a woman who wishes her fetus destroyed from having it done are men.
What is troubling is that the men leading the anti abortion movement claim celibacy though to all indications, a majority are sexually active with other men. Not being Catholic, this is ordinarily none of my concern If Catholics want to take advice on marriage and procreation from gay priests, it is no business of mine. It certainly is my concern, however, that these gay male leaders of the anti-abortion movement are under a heavy moral and legal cloud for destroying the lives of many innocents.
With respect to my good and decent fellow Americans of the Catholic faith, Individual freedom is sacred to all Americans. The Catholic Church is sacred to a minority of Americans. The Catholic Bishops have paid enormous sums recently in compensation to victims of sexual abuse by priests and the Bishops who protected these abusive priests. Some priests went to jail. Mainly the Church bought its way out of trouble while the rest of us held our noses and looked the other way.
It can’t be denied by even the most faithful soldier of the Church that the Catholic Bishops have wasted a treasure on victims’ compensations and legal fees that could have gone to hospitals and to a hundred and one other fine and kindly Catholic philanthropic enterprises which are a blessing to all. So who are the Bishops to lead the moral charge to protect the lives of the unborn?
With respect, it seems to this non-Catholic Hebrew father of three daughters that the Catholic Bishops are entirely unfit and need to butt out.
From the movie,”The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence”;
‘When the myth is stronger than the truth, print the myth’
Thus has it ever been, whether Paul Revere ever rode that night to warn of the British, the myth remains. When the myths we tell about ourselves fall, and we have to actually look at the harsh, cold reality of just who we are and just what we are responsible for, then perhaps just about anything can happen. That kind of ugliness is more dangerous than gazing at the Medusa. Gazing at the Medusa just brought you death. Gazing at the truth of what we really are could cause people to at least temporarily give up their phoney-baloney rationalizations that get them through every day.
Are we still a Republic when even the rights of one man counted against the wishes of the majority, or is the Republic dead (which is what I suspect we are about to find out) and there is actually no more room for religious freedom and accomadation when it is contrary to the wishes of the majority, especially when the wishes are embodied by President ” I Won!”?
“Oh say does that Star Spangled Banner yet wave
O’er the Land of the Free, and the Home of the Brave?”
No.
The land of the entitled and the home of the agrieved interest groups.
“The public policy arm of the United Methodist Church, which like the Catholic Church, runs hospitals and universities across the country, has applauded the mandate to cover contraception.”
Not at all surprising. Several decades ago I was a member of the Methodist Youth Fellowship (MYF) and as such I had the experience of going to a meeting, as suggested by our pastor, that was nothing more than a blatant harangue concerning how wonderful it would be if we did our part as young people to advocate for a one-world government. The message wasn’t presented in subtle fashion. It was direct and to the point. If you will recall the Elian Gonzalez fiasco whereby poor Elian was snatched by Janet Reno’s goons and sent back to Cuba after his mother had brought him here (and died in the attempt) then you may recall that such action was applauded and encouraged by the Methodist spokesman for the National Council of Churches.
The Methodist Church has a history of radical left advocacy among their leadership which goes back many years. It has betrayed the legacy of good works by John Wesley. (Wiki that if you don’t know what I refer to). If you are a member of the Methodist clergy I dare you to try to demonstrate otherwise. I am one very disgusted Methodist. One world government + government sponsored abortion + Obama + Methodist leadership. Now do you wonder why the pews are empty?
The other difference is that while Assad is personally losing legitimacy it is not Obama who is losing his individual mojo but the elite system.
I hear what you are saying, and yet, weren’t we already supposed to know that, that there is no elite and thus we should appreciate democracy?
If any elite has lost its mojo recently it’s the bankster elite in the USA, that suddenly showed they would self-destruct, taking all with them, if left to their own judgement.
That was a shock to me. One can argue that it’s the capitalist system itself which has lost its mojo, with the failure on this scale. Well, the US economy and capitalism seems to be keeping things afloat, for the moment, by printing trillions. Will this work longer term? Remember Greece? California?
#14 wretchard
I never argued that Obama was Assad, but that like Assad he depends on myth. Assad’s myth is that his secret police is all powerful. The elite’s myth is that the ideas they represent have a moral authority which they actually lack.
I am in total agreement with the concept that different things confer legitimacy in different cultures. And that they can, and do, fail causing upheavals that continue until a new equilibrium is reached. That new equilibrium may well not be an improvement.
What I sense in the offing [especially with the Enabling Act attached to the NDAA] is a coming attempt to replace moral authority with a coercive one.
Subotai Bahadur
@22. Pam
They have no choice. Besides nuclear power, they either pay for foreign energy or reopen the coal mines in Saarland. The whole “green” energy thing was always a pipedream sold to the gullible for socialist votes. Want to guess where Joska Fischer, former head of the german green party and Schroeders old lackey, is these days?
23. vb
“All of this was predicted, and no one listened.”
They wanted to believe the lies and soothing words. Truth isn’t always kind, but it always prevails.
“As to Sigmar Gabriel, the SPD chief: he was Schroeder’s mini-czar for pop music.”
Ha! I didn’t know that. Thanks.
One might grant that Catholic church is the seat of all perfidy yet still admit that the pushback is coming from something deeper in the background: from people who don’t want to be forced to pay for insurance, or toe the line on “climate change” or fund things to which they object.
The only thing distinctive about the Catholic church in this instance is that, they had to defend a doctrinal position, making them a tripwire, but otherwise no different from those who would also react to the intrusions of expanding government. For some the cause will be guns, the others Korans, for some it will be home schooling, surveillance,etc. Everyone stands in the path of expanding government, and even in a world where the Catholic church had never existed this would still be happening.
If the ruling elite were rational they would apply the strategy of divide and conquer. They would know when to stop. Then they could halt and say, “it’s just them Catholics” or “it’s just the climate deniers”. That would localize the problem and limit it.
But they can’t act rationally and here’s why. Elite systems are all about exercising power over others. One of the real mysteries of history is why power entrepreneurs at the pinnacle of success always go one bridge further, one campaign too far. One explanation is because once power groups metastize beyond a point they can’t help but make themselves busybodies.
Not in the least because those power groups now have economic interests to defend. They have to sustain and feed an ever growing bulk. Beyond the issues of “religious freedom” and “women’s health” the whole health care debate is largely about money. Hope and Change is all about money and keeping its supporters happy.
That circumstance ensures that this is only the beginning. The locusts need to eat; and the population will look to defend what crops they may. The idea of limited government is based on the belief that unless the state is intentionally kept small it would enter into a runaway chain reaction. Once you let the locust population explode … then it goes geometric from there and in nature, what follows is a collapse.
My hunch is that the elite has crossed over into criticality. It has to keep expanding its intrusions to survive and therefore, rather than seeing the last of these clashes, we have only had the first taste.
A simple man indicated to me how he have his fun. He said when I go to the movies I paid for my ticket and my popcorn. If I want to enjoy a theater play I paid for it. We assume that intimacy is for procreation, but if you decide, all of a sudden that is for fun, then pay for your fun and your contraceptives. This is not a matter of religiosity is a matter of personal dignity. Our religious leaders refuse to be the instruments of any Administration who refuse the faithful the right to religious freedom, and furthermore, the right to defend human life with decorum and dignity, even if that human being is in the womb and have no voice.
In the liberal West, it is the myth that the elites are the all-wise source of public approval.
I’m not familiar with that myth.
…and growing awareness in the street that the elites are not all they are cracked up to be
I always thought they were just cracked, especially in their own precious assumption that they possessed some kind of superior wisdom.
Possible reasons for Obama’s contraception gambit.
1. He estimated that the gain in the women’s vote would be greater than the loss in the Catholic vote.
2. He thought this would lure the Republicans to say stupid things about contraception and “women’s rights.”
3. He is at war with religion and wants to establish that the secular government should dominate the culture, including religious institutions and beliefs.
4. This is a move in a deep game to permit future Moslem institutions to ignore Federal Law.
I vote for all of these, but especially #4.
Anti Catholic venom is now the only permitted hate speech in the PC world.
The RCs need to be more muscular in their promotion of Christianity and morality.
30% of American health care is provided by Catholic hospitals–supported in part by Catholic Charities.
If Obama wants to impose his values then these Catholic hospitals will have close down
–like the Catholic adoption agencies had to in Massachusetts when homosexual adoptions were mandated by the state.
Use of contraceptives is a matter of individual decision and conscience not for the government to impose.
Wretchard, very well said. And as for Subotai’s comment: you don’t have to be a Confederate H sitting in Switzerland to see which way the wind is blowing. Those drones that were used to play whack a Taliban and his family in AfPak are now for us — 30,000 of them, at least are authorized by the FAA legislation just passed through Congress. They may not all get built by the time 2020 rolls around.
There will have to be quite a few drone technicians, many of whom will both be technically and morally capable of leaking out that these things are being programmed to hunt down American citizens. Not that at first they will be taken seriously. At that point every U.S. state will have a choice to make, particularly if it has an ambitious and Republican Liberty Caucus type Governor (think Chuck Baldwin getting elected to high office in Montana) who starts talking about issuing a local currency like Berskhires or silver coinage. Drone hits can be disguised as other things, perhaps someone losing control and having an unfortunate wreck…
I know this sounds like utter tinfoil hat wearing madness but we are not terribly far from that event horizon. All it takes is one of Wretchard’s conjectures with a blinding flash in one American city or a bioweapon outbreak, and the drones are suddenly all over us.
Hopefully with some of the weaknesses in AI yet to be wrinkled out they’ll have to stay in the skies and not start walking among us ala Ah-nuld in the Terminator movies, lest they get stuck in ditches or chewed up by dogs. But at some point when the elites seriously ruin things they will get desperate. Drones have the advantage over pilots of not only not requiring to be fed, but also not having wives and children they have to look in the eye if they obey illegal or unconstitutional orders to fire upon their fellow citizens…
I’m reminded that at the demise of two totalitarian systems, the old East Germany in September/October 1989 and the Soviet Union in August 1991, the tipping point came when soldiers refused to open fire on their fellow citizens.
In the East German case, it probably had something to do with hopes of a better life in the West once the Wall was allowed to tumble down, less than a fear of prosecution if the Wesssies won (the Nazis for one tried to cover up their crimes but didn’t stop the killing machine even within ear shot of Patton or Zhukov’s artillery).
In the case of the Russia that was born in 1991, the late Patriarch Alexus of blessed memory urged the soldiers not to kill their fellow citizens at the behest of the last gasp KGB coup plotters, and threatened them with excommunication if they did.
So before the drones are unleashed like Abaddon’s locusts of Revelation upon us, the drone maintenence workers and suppliers will have a moral choice to make. And I hope and pray they’ll make the right one.
One of the big news items in the UK is about a similar kind of pushback. Christianity under attack: Anger as major court rulings go against British worshippers, from the Daily Mail and Government tells councils to carry on praying despite High Court ban.
Gee, you would think there was an outbreak of piety in the world. But it would be a mistake to think this pushback was about religion or even God. Religion often becomes a proxy for civic dissent because it is common context among the indigenes. Thus, Catholicism in Poland, or Ireland (or in the anti-Marcos struggle) was really less about Christianity than it was about being Polish, Irish or Filipino. Religion is often a proxy banner for something else. And very often it simply means “I am not you” Or even more strongly, “I will never be you.”
In the UK, churchgoers may have no attachment whatsoever to the Church of England, but may feel compelled to defend it on principle because the politically correct people have chosen to attack it. Because the PC people hate it, they love it. Why, because it’s part of Britain. As the guy in the movie “Red Dawn” once put it:
We live here. This was what I grew up with. People are like that about things that are part of them. And they will defend a faith or tradition they may not even like simply because it has become emblematic of resistance. Muslims have donned a hijab as an act or protest on many occasions. Why should the liberals be so surprised when Christians or Jews do the same?
I’ve described this phenomenon as the “Gessler’s Hat” effect. The only reason people got excited about a hat on a pole was because it was compulsory to bow to it. Sometimes a hat is more than a hat and an apple more than an apple.
The Japanese Imperial Army (of whom more died in the Philippines than the rest of the Pacific put together) never understood how much resentment they caused by forcing the locals to bow to the Nipponese sentries. To Japanese, bowing was a simple act of courtesy. But in the occupied culture it was a mortal insult. When you make something mandatory, it is not the something which is at issue, it is the “mandatory”.
So why do the PC people keep pushing this stuff even if they strictly speaking don’t have to? Because they can. It’s all about power. And ultimately power is the undoing of those who worship it.
When you make something mandatory, it is not the something which is at issue, it is the “mandatory”.
I don’t see any of this contraception stuff being pushed by Obama and acolytes as anything but a raw power grab, another in a long line from a guy who finds Constitutional process, those other pesky branches of government and the notion of “states rights” as one giant pain in the ass.
Both tacitly and overtly he has declared his impatience with constitutional limits on his own power.
He is laughing in our faces as he reaches for power and control surpassing anything ever dreamed of in presidential purview.
The sad part of the story isn’t him, but what he’s able to get away with in a weakened system.
Wretchard,
Yes, they Corporatist Globalist Leftists are like the Nazis in late 41′, who’ve just been beaten back fifty miles from Moscow, and just declared war on the U.S., and now the Angry Siberians AND the greatest industrial power on Earth are upon them.
If the Philippines was the grave yard of the Imperial Japanese Army, southern Russia and Belarus (Operation Bagration 300,000 Nazi casulties in one week after D-Day) were the slaughterhouse of the Wehrmacht.
Perhaps I put it too dramatically in the previous post on the planned drone-ocracy. As several BC old hands have pointed out, the drones that fly close to the ground aren’t that hard to shoot down with a 30 ought six, much less with a .50 cal. And the swarms flying in formation like in that YouTube video while impressive wouldn’t be able to handle birdshot. If a bunch of Iranians can hack the most sophisticated U.S. drone and cause it to land nearby, one can only imagine what the kids at CalTech or even State U could do.
My hunch is that the elite has crossed over into criticality. It has to keep expanding its intrusions to survive and therefore, rather than seeing the last of these clashes, we have only had the first taste.
“First taste”, hmm?
Let’s see the list so far where Obambus knows better than the people.
* Obamacare, which is a pack of lies and endless intrusion, no matter how well intended
* No budget for three years
* Trillion dollar porkulus bills
* Not prosecuting black panther voter intimidation
* Not defending the US border against Mexico
* … and all the other idiocies of Janet Incompetano and the TSA
* Not developing domestic oil
* Not accepting Canadian oil
* Supporting Mexican, Brazilian oil development
* Bowing to Saudis
* Hating the British
* Telling Catholics to shove it
* Not cracking down on Wall Street
* Fronting for two total idiots in Pelosi and Reid
* Claiming unemployment and the economy are improving when millions of people are vanishing from the count
* Sending his family all over the world on splendid vacations in the middle of all
… I may want to work on this list a bit
I’d feel so much better about him if he was just caught nailing some interns, but on the redeeming side, at least he doesn’t listen to Michelle’s advice on food.
#37 wretchard
Religion often becomes a proxy for civic dissent because it is common context among the indigenes. Thus, Catholicism in Poland, or Ireland (or in the anti-Marcos struggle) was really less about Christianity than it was about being Polish, Irish or Filipino. Religion is often a proxy banner for something else. And very often it simply means “I am not you” Or even more strongly, “I will never be you.”
It does not even have to be your own religion. Your Humble Servant is not of the Judeo-Christian faith tradition. Other than, of course, what is absorbed by growing up in the United States in the 1950′s, and as a student of history and politics. Strictly speaking, I have no personal dog in this fight. But I will stand with my Catholic brothers and sisters in this, just as I stand with my Jewish brothers and sisters when faced with anti-Semites. Because it is the right thing to do. It is the American thing to do.
Subotai Bahadur
European Christians are getting uppity, you can sense it in the air….a nasty combo of Leftwing success and Islamic entryism has pushed them to the edge and retreat and appeasement is no longer an option.
In the words of the immortal silverscreen Wyatt Earp…who had finally had enough…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWGp7A3j6FQ
I don’t think that it’s simply the ideology-of-elitism that is the driving force behind this Obama administration; I think that it is a particular brand of elitism.
Certainly, elitism is authoritarian – whether it is found in the society of Plato’s Philosopher-King Rulers who were, genetically, defined as superior to those who were ruled or the god-kings of the various dictatorships in the modern world. Or, the ‘experts’ of our modern progressive elite, found in our academia and bureaucracy.
But I don’t think that we will ever see the end of this desire-to-rule among various people/sets in a population. It’s part of our psychological make-up, both to desire power for itself and the feeling of control it provides us.
AND to dream of perfection. Elitism, after all, rejects fallibility, it rejects the random unluckiness of reality; it operates within the notion that utopia, perfection, is actually possible on this earth! If only the ‘unintelligent, the imperfect, the too-busy-to-think’..would follow the Rules of the Wise Men…then, utopia would be possible.
But I think we have in the Obama regime, not merely an ideological elitism, with its lust for power and its utopian dreams – but a psychological elitism. That is, I consider Obama a pathological narcissist. This is not your ordinary run-of-the-mill egoism but a deep long-held need to control all others, to reject any glimmer of individual power and will in others, to disable, denigrate, disempower all others.
Politically, it is expressed in his contempt for Congress, his rejection of their duty to debate and vote on bills, his disdain for freedom of the States and their Governors, his insults to the leaders of allied nations and, his focus on a centralized, all-controlling federal governance.
Personally, it is expressed in his inability to handle dissent and criticism, his inability to discuss and work on policies with others as an equal (he leaves policy/program devt to his ‘minions’); his inability to debate as an equal; his need to lump people into ‘identity blocs’ and set them up as adversarial to each other (rather than focusing on him and his policies).
And, there’s his need to surround himself with unelected people who are totally dependent on him and his goodwill. Another factor of Obama is his basic ignorance of history, economics, political theory – and his lack of curiosity about these areas. Obama operates solely by psychological manipulation; he can do only one thing – campaign, which is an action of misinformation and manipulation. He’s not capable of anything else.
What I think we are seeing here, is not simply the cracks in the structure of elitism per se – for it, as a form of interaction over others and a dream of utopia, will always keep recurring – but the cracks in the Obama regime and its need to overpower and control, almost entirely, the population of a nation.
I’d feel so much better about him if he was just caught nailing some interns, but on the redeeming side, at least he doesn’t listen to Michelle’s advice on food.
She doesn’t either. Obama has quaintly enough warned us to “never get between Michelle and a tamale” and Michelle has self-importantly told us that her own favorite food is french fries.
(We’re supposed to be fascinated by these personal revelations, these glimpses into the every day life of the queen.)
For these rather common Obamas and their fellow élitists , for so called progressives in general, the rule of thumb is “do as I say, not as I do.”
Let them eat arugula
25. Davud Levavi – With respect, it seems to this non-Catholic Hebrew father of three daughters that the Catholic Bishops are entirely unfit and need to butt out.
I grew up immersed in the ways of the Catholic Church, and though I no longer consider myself a part of it, I’ve become more appreciative of its intellectualism. My mother-in-law, a Catholic with no political leanings whatsoever, once said to me that “they” (meaning herself, her family, friends, and I guess the neighborhood, in the early 60′s) always knew that about a third of the priests were gay, and felt it was one way for those gay men to effectually escape themselves. Sexual acts are entirely reserved for married couples, and the church condemns sexual activity for everyone else, regardless of preference – and mere preference is not a sin.
Mother-in-law married young, as “they” all did, and her young husband took to drinking too much and he beat her very badly. Their families huddled with the priest and decided that the young couple needed spiritual counseling. Upon the next imminent beating, mother-in-law was ready and chased him outside with a carving knife, slammed the door and never let him, or the priest, back in. It is for reasons like this that we have cafeteria Catholics today – the Church, especially with women, tends to be more concerned with your soul than your life. It does not impart the concepts of freedom, equality, protection, escaping poverty, or any such thing; those are humanist principles. The divorced man or woman is further estranged from the Church than the violent, abusive spouse.
And so, as you said, we Americans in particular are living the moral conflict – or to look at it another way, we’re also trying to live in the best of both worlds.
12. Utopia Parkway
OK, some catholic bishop didn’t like the idea that he should have to pay for birth control for someone. Him and about twenty of his friends agree on that. The rest of the US does support the idea that health insurance should pay for birth control. And even if it didn’t, this is politics, not some liberal plot to take over the world.
I should point out that this Obamacare thing — this command economy health care system — hasn’t a chance in hell of producing good results for the American People. You are not doing women a favor by pushing “free birth control.” In the end it will be an expensive boondoggle. The decisions (many thousands of them) are being made — and sold — on a political basis, not an economic one. It is a political spoil system designed to reelect Democrats. It is an expensive political patronage system and every year it must be fed more money — much more money. Soon there will be copay’s and soon after that it will cost more than the free market price (but there will no longer be a free market) — and that will be in addition to the massive subsidies. Health care will be rationed not on the basis of price but on the basis of abysmal service, massive corruption, and incompetent management. It is brought to you by a party that has not produced a Federal Budget in years.
I was born and raised Catholic but have not been to church (except for weddings and funerals) for decades. I certainly know a lot of people who are happy to see “the church” embarrassed. Well, they should enjoy that now but be aware they support the creation of a system that will intensely treat the healthy and allow the sick to languish.
But what is really important is that women get their birth control pills paid for in a way that embarrasses a Catholic Bishop (and what will the quality control on those pills be like?).
So enjoy sticking it to the Catholic Church. But in the end it is ordinary people who will get pronged.
I am a practicing Catholic, but I can see that the religious freedom issue is only the tip of the iceberg. The bishops seem content to accept the “compromise” offered as it shifts the responsibility from the Church to the insurer.
But there are two other issues, 1) that the federal gov’t is establishing authority to force private companies to offer services for free and, perhaps more importantly, 2) the federal gov’t is, by insisting that these things be offered at no cost to the customer, establishing abortion, contraception, and sterilization as civil and human rights which can never be denied. Progressives have been insisting this was the case for a long time, but now they have just laid the definitive groundwork for legal precedent.
If we don’t continue fighting this on behalf of the insurers we are asking for trouble down the road, as it will be that much harder to fight these next three entitlements, at least one of which is patently unconstitutional on purely secular-scientific grounds (abortion).
Seems like it was just yesterday when the Church was applauding, if not demanding, government dicta to change citizens’ behavior, and/or redistribute their property, and/or un-blind justice and/or lean on the scales of the market. All of these goals are objectives that the Church should take ownership of itself, evangelizing its members and others “to do better” – voluntarily – as part of a more civil society. Asking the state to be a church is the ultimate abdication of their responsibility.
So when they lie down with dogs it’s no surprise they get up with fleas.
What’s worse is we shouldn’t even be having this discussion. The administration is governing by dicta. Our system of government requires that all controversial topics be voted on by our representatives, at a minimum so they can be held individually accountable for their votes at the next election. This is no better than Chavez ruling by dicta. Might just as well send Congress home (granted, they’d just as soon avoid controversy themselves – “who, me?! be responsible?? you jest!).
That would be just like the unions who were all for Obama until they realized he would side with the Greens instead of organized labor in the case of the Keystone pipeline. Or any of the innumerable groups who thought their agenda would be advanced by only to find that there was a higher bidder. People hardly to stop to think that if you can convince a politician to shaft someone else, he will sooner or later get around to shafting you. What will prevent it? His good character?
The problem with whispering into ears at court is that you’re not the only one doing the whispering. Maybe Gerald Ford was right after all: any government big enough to give you what you want can take all you have. But people never learn. Everyone thinks they can ride the tiger, thus proving that people are actually more stupid than they need to be, usually because they let short term calculation get the better of their judgment.
All the people who think they’re going to benefit from Hope and Change will be the ultimate victims. Even the Greens; even those who think the One is their friend. Especially them. If it weren’t so tragic it would be funny. But the task of those who toil amidst men, in whatever capacity, is less to remind people of their previous folly than to recommend some path of present wisdom.
The most relevant question in life is always, “what now?”
Sooner or later people who find themselves in a hole should stop digging, whether they are a church or a union, or that poor woman who imagined that President Obama would pay for her gasoline and rent. The past is past; and in a way, never mind how we got into this fix. The important thing is “what now?”
The see-saw battle in the Republican Party can be read as an indication that the backroom functions of the party no longer function. The old system can’t deliver a clean result any more. But my guess is that the Democratic Party is in worse shape, because the liberal coalition is glued together with money. As long as there was enough surplus in the system (design margin) you could satisfy everyone.
But now that the level of avarice and expectation inflation is so high and the available funds are so low, the President can’t square the circle. Someone is going to get the short straw. So he starts cannibalizing the fellow travelers or occasional allies first, like the social justice church because they are low man on his totem. But as the resource crisis moves to the center the instances of shortchanging, then outright political betrayal will increase. Both parties may soon be in trouble from internal contradiction.
The world’s Catholic population is now 1.166 billion
venomous-Know Nothing-anti Catholicism may play well among the elites
But-the consequences may be very severe
The RC charities are the major health care providers in Africa-together with other Christian agencies
Mocking such Christian faiths is not wise
The leader of the Southern Baptist conference pointed out that they are “self insuring” and their insurance organization will not as a matter of faith go along with Obama.
In fact there is talk of “taking it too the streets.” There are a number of evangelical and conservative Jews that are very upset about this. If the Obama administration persists if will be facing groups that are say “much more aggressive” than the Catholic leadership. There is growing unease in the local Texas religious Black community also.
On top of that a number of economic conservatives see this as a power grab also.
“Behind every blade of grass.”
The Establishment Clause seems simple enough to me. It does not say that the people cannot spend their money hanging the 10 Commandments in City Hall. It does not prohibit a Xmas display on public property. It says that Congress shall make no law regarding an establishment of religion. By every objective measure the Socialists are establishing themselves as a religion. Theirs is a very intolerant faith. The Catholics are realizing that there are some groups you cannot share with, like they can issue vapid papers stressing commonality with most Protestants and Jews. The Donks cannot share. Neither can the Islamists. Once one group says “No” as the Catholics have then others will feel emboldened. The acquiescence to bullying that has sustained the Left and their affiliated race baiters, grifters, and others will fail publicly and spectacularly. Unexpected alliances will be formed.
“Davud Levavi” – You are vile and a fool. You spread lies about the Church that are nothing but propaganda from the Left/Marxists. You know nothing and proudly display your ignorance. Most priests take their vows seriously and follow them. The pederasts and abusers are a minority. Why do I know? Because I was a victim of the bad ones and a fallen Roman Catholic. I have no interest in protecting the guilty but your broad brush is no different than The Grand Mufti Of Jerusalem and his friends. Get it?
Be gone, Demondim.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
I am not Catholic, but I will defend the right of the church to practice their beliefs. This is not an abortion, contraception or “woman’s health” issue. This is the obama administration “prohibiting the free excercise” of religion in violation of the Bill of Rights to the Constitution.
Unlike what atheists would like to believe, the First Amendment to the Constitution does not guarantee freedom FROM religion, it guarantees freedom OF religion.
Today obama changed the subject and said the church would not have to pay for “female health” rights, the insurance company would. Who is paying the insurance company to provide the service? The church will have to pay.
You know what’s next, Richard. It’s been mooted here for some time. I suspect it’s one of the reasons we don’t see Habu here anymore; he’s getting ready. Subotai is right in his assumption of what the elites plan to do. It won’t be accepted peacefully. I have a feeling that it won’t be too long before being a fedgov employee becomes a very unpopular issue with the neighbors.
I have a problem with this line:
“And a coalition of mainline Protestants, Muslims and Reform and Conservative Jews released a declaration on Wednesday supporting the ruling.”
Since when did Muslims support contraception? If they’re that keen, perhaps cutting down the number of wives would help.
So tell me again just what ILLNESS is pregnancy and why is FREE Contraception a RIGHT?
I can only hope that we are seeing the beginnings of Prof. Reynolds vaunted preference cascade starting to break loose. Could make for some interesting times.
Obama’s “accommodation” fix isn’t a fix at all. How in the world can he expect (or even force) insurance companies to provide contraception to all women for “free”. Talk about lame. Doesn’t he know that insurance companies don’t do, or give, anything for free? What Obama has managed to do, by trying to regain the Catholic vote in November, is increase our insurance premiums to cover all these so-called “free” contraception. He and his Health & Human Services Secretary, Sebelius, are about uber-ideology and expanding Big Brother’s stronghold on us. Walk on our freedom and liberty, why don’t you?
Liberalism is a virus, a cancer on the human condition. It must be wiped out, exterminated, a stake driven thru its heart, the body dismembered and the pieces reduced to ashes and scattered. Liberalism has killed hundreds of millions of people, both born and unborn. Its foremost proponent in this country is the Manchurian candidate, b Hussein 0bama. He is a stealth terrorist, destroying America from within. He must be defeated by any means necessary. It is to America’s shame that this imposter was elected President. We can redeem ourselves by voting overwhelmingly in November to send him back to whatever socialist hellhole spawned him.
There is a much bigger issue hiding behind this row. It is the issue of just what should be paid for by health insurance in the first place.
Insurance, in every other sphere, is thought of as a way of avoiding the financial effects of unforeseen catastrophe. Car insurance does not cover against routine servicing; it does cover against your car being damaged in an accident. House insurance does not cover you for painting the windows; it does cover against a falling tree wrecking your roof. And so on. Why, then, has the practice grown up of charging routine health care to an insurance scheme? Sure, if you have an unforeseen health expense such as breaking your leg, coming down with some horrible disease, or (going back to this discussion) needing “morning-after” emergency contraception after a condom breaks, then insurance should pay for it. Insurance should not pay for existing medical conditions, routine contraception, routine checkups…
This might be said to be an issue of terminology. It seems to me (from across the pond) that most American health insurance plans aren’t really insurance at all but a payment scheme of some sort.
@29. Subotai Bahadur
@31. wretchard
@36. Viktor (not that Victor)
The Internet is eroding the elites grip on power while it spreads awareness and the light of truth to the grass roots. As their memes and promotions lose traction in ever shorter periods of time the elites are going to be forced to make their move. They have long known that the era of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency will come to an end sooner rather than later and have planned accordingly. There are many pieces to the puzzle, but they will need something really big to tie their martial law to. Some kind of WMD in the “homeland” battlefield of the war on terror might do it. It will surely include some kind of cyber-terror aspect which will allow them to shut down or really clamp down on the internet. This will probably be simultaneous to a bank holiday in order to further scare the inhabitants of the US and force them into absolute dependence on the dollar and the Fed. They will outlaw all large cash transactions like Argentina has done. Through foodstamps they already have the infrastructure in place to control (and feed) the masses. And they have their Fema camps all ready.
NDAA Is Now Law, and Libertarians Are Now Anti-Government Extremists!
“a coalition of mainline Protestants, Muslims and Reform and Conservative Jews”
Ichneumon wasp, anyone? You only left out the atheists.
Next stop: the blithe and over-the-top racism of the liberal Left. MSNBC’s Al Sharpton and Melissa Harris-Perry operate from the same intellectual space as Joseph Goebbels.
They each admire the despicable Mary Frances Berry, who was amazingly a former chairwomen on the U.S. Commission for Civil Rights and who once said: “Civil rights laws were not passed to protect the rights of white men and do not apply to them”, which is as brazen as her apparent belief in having that special shield which means no matter what she says, it’s not racist, even when it is.
Ms. Berry also wrote in July of 2010: “Tainting the tea party movement with the charge of racism is proving to be an effective strategy for Democrats. There is no evidence that tea party adherents are any more racist than other Republicans, and indeed many other Americans.” Publically admitting that one is a liar and a race pimp in only 2 sentences is rare and why I used the word despicable.
The Goebbels version is “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie.”
Fletcher @61
I too am confused about how and why insurance companies cover contraception. Clearly, the idea behind insurance covering contraception is that a year’s supply of birth control pills is cheaper than the cost of a pregnancy. I know the cancer issue comes up too, but I don’t think the cost-benefit of reduced numbers of ovarian cancer really justifies covering birth control pills. I could be wrong though and would love to see the data on that.
What I don’t understand is that when I applied for my insurance with Kaiser, I elected to NOT have pregnancy covered by my policy, as my husband and I have decided we’re not having kids. So if Kaiser won’t cover my pregnancy, then the only reason I can deduce that they cover the pills is because of the cancer-fighting properties.
However, there’s some massive inconsistency in how they decide to cover certain types of contraceptives. For example, Kaiser covers pills, but NOT the contraceptive ring, a plastic device that delivers the same hormones as the pill vaginally. Regardless of the pregnancy issue, my understanding is that both forms of contraception provide the same cancer-fighting elements, so why is one covered, but not the other?
Now here’s where things get really confusing. I got fed up with the pills and decided to get a non-hormonal IUD, something that was also covered partially by Kaiser. Non-hormonal means no cancer-fighting properties and I had opted out of pregnancy coverage. Also, the IUD does nothing to protect against STDs and actually ups your chances of developing things like infections and uterine perforations. So then, why would this particular type of contraception, which has no health benefit beyond preventing pregnancy be covered, but the contraceptive rings were not? Incongruous.
Anyway, regardless of why insurance companies do what they do, I still don’t know why contraception is covered at all, nor why people seem to think they have a “right” to it. As a woman, I actually find the whole argument demeaning. I don’t need the state to help me – I’m quite mentally and financially capable of looking after my own reproductive concerns, thank you very much. Isn’t that what the feminists are always shouting about – “my body, my business” and all that? I’m pretty sure that Obama’s decision to make contraceptives free for women means he’s decided what’s best for us – so no, our bodies are apparently not our business.
Fletcher Christian #61
“This might be said to be an issue of terminology. It seems to me (from across the pond) that most American health insurance plans aren’t really insurance at all but a payment scheme of some sort.”
Spot on, FC. For routine medical and preventive and dental care, the term “insurance” is completely inaccurate. Given the cost of premiums it’s really a money transfer scheme. With a skim of 20-25% for the insurance company.
Take dental “insurance”, for example. Every plan I’ve looked at for the business has an annual maximum of $1000.00 to $1500.00. They all have deductibles, and they usually have two levels of benefits, one for preventive stuff and another for the rest. And the premiums aren’t cheap, several hundred to over a thousand a year.
For most families, dental insurance is a lousy investment. If you are single and have good teeth, you’ll end up having the insurance company pay roughly what you paid (or what your employer pays on your behalf) in premiums. All the insurance company did was tranfer the money for you.
If you do need more extensive work like root canals and inlays, one tooth could eat up your entire maximum, and you would be left having to pay the rest anyways. Your only real advantage is the difference between the maximum and the premium, a few hundred dollars at most. I suppose if you had a bunch of kids with bad teeth or that needed braces it might work to your advantage, but most people aren’t like that in America in 2012 (one or two kids and better teeth nowadays).
It should really be called dental “benefit”, not dental “insurance”. Insurance implies some guarantee against one party’s risk by incurring a financial risk to another party. Since there is only a small annual maximum, the “insurance” company has little or no real financial risk.
Doesn’t sound like Lloyds of London to me.
A 2,000 year track record across the four corners of the earth provides plenty of opportunity for Church bashers, but the fact is that the Catholic Church is the only institution, other than the individual States, with the organization and Constitutional standing to push back against the Sovereign.
If Obama is lucky he can keep the topic framed around contraception, but the real issue is abortion and the Catholic Church will never, can never, cave in to any government dictat that requires its active participation in the murder of unborn children.
I hope this turns into a real donnybrook because it will force out into the public square a ton of critical issues that seemingly everybody wants to avoid.
There is no such thing as “free” birth control. We (taxpayers) will all have to pay for it forever, as opposed to having to pay for it during our reproductive years. I vote for the people that need it paying for it.
There is no such thing as “free” birth control.
It’s called keeping your legs crossed. How much does that cost?
41/Subotai Bahadur & #37 wretchard
Strictly speaking, I have no personal dog in this fight. But I will stand with my Catholic brothers and sisters in this, just as I stand with my Jewish brothers and sisters when faced with anti-Semites. Because it is the right thing to do. It is the American thing to do.
It is also the only pragmatic thing which gives us any chance of saving ourselves. As Martin Niemöller stated:
“First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out – because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak out for me.”
As Niemöller found, the failure to take a stand for your neighbors’ rights eventually results in the loss of your own (or even your life).
If Obama is lucky he can keep the topic framed around contraception, but the real issue is abortion and the Catholic Church will never, can never, cave in to any government dictat that requires its active participation in the murder of unborn children. – Peter Boston
The Catholic Church in Europe caved in to the murder of millions of Jews and other undesirables by Nazi Germany in WWII to preserve themselves. The Catholic Church is a huge organization with literally millions of people making choices within its heirarchy, and over a billion members worldwide. A lot of “Catholics” disagree with the Church Leadership over birth control and the idea of abortion.
I think the Catholic Church (and other religious organizations) will fracture over this issue, which might be the “long game” that Obama and the Democrats are playing here. Nancy Pelosi insisted that the majority of Catholics are with the Obama administration on this issue. She is obviously incorrect, and it is hard to tell if she actually believes this bit of propaganda, but there are places where the majority of a Catholic congregation probably DO agree with the Obama Regime policy.
Don’t think it can’t happen just because it hasn’t happened yet.
Catholic’s lose as soon as the curtain is drawn at the voting booth! Women and especially so called “Christian” women will vote for their interest and “Feelings” over all else! If this was the pre “Pill” society there would have been a bigger chance of the “Faithful” on the women’s side voting with their faith but not now, not in this “Reality” show driven “Sex in the City” culture! 90% of half the American voting age population (women) wants free Birth Pills and Contraceptives and will over look the Abortion part because as it has been drilled into little boys and girls heads in public school for the last 50 years is “you can’t tell me (women) what I can do with my body” and so they will “FEEL” they have no right to vote against the Politician claiming to help the poor Raped, Incest, and Abused women who really need these option’s!
Obama is gonna win and things are going to spin even tighter as the old is flung from the core and the new “Fair”, “Caring” and “Equal” society is born as the Prez, his minions and the MSM all declare it, while the 10 second sound bite voters (the majority today) will believe it as so. This once great nation will continue to fall and it will be as it has been for the past 40+ years mainly a whimper….
#71 David
The Catholic Church has weathered much bigger storms than what Obama and his cohorts can throw at it.
It was not Catholic priests in the Warsaw Ghetto that “selected” the few to feed the beast outside the gates.
“Never before,” Archbishop Dolan said, setting the tone, “has the federal government forced individuals and organizations to go out into the marketplace and buy a product that violates their conscience.
Forcing individuals to buy something that they don’t want……… Where else have we heard about this tactic? Let me think………. Oh, yes……the OBAMACARE individual mandate.
The government has finally thought up a completely new way to tax the individual and not call it a tax. Just demand that the individual must buy a product or a service. What’s next? well….. we have a problem with the cost of never-ending unemployment insurance. Why not mandate that every person of working age in the U.S. individually purchase unemployment insurance? This would allow the government to shift ALL of the UI cost (not a tax) to the people and allow them to claim that they have lowered the tax burden for business.
65. E2 – What I don’t understand is that when I applied for my insurance with Kaiser, I elected to NOT have pregnancy covered by my policy, as my husband and I have decided we’re not having kids. So if Kaiser won’t cover my pregnancy, then the only reason I can deduce that they cover the pills is because of the cancer-fighting properties.
I understand this to mean you’ve elected not to be covered for pre-natal care, labor, and delivery, but birth control is a whole other subject. A few years ago, the insurance portion of labor & delivery and newborn care charges for my youngest totaled $12,500, for natural childbirth with a midwife. By some miracle we missed complications from an unforeseen condition which could have easily torqued the medical charges and cost the baby’s life in the process. From a financial standpoint, birth control is always going to be a net positive for insurance companies.
#6 Steeple says “Germans pay an average of 36 cts/kilowatt hour for their electricity. The avg American family pays less than 10 cts. ”
WOW! Not in California. The lowest cost per KWH (Pacific Gas and Electric baseline usage) is $0.12233.
101-130% of baseline is $0.13907
131-200% of baseline is $0.29276
201-300% of baseline is $0.33276
FYI, baseline is 330.2 KWH
The rate/KWH goes even higher after 300%, but I don’t have one of those bills handy to reference it.
Will Hussein’s attack on the Catholic Church be the Bridge Too Far? Doubt it. Even after a genuine Bridge Too Far, the Allies went on to beat the Germans. All the mistake of the Bridge Too Far did was to push up the body count — not something that matters to Obaminoids.
If the Catholic Church looks like it is winning the argument, it will simply be a replay of what happened when the Occupy nonsense started to backfire. The Big Media cone of silence will descend, and it will be as if it had never happened.
Still, Hussein’s model of Big Intrusive Government is unsustainable. Most western governments are two failed bond auctions away from collapse. Something quite trivial is going to bring this rickety house of cards down — and maybe quite soon. For example — the silly old Brits get themselves into a war with Argentina over the Malvinas. Chavez and the UN pile in. Hussein paralyzed with indecision. China takes advantage of the situation to sort out Taiwan. Iran decides to use the opportunity to trigger its actions against Israel and the hated French. We are close, people. So close.
Re. #9. Eggplant
Steeple @ 6 said:
Fortunately, the Germans will be smiling while they are cold and shivering in the dark because they’ll be serene in the knowledge that they are “green”.
Unless they turn blue first.
Hangtown, I’m afraid that California’s energy policies resemble Germany’s more closely than the rest of the states.
What a soup:. Climate Change, German electricity costs, Assad, birth control, anti-Catholic hatred, and liberalism. The cobweb is interconnected but let me stick with one concept, one disaster, Obamacare. The nation has been traumatized, not by varying positions on contraception, but the assault by bureaucrats on the First Amendment to the Constitution. We split from England for several reasons, but the prime motivation was not to force tax payers to fund the Church of England. This tax still exists today in London. In part this was motivated by religious hatred, but calmer heads held that in our polyglot society, American must avoid the centuries of religious wars that plagued Europe. Bluntly, does anyone want 70 million Catholics to take up arms against our federal government? This is common in other societies.
The first disaster occurred in Congress, the people who set national policy. Congressman Stupak bucked, with others, his own President, on this every issue. He caved to Obama at the 11 th hour, on a squeaker; the bill passed. Yesterday, the defeated Congressman said that the Executive Order (non-binding legally) promised that this would never happen. Obama words:
“Under the act, longstanding federal laws to protect conscience … remain intact and new protections prohibit discrimination against healthcare facilities and healthcare providers because of an unwillingness to provide, pay for, provide coverage of or refer for abortions.”
This eruption was only tangentially related to contraception. In the last days, the WH has been welded to Planned Parenthood. PP makes half their income doing abortions. No calls to Catholic bishops were made. This is about ramming abortion funding down the throat of Catholic, and other institutions.
The second level disaster is now obvious; Obamacare pays for sex costs between healthy people. Obama did not wish to cover toothpaste, soap, toilet tissue, or a host of other health related purchases. Why? Why was one topic pushed so hard, to the exclusion of others, so hard that he lied to a Congressman? Stupak was had. My answer: we have an incompetent, dishonest Fascist as President. Fascism is a system of government whereby the state dictates everything to the people. When churches or insurance companies are told that they must pay for “free” sex, we have gone down a wrong road. Obamacare was sold as funding the uninsured; this is the actual result.
A similar process is ongoing in our energy policies. You are going to be forced to pay severely for unworkable, ideologically driven, politically favored, centrally dictated, businesses.
The German people, by vote, traded their freedom for the security from a Fuhrer; it ended badly.
What individual Catholic priests think or do will not matter nearly as much as the leadership decisions made by the Bishops, Cardinals, etc.
They already signed onto Obama-Care Health reform in 2009 because it was “the Christian” thing to do and would be compassionate towards the poor. Never mind the it was counter the rights and sovereignty of free and private citizens. Because it was all about “their” principles, not the Constitutional principles that try to keep us a free people.
In principle and purpose, the Catholic Church is a collectivist organization, as are most organized religions.
When it came to speaking out about the Holocaust and the murder of millions, the Church in Rome was silent – because they knew they could be the next ones rounded up. Regardless of the personal courage and integrity of individual priests and Catholics (such as the present Pope).
When it came to protecting their parishoners from predatory homosexuals abusing young men, they protected the image of the church. When it came to standing up for freedom and justice and the individual rights of Americans, they chose to back Obama-Care medical fascism.
They are who they are.
As CharlesWhite wisely said above, when they stand alone in the voting booth, don’t expect a lot of Catholics, especially women, to vote AGAINST subisdized birth control and abortion. Because in their hearts, that’s what a lot of them really want. They are no different than the rest of the public, conditioned to believe in the sacraments of death.
Hangtown:
In Georgia,average residential rate for use of 1000kwh is $.1029
It really sucks to live in CA.
#30 Buckeye
“Want to guess where Joska Fischer, former head of the german green party and Schroeders old lackey, is these days?
Last I heard he was with Nabucco in some capacity. Wonder if he’s on his 6th wife yet.
I must respectfully but vigorously object to this. As I tried to explain earlier, in the case of contraception and abortion, it is most certainly about the “something.” This is not simply a question of “who decides,” as if the world-boat will go drifting merrily down the stream no matter what, and the only controversy at hand is over who gets to sit in the comfy chairs. It is about who decides and what they decide. Actions have consequences after all, and the consequences of abortion and contraception are well-nigh disastrous.
Setting aside the morality of it all for the time being, there is also the simple fact of demographics. The demographic destruction of the developed world is THE signature issue of our age. It is the determining factor in every other crisis we face, from national insolvency to geopolitical instability to illegal immigration, and yet nobody in any position of authority will even mention it. As David Goldman is fond of pointing out, there is not a single country in the entire developed world, with the bare exceptions of the US and Israel, which is even replacing its population. Europe, Russia, and Japan already appear doomed to an irreversible decline, and the formally high birth-rate areas of Africa and Asia have recently seen steep declines in fertility (not that they were capable of producing a qualitative substitute for Western populations anyway). To offer free birth control to Americans at this juncture is a bit like offering free ankle weights on a sinking ship. It is an horrendous policy move for any number of reasons, and it is also proof that certain decisions are too important to be left up to the whims of individuals. Those women (and men) whose state of life affords them the opportunity to have children and who choose not to do so, are guilty of the suicide of the race.
Any religion which is a proxy for something else is, of course, no religion at all and will be burned up as straw on the Day of Judgment. Not only will it avail you nothing in the world to come, it is not even a very reliable indicator of how people will behave in the present world, since the attachment is one of emotion and convenience and will be changed as soon as the circumstances change. This is not to deny the point that for many people religion is nothing more than a proxy, but it is to guard against the corrupt idea that religion is never anything but a proxy. The law of non-contradiction holds true in metaphysics as well as in other plains of being. Here as elsewhere, statements are either true or false. God either exists or He doesn’t; Jesus is either His only begotten son or he is not. In the sphere of real religion, it matters what I believe about these things. It is, in fact, the realization that what I believe about these things matters, which is itself the beginning of real religion. Short of that point I am permitted to treat religion as a convenience or a fancy, but once that point is reached it becomes a matter of life and death, calling even for sacrifice if need be. It is not “religious freedom” which men will sacrifice their lives for, but for the love of Christ. Obama is not waging a war against religious freedom—that is a half-hearted slogan. He loves religious freedom, loves the relativism and the nihilism and the blow to tradition which such freedom always offers. Obama is religious freedom, the unrestrained, godless Intellect elevated to a metaphysical absolute. He opposes not his own creed to the creed of the Church, but his own libertinism to the Church’s sanity. The substance of the matter supervenes eventually on every question of “who decides,” apart from which it is simply an issue of spite.
An additional point: It would be a shame if ‘elite’ became a dirty word.
If you’re like me, whenever you need advice about birth control you seek the counsel of the oldest, most sexually repressed men you can find
David, you’re not correct when you say the Catholic Church caved into the Holocaust. The opposite is true. Prior to the war, the Pope was a leading opponent of Hitler who ambushed him with a stealth Palm Sunday encyclical, published unusually in German, called “Mit brennender Sorge”. In it, the Pope blasted the Nazi’s in a number of ways and also warned that a course was set for world war. World leaders everywhere, with the exception of out-of-favor guys like Churchill, condemned it hyperbolic and over the top. During the war, the biggest organization operating inside the Third Reich to protect the Jews was the Catholic Church. The famous bomb plot which almost killed Hitler was the result of a conspiracy of devout Catholics in the German Army. Hitler viewed the Church as his enemy, and Nuremberg confirmed Nazi plans to eradicate it from Europe after the war.
Evidenced by the Church’s experience in Nazi controlled Europe and behind the Iron Curtain, the Church is far from unaccustomed at operating behind enemy lines so to speak. She no doubt feels she is today, for who could deny that the Church as become a counter-cultural agent behind today’s secular humanist hegemon?
You may wish she’d have done more, or at least things more openly and stridently, but it is difficult to play with a weak hand, having, as Stalin observed, no so many pieces on the board.
Amen Cowboy.
Unless we win this election, (and it seems we have royally screwed up our chances)-we must get a favorable ruling by the Supreme’s on the Obamacare dmandate. Our chances there may have gotten a boost from this mandate to provide free contraceptives, since the most effective Commerce Clause argument has been- “if the CC still exists at all, what else can the government mandate us to purchase? I believe that Kennedy is Catholic, so this travesty may have served as a tipping point in our favor.
14. wretchard
The mask is worn consciously because the wearer knows more than anyone else what his visage really looks like. The onlookers can only guess, but their guesses get better as time wears on.
………….
This is why the writing of the Russian fsb/kgb/nkvd posters for ron paul look so totally cock eyed. They use the language of authoritarians to support a guy who totally is not.
You do not have to appeal to Roman Catholic doctrine to oppose birth control. All you have to do is wonder why the new woman requires a pill. For we do have a new woman, intentionally conceived by the likes of Margaret Sanger in her book _Women and the New Race_. The view of the new woman’s adherents is that the woman of yore was constrained by false, man-made constraints as embodied in a religious doctrine that they did not believe and embodied in the cultural paradigm of patriarchy, an arbitrary power construct. The paradoxical solution is to forge a new morality enabled by the pill and by abortion. Formerly the cry was to selectively breed a new race literally. Post Holocaust, the cry has focused on lifestyle and presumptive rights.
No little amount of hubris entwines this project. To embrace it is to deny biology, the very basis that defines what it means to be male or to be female. Sexual difference is the natural reality of our species’ reproductive strategy, whether you take it to be God-given or not. So, to embrace this project you therefore reject biology and disavow natural reality. You have embarked on a Utopian scheme, reliant on the conquering ability of man over nature, to forge an ideal society. This is the same familiar goal of socialists and humanists everywhere. You are building a prideful Hoover Dam of sorts.
No small irony thrives in this age where all faith man’s former nature conquering abilities has been lost. Try to build another Hoover Dam today, or even a much justified pipeline. Man has become a cancer to nature in the socialists and humanists own pantheon. Man’s presence and his activity sully any environment in which he’s found, robbing it of “Pristine-ness”. His very presence on the globe poisons it, thanks to AGW. We have arrived in strange position that denies us the very possibility of improving the natural situation by any means other than artificially altering ourselves.
I seem to be paying about 13 cents per kwh to LADWP fwiw.
dls @ 88: I believe that Kennedy is Catholic, so this travesty may have served as a tipping point in our favor.
Also Obambus’ “accomodation” is so grossly unfounded and arbitrary that I think it throws everything, from Obamacare to the commerce clause, in a bad light.
OTOH I don’t doubt that these three liberal women on the court might well be happy to support Obamacare specifically because it justifies an executive demand for free contraception, even though there be no mention whatsoever of any related topic in the constitution.
The Left wants to establish a State Religion ( Progressive Atheism) and effectively abolish the Constitution . It is very close to succeeding on both counts. That is what this is about.
The following has a chart on 2011 electric rates top and bottom ten:http://ki4kqd.net/2011/05/23/electric-prices-by-state-2011/
Almost all of the top ten are either hard to get to (Alaska, Hawaii) or Democrat and urban. California is tenth.
Bottom ten are almost all Republican and rural with a few outliers like Washington State.
But in any case be aware that electrical rates are going up rapidly powered by EPA edicts.
That said, I don’t like politics from the pulpit, Rabbinical or Ministerial, and I get the willies when Roman Catholic Bishops make their muscle felt in the public square.
But that’s the end result of Big Government politics – everything is politicized. What else would you expect from preachers when the government starts telling them when they can and can’t practice their religion?
Wretchard is right, the Lefitsts have gone over the threshold.
That would be just like the unions who were all for Obama until they realized he would side with the Greens instead of organized labor in the case of the Keystone pipeline. Or any of the innumerable groups who thought their agenda would be advanced by only to find that there was a higher bidder. People hardly to stop to think that if you can convince a politician to shaft someone else, he will sooner or later get around to shafting you. What will prevent it? His good character?
Or, as Instapundit likes to say, another Rube self-identifies.
Besides, politicians get replaced. Even if the guy you bought never stabs you in the back, what happens when someone else knocks him off the greased pole and takes his place? It amazes me every time I stop to think about it, that the pro-abortion folks would so thoroughly support a government takeover of health care immediately after a Born-Again Christian had been in charge of that government for 8 years. Do they think it’ll never happen again?
Perhaps if conservatives really were the brutal powermongers Leftists claim they are, Leftists would believe less in Big Government. Then again, maybe not. What else would they have to believe in?
More Jews have died from abortion than from Hitler.Progressives want fewer people so we have replaced our children with poor Hispanics.Voluntary ethnic cleansing.No aid for college students with small babies.We surround ourselves with young mothers with lots of kids as long as they are not ours.Motherhood is demonized at every turn,as if it is crippling disease that women need to be saved from.Look around Los Angeles.Where would all those extra blacks,wasps,whites,Italians,Irish, babies be living now?We thought that wouldn’t be room for our kids,so we replaced them with imports.Abortion and open borders–the modern progressive creed.
An unreported part of the Obama mandate is this nugget-Women will “no longer have to pay hundreds of dollars a year (for contraceptives)that could go towards paying the rent or buying groceries.”
Ok-Assuming he could order hundreds of dollars a year in free rent or food to the public, he considers it more important to order free contraceptives. This is the most bizarre “policy” to come out of any White House in history. Who the hell in the administration not only pushed it and convinced Dear Leader in an election year to come out twice and “articulate” it? There must now be a third clumsy attempt, since he can’t back out of this mess. Pray tell what pretzel logic that will employ.
Also, why is this a compromise? To compromise is to “make a deal between different parties where each party gives up part of their demand. In arguments, compromise is a concept of finding agreement.” He is just negotiating with himself.
The edict on providing free abortion is a deliberate joining of Church and State because it commands the Church to implement a State policy. That’s what I don’t like about it. Church and State should be separate.
Regarding the breaking of taboos I would say that England is a lost cause. I’ve just spent an afternoon in the U.K. surrounded by Brits who are total believers in the Progressive doctrine and fervent worshippers of St Obama. Sure I had lots of fun making their lips purse – they looked like they were sucking on a lemon – but they are lost souls.
The koolaid drinkers are legion in N. America too. The taboos are strong. A few people breaking rank does not mean the taboos are about to crumble. Some interesting defectors from progressive orthodoxy are encouraging but I think that only the full weight of reality crashing directly onto a taboo will ever break it.
Here is a simple solution to this whole insurance mess. Just let individuals have the same tax deductions for their health care that employers currently enjoy. Then employers can just give to each employee, as an increase in their salary, the money they now spend on healthcare. This way employers can get out of the healthcare business and individuals can now shop around and find the policy that best suites their individual needs. Makes too much sense though.
When you cast the solution in these terms you begin to see that this is not about providing affordable healthcare, it is about control over the individual. The promise of free healthcare is just the bait in the trap.
Matt @ 84: “It would be a shame if ‘elite’ became a dirty word.”
Au contraire — our aim should be to make “elite” a disgraced word. Just like other formerly useful words, such as progressive, liberal, gay.
According to the dictionary, “elite” shares the same Latin root as “elect” — those who have been selected. We need to put a stop to the progression: elect -> elite -> nomenklatura -> dynastic ruling class. Our only effective tools are mockery and rope-&-lampost. Let’s try mockery first. Goodness knows, today’s elected elite & their running dogs in Big Media give us lots of material to play with!
The Obama tactic is squarely aimed at the Female vote, This is delivering something that cuts thru the religious wall and generates a massive voting bloc behind the polling booth curtain, Obama is cleaving off the female vote and they will pull the lever for him in the same massive numbers as last time.
Matt @ 84 “As David Goldman is fond of pointing out, there is not a single country in the entire developed world, with the bare exceptions of the US and Israel, which is even replacing its population. Europe, Russia, and Japan already appear doomed to an irreversible decline…” ahem, I have been informing David for some time that his reliance on projections from several years ago in Russia are overly pessimistic. Russia’s population actually increased by 60,000 this year — a blip in a country of 141 million, but there are reasons for cautious optimism on Russia. Will Russia hit 500 million by 2060 as Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin proposes? Doubtful. But it could rebound to 160-170 mil with just a modest uptick in immigration, and I’ve already seen the pattern in Moscow — deportations of unpopular illegals like Tadjiks, and quiet admission of more Indians and Chinese. Granted that’s the Moscow view and there probably are not so many Asians in St. Pete, Nizhny Novgorod or Novosibirsk. Nonetheless, Moscow itself is not insignificant as it’s the only major city in EUrope still growing fast and headed for 20 million.
The Lomonosov Moscow State University, it’s overrun with Chinese these days with Taiwanese, Koreans and Japanese all outnumbering any single European nationality. David’s other catch phrase is more accurate: It’s not the end of the world, it’s just the end of you. That is of the types who were dismissing Russia as totally irrelevant ten years ago and are now fuming that Russia is back and spoiling their plans for a merry go round of Mideast regime change.
So Russia’s future might be in a more genetically, and not just ideologically Eurasian future — part Turkic, part Slavic (Scandinavian blonde influence) and part Chinese/Korean. In this sense, it’s back to the future when the descendants of Ghenghis Khan and the Tatar Orda ruled in the 14th century before intermarrying and then being overthrown by Slavs (though Ivan Grozny a century and some years later still married a Tatar princess).
I find the decision to announce this policy, indeed, to initiate this policy now more or less bizarre. Why would he decide to make a direct attack against Catholics and other religions by announcing this as he did when he did. Surely he did not think this would go unnoticed by the Catholics and others. It is not something that will meaningfully increase the support among or motivation of his base, at least not enough to make up for the loss of those offended. I do not know why he would do this when he did, it is bizarre.
It seems the strategy being pursued is to bewilder the populace with a weekly onslaught of insane intrusions and excursions into unconstitutional trifles. Resistance to the general trend weakens as the tax-paying producers fight against the “Death of a Thousand Paper Cuts.”
The mind is numbed by the constant barrage of Cash-for-TBTF-Genuflect-to-Murdering-Islamists-but-Spit-On-the-Brave-who-Protect-the-Country-that-pays-your-wife’s-Million-Dollar-European-Shopping-Sprees, and anyone who objects is an Enemy of the State.
Tee#45:
Thank you,Tee. Always refreshing to be reminded of the essential sweetness of so many in the Catholic laity. My sympathy and support for your Mother-in-law. I have always maintained that the first victims of the Church are its own closest communicants. I have some comments and questions to your response.
Let’s test some of your statements, Tee–not in order to tear down the finest part of your faith which would be a sin in Judaism no less than in Catholicism. Rather to confirm you in Christ and his recorded Gospel teachings–indeed in the teaching of the entire Christian Bible which, along with St. Paul’s letters, comprises the whole of the Christian Canon. I don’t take issue with you on matters of inviolable faith. But I do question your general facts.
Is the the American Catholic priesthood overwhelmingly and actively gay, as I assert, or is it no more than one-third gay, active or not unspecified, as you suggest? More intriguing to me, for I have not heard it before, is the entirely credit-worthy and laudable enterprise of the Church sheltering men who might otherwise be shunned and shamed and worse for their cohabitive predilections.
Let me try to prove my position by by analogy. In Brooklyn where I grew up in the Fifties and early Sixties it was commonly heard that, “show me a cop, I’ll show you a thief.”
Everyone agreed that there was no shortage of crooked cops on the Police Force. The question was, how many? What percentage of the NYPD was dirty? Discussions of police corruption always ended the same way. “There’s always gonna be some rotten apples in the barrel.”
Then a crazy cop named Frank Serpico came along followed by the Knapp Commission on Police Corruption and everyone in New York learned the number was one hundred percent. There was an organized pad in every precinct and every single cop from Precinct Captain to foot patrolman was on the take. The NYPD was one hundred percent bent.
The full report of the Knapp Commission was detailed and lengthy and few people read it. I certainly didn’t. I was a hopelessly degenerate New York Times addict in those years and I followed the story as presented in its hallowed pages. One detail struck me as odd and inexplicable. The overarching recommendation of the Knapp Commission was that the NYPD be diversified. How, I wondered, would greater diversity reduce corruption?
Years later, researching a novel dealing with the history of the New York Police from the Rattle Squads of the Seventeenth Century New Amsterdam colony to the present NYPD, I read about the first investigation of the New York Police some eighty years before the Knapp Commission. It is an instructive story worth retelling here.
Just before the turn of the Twentieth Century, the Minister of Marble Church, let out a holler from his pulpit one Sunday morning regarding all the opium dens, gambling parlors and whorehouses within a stone’s throw of his Church. The Minister was hooted by the press, vilified for a pious prude and otherwise publicly insulted and dismissed. Uncowed and unbowed, the Minister hired a respected and credible detective who assembled lists of hundreds of illegal establishments in the city exactly as the Minister described.
The resulting scandal triggered the first investigation of the New York Police. The results shocked even the most cynical New Yorkers. The New York Police ran crime in New York. No criminal enterprise in the city could survive without police participation. A hefty bribe was required in order to join the Police Force. Every cop kicked back a percentage of his salary to his superiors. Larger kickbacks and larger percentages were required for every promotion. But the return on the investment was huge. A policeman’s badge was a ticket to ride roughshod over the citizenry and the law; a license to sell dope and whores and to extort and steal wholesale.
Tammany got thrown out of City Hall in the next election. New York’s old Dutch and English Protestant elites were swept back into power. Teddy Roosevelt was appointed Police Commissioner. Like the Knapp Commission seventy years later, TR concluded that police corruption was directly tied to lack of diversity in police hiring.
Political Correctness had not been invented yet, so unlike Knapp and the New York Times, TR vented his honest opinion without embarrassment. The New York Police Force was too Catholic and too Irish. Irish and Catholic was a sure formula for corruption. TR’s solution was simple. He immediately set about publicly recruiting “young Jews of the Maccabee type,” to displace and dilute the Irish Catholics on the New York Police force.
(Irish) Catholic Cops who traditionally monopolized the New York Police Force were and are today, drawn from the same classes of Catholic society as cops. I would respectfully submit that the widespread if not universal corruption of Catholic policemen tells us something significant about corrupt tendencies among Catholic priests. There is something rotten and it isn’t in Denmark among the Danish but here in America among Catholics, policemen and priests alike.
Before the recent pedophilia scandals, people estimating the number of homosexual Catholic priests would usually say fifteen to twenty-five percent. You say a third, Tee. In a best-selling book, a Catholic psychiatrist paid from Church funds to treat troubled priests, estimates the overall number of homosexual Catholic priests at eighty percent. Published reports have it that heterosexual seminarians are made unwelcome in Catholic Seminaries. An objective estimate of homosexuality in the Catholic Priesthood is not possible. However, the fact that the Bishops refuse to take an honest poll suggests that the percentage of homosexual priests is higher rather than lower.
A sea change has quietly taken place in attitudes toward homosexuality among lay Catholics. As recognition of the preponderance of homosexuals in the priesthood sinks in, even the most conservative of Catholics have been forced to accept sexual behavior they formerly considered deviant for normal. The pedophilia scandals and the increasingly homosexual identity of the Catholic Clergy are an unexpected boon for the gay rights movement. Whether this is ultimately healthy or not, I leave to you, Tee.
Again the question: Why should a Jew Like me care one way or the other if Catholic priests are gay? I don’t. Pedophile priests are another matter, however. Pedophile priests are not merely dangerous to their innocent young Catholic victims. They are profoundly vicious criminals whose malevolent impact is enormous and in no way limited to their own Communicants. Two less than ancient examples:
Example 1.
A catholic maid employed in a European Jewish Household takes it upon herself to Baptize a six year old Jewish boy. Church authorities hear of the Baptism and the local Bishop’s men at arms seize the boy in order to raise him as a proper Catholic. Pictures of the boy’s grief stricken mother make headlines and howls of protest at the child’s kidnapping are heard around the world. The Pope weighs in, declaring the boy fortunate to be saved. The lucky boy is not only officially saved, he is brought to the Vatican to meet the Pope.
But here the Pope stumbles. Silent moving pictures are taken with a motion picture camera of the Pope at play with the boy. The flickering black and white images are intended to show how happy the newly saved boy is in the company of the Holy Father. Instead, the images horrify everyone who sees them. The Holy Father is seen playing peek-a-boo with the sweet little boy, lifting his Holy Vestments and dropping them over the boy. The boy moving around under the Holy Father’s Holy Robes, His Holiness pushing the little boy’s face into his Holy Crotch, outrage viewers everywhere. The protests demanding the boy’s release spill into the streets of cities around the globe.
The Holy Father only digs in his Holy Heels. Declares publicly that he doesn’t care a fig for public opinion. The Holy Roman Catholic Church does not bow to public opinion. The resulting outcry is such that even crafty Napoleon III, whose troops protect the Vatican, feels compelled to withdraw his support for the Pope. The Piedmontese attack. The Papal Estates are seized. By the time the dust settles, the bulk of the Church’s real estate holdings have been nationalized by the Italian government.
So do a tally of losses, Tee. We Jews lost one boy who was raised by Catholic priests and grew up to be a priest famously sensitive to Jewish concerns and devoted to the welfare of the Jewish community. Frankly homosexual, but who knows, maybe he was naturally inclined to be gay.
Now consider the Catholic losses, Tee. If you define the Catholic Church as the Catholic Priesthood, the Church lost nothing. Catholic priests are impoverished by oath and the Papal Estates were mere real estate, unimportant material vanities of the fleeting mortal world. But what if you define the Church as contributing, donating, Catholic Communicants in their hundreds of millions around the world? Did an arrogant and grotesque pedophile Pope not do the Catholic Church profound and irreparable harm?
Example 2.
The Nazis have been democratically elected in Germany. People are being rounded up and slaughtered. Mass murder of inferiors and undesirables has become ordinary—lawful and patriotic. The Vatican is pressed to protest. Its silence has become an embarrassment to decent Catholics everywhere. A formal Papal protest is prepared. Its title, “With Burning Anxiety.” The document does not protest the mass extermination of Jews and Gypsies and homosexuals. It does not protest the mass enslavement of Poles and Russians. The Church’s single protest in ten years of Nazi rule limits itself to criticizing the euthaenazing of German physical and mental defectives.
Word of the protest being prepared by the Vatican reaches Hitler. It is a ticklish challenge for the Nazis. They recognize that Christianity is a hated Jewish derivative and detest the Church for a political rival. But forty percent of the German population and sixty percent of the Wermacht is Catholic. The Nazis don’t relish a head-to-head confrontation with the Church for the loyalty of the German people.
But the Nazis have a solution. There is one powerful issue which will win Hitler greater sympathy and support than the Pope. The Gestapo begins arresting Catholic priests in the German university town where the Pope studied as a young seminarian decades earlier. The charges are homosexual pedophilia and would be legitimate even in the most democratic of courts. The priests are guilty as hell. Hitler is merely exposing something about the Catholic priesthood that faithful German Catholics well know but never speak about. Hitler shows German Catholics their Pope with his pants down.
The threat of mass arrests and show trials of pedophile priests has the intended chilling effect. The Vatican protest against Nazi mass murder is revised, unenthusiastically published and dies a quiet death. The most powerful moral voice in Western Civilization is silenced. Tens of millions are brutally murdered for ten years without a peep from the Pope because the Catholic Priesthood had wasted its moral authority lusting after young boys.
Today, as Muslims hordes invade and occupy Christian lands, cut heads off Jews on video, burn Christians and Christian Churches, blow up innocent Hindus and desecrate Buddhist shrines, the silence from the Vatican is deafening. Quiet diplomacy is the Vatican watchword. Worked real well with the Nazis. Only regarding the issue of abortion and contraception in the United States does the Church evidence life signs. How to explain this, Tee?
Pro-life has become a term to describe the Church only recently in connection with the abortion issue. Is the description accurate? How many were tortured by the inquisition? How many entire Jewish families burned alive by Franciscan and Dominican priests during festive religious carnivals called Auto de fes? During the Seventeenth Century witch hunts in Europe, the Church burnt alive an estimated one hundred thousand Catholics—mainly elderly and impoverished women—for the crime of dementia.
Were Catholic priests in their confessionals for two thousand years unaware that midwives routinely suffocated unsightly and unwanted infants? Midwives have filtered the human race since the beginning of time. The child born overly hirsuite, the child born with too many digits, the beginning of a tail, hare-lipped, deformed in any of a thousand ways has been snuffed in his swaddling in every society on earth. Why the Church’s sudden obsession with the lives of the unborn? Where was its voice for two millennia of daily infanticide by midwives?
The Catholic Bishops and the Catholic Priesthood are morally bankrupt and everyone knows it. The contraception battle was lost years ago. Hundreds of priests, including superiors and Bishops, secretly thank their lucky stars for having evaded exposure, criminal proceedings and prison. No one, not American Jews, not American Protestants not rational Americans of any faith have the stomach for a proper legal purge and a grand public humiliation of a major American religion beloved by millions of good and decent American citizens.
The Catholic laity is reliably sincere. Its opposition to abortion is moral and heartfelt. It is politics, however, not morality, that drives the Bishops’ anti-abortion campaign. American national politics. Abortion is the only issue the Bishops have left. The only arrow in their otherwise empty quiver.
Abortion offers the American Bishops a political bridge to the newly powerful Christian Evangelical right. It affords them a tattered fig leaf to hide their timorous leadership, weak characters and shameful moral lapses.
You have my deepest sympathies, Tee. If American rabbis shamed and humiliated the Jewish community as American Catholic Priests have shamed lay Catholics, Jews like me would have assisted Catholic policemen and Catholic prosecutors and Catholic judges to put every last one of our pervert Rabbis in jail. Our children’s safety takes precedence over our pride in our faith and our loyalty to degenerates among our Rabbis. We would have cleaned house.
Which brings me to the most disturbing aspect of the pedophilia scandals. As a parent, I can’t imagine myself allowing any son of mine to go off on a weekend retreat with one or another exquisitely groomed and sweetly scented priest. My grisly suspicion is that in many cases, reflexively respectful and servile Catholic parents were consciously and unconsciously complicit in their children’s abuse by pedophile priests. Unsightly Catholic girls were traditionally relegated to celibate lives as nuns. Is it impossible that Catholic parents willingly if grudgingly sacrifice their sons to their priests?
Alas, Tee, your estimate of one third applies to the number of Catholic priests who are pedophiles. The percentage of gay priests—actively gay—is much higher. Honest and moral lay Catholic men and women need to suspend the campaign to protect the unborn and concentrate on wresting control of their faith from its overwhelmingly and outrageously corrupt priests.
Boards of directors at Protestant churches and Jewish synagogues routinely dismiss ministers and rabbis who disappoint or offend their congregations. Catholics don’t need to alter their faith or change their belief. They need to politically restructure their church to a more democratic American standard.
David Levavi, you idiot. You really burn me up. Not that I’m surprised. Anti-Catholic idiocy is the norm for the world, so we’re used to it to a degree. But then an idiot comes along who takes the cake.
Cowboy, I don’t have a dog in that fight anymore. I used to be Catholic but converted. I don’t have anything against Catholics or Catholicism; I just found something with all Catholicism offered and more.
That said, I grew up Catholic and know Catholicism. Levavi’s claims about the numbers of homosexual priests are probably not too far off the mark, and the percentage has undoubtedly grown as the overall number of priests has shrunk. I knew some incredibly fine men who were Catholic priests; I also knew some who were undoubtedly homosexual and who may well have acted on those inclinations.
His arguments about the Church being blackmailed into quietude regarding serious moral issues also ring true at first reading. I suspect there are still lots of Catholics who don’t want to have Mass performed by a practicing homosexual. Shoving that in the faces of the parishioners is not a way to keep, much less increase, membership. If the majority of Catholic priests are homosexual, the Church is going to do everything it can for as long as it can to keep that fact from the average Catholic. The Vatican knows exactly what kind of damage that would cause, and that it would be irreparable.
It’s a pity that God didn’t see fit to enlighten the Church about married priests long ago. We’re in a situation now where we could really use an organization wielding the type of moral authority the Catholic Church could if it wasn’t so tainted by homosexuality.
RE: Catholic Church and homosexuality
The subject is disturbing on merit alone, without further context, but one notes that male homosexuality has been linked to specific ideological and professional preferences, the common citation being the dominance of homosexuals in the spy scandals of 50 years ago and within the EUropean political aristocracy. While I do not make that argument, it casts an even more damning light on pedophile priests, if that is possible, and the failure of the Church to respond in a manner appropriate to the presumption of moral authority.
…
Women Who Stray:
Freud wrote that “Biology is destiny,” in describing how he believed women MUST be, and how their behaviors and personalities are compelled by the female biology. Today, we know much about the different biological processes involved in gender differences and behaviors. But, we know even more about the complex, unpredictable role of the interplay between environment and biology. In fact, we know enough now, that we are almost back to square one, unable to predict anything with certainty. I once asked a famous evolutionary researcher if he had ever examined his own testosterone levels, or measured the symmetry of his own face. “No,” he said, “The value of these data is not meaningful at the individual level. It only has predictive ability at the statistical level, when you predict trends across large numbers of subjects.”
That, of course, was meant to be humorous, but in the context of moral authority, empirical evidence suggests its dilution with movement along the continuum away from the individual and towards the institutional. YMMV.
Well, I do have a dog in this fight, as I’m a convert to the Catholic Church, and I prefer my anti-Catholicism straight up, like Obama’s, rather than larded with smirking faux sympathy like Mr. Levavi’s or transparent resentment like mac’s. Both of you make bland assertions about the homosexual nature of the Catholic priesthood. In post 25, Levavi contents himself with defaming just “a majority” of Catholic priests; by #103 he’s crept up to “overwhelmingly gay”, while pooh-poohing what he imagines is the standard Catholic ass-covering excuse that it’s “only” 1/3 gay. I deny that the percentage of Catholic priests is anywhere close to even this supposedly “generous” estimate. I don’t think it’s even 10%, otherwise every single parish would have been laid waste by these serial criminals. In fact, the stories of sexual abuse we read about today are all dating way back to the 1950s! Yet every one is covered by the press with the same gusto as the up-to-date crimes of ten years ago. Face it, the Church’s enemies are scraping the bottom of the barrel now, with accusations that are all but impossible to prove, but you all pretend that every year the seminaries turn out a fresh crop of perverts. Our good pope is scrubbing the Church clean of the filth that poured in when She mistakenly thought that she could reach an accommodation with the secular world. Probably the whole diseased generation that came of age in the 1960s and 70s will have to die before the Church is whole again, but many of them are gone already, and they are not being allowed to replace themselves with another generation of libertines.
I’ve never met a single homosexual Catholic priest, but I HAVE met plenty in the Anglican and Episcopal churches, and more are coming in every day. The Catholic Church has nothing to learn from the evaporating zombie Protestant churches, least of all the whole “married clergy” experiment which is supposed to solve all our problems. Instead, the Anglicans now just have “married” and fornicating homosexual clergy, and their rate of decay increases daily.
Dr. Mabuse:
Just logged on and started reading the comments here last to first and here you are.
FYI: I am not a smirker. “Faux sympathy” is not my M.O. I do not resent the Catholic Church. I hate it with all my heart.
Like Rabbi Gamliel, long before me, I believe in following worthy advice whatever the source. “Love the sinner but hate the sin” is a fine Christian sentiment. Catholics and homosexuals are sinners like me and you and everyone else, Doc. The Catholic Priesthood,and Ernst Rohm’s SA, both catholic and homosexual and utterly corrupt, are sins.
I was trying to make a simple point and was hoping to do it respectfully. I am a living, breathing, contemporary, witness to events and I see a Grand-Canyon-wide gap yawning between the Catholic Priesthood from the Holy Father in Rome down to the greenest Novice and the great, broad, majority of lay Catholics.
With a Sharia-for-all, death and martyrdom obsessed Islamic horde already deeply embedded in every land in Christendom, Christians and Jews are unwise to fight among themselves. Christian-Jewish amity is critical to our mutual survival and our robust confederation not merely for defense of Western Civilization but for an aggressive and brutal campaign against Islam and a permanent shattering of its self-fulfilling end-of-the-world fantasies. My oldest daughter just delivered my first grandchild and I want him to live peacefully in a democratic (hopefully, shortly Republican) America, free from the threat of mad Muslims.
Best of luck, Doc.
103. David
Catholicism is more a part of my heritage than a current faith. My posts refer to the Church as an institution, while yours refer to the individuals within it, spanning two millennia. I am glad you introduced law enforcement as a means of analogy, as, not surprisingly, I’m directly descended from Irish Catholic cops, and comfortable discussing the merits and demerits thereof. However, to do so as an argument against the objective of the current NYPD to enforce laws against racketeering, for example, would be a pointless exercise, because no one disputes that the function of the NYPD as an institution is to do exactly that: enforce the law.
And so it is with the Catholic Church and its mission to enforce adherence to the Word of the Lord. In the faith, the roles of men and women each comprise two halves of a whole; the resulting unity affirms a living service to God with beautiful simplicity. Yet the religion is not simplistic, imperfect, unworldly or resistant to examination; alongside Wretchard’s ubiquitous Filipino workers in the Earth’s dark and remote corners, I’m certain you’ll find a nun. Celibate, of course, but I doubt either you or I would be able to shock her.
The institutional walls of the Church have been breached somewhat and we’ve found the problems of i) pedophile priests and ii) pederasty, and iii) reassigning offenders to different areas seemingly to hide the offenses, and iv) not enough hurry or humility in the hierarchy to address the environment in which these offenses can hide. This is human error, human fault, and I doubt we’ve seen the last of it…but it only tangentially relates to what I was trying to say in the previous post, which was that the simple morality of the Church often conflicts with the notions of freedom, equal rights, and so forth that we idealize…no politics or pretenses are necessary here. The question of birth control as a right, not for just women but for everyone, is just one example.
So I just encourage all those who champion their core values, whatever and wherever they are, to consider that some of those values might have originated beyond the jurisdiction of religious faith.
#104. Cowboy:
I was expelled from three schools before graduating high-school, Cowboy. Flunked out of two colleges. You could say I’m an idiot, I suppose. But from the mouths and babes and fools often comes great wisdom.
It is a sin in Jewish law to gratuitously enrage (l’hakhis). It was not my intent to burn you up. Nonetheless, I appreciate and encourage your rage, however misdirected. Righteous rage is always healthy. Point it at a Muslim, Cowboy. David Levavi the Jew is no threat to you.
Happy trails, amigo. Keep a sharp lookout for camel-riding hostiles.
David Levavi @108,
I do not resent the Catholic Church. I hate it with all my heart.
Back in the day, when I was in the middle of the Passion of the Christ controversy, I became especially attuned to the way in religious controversies develop.
After sitting through a number of inter-faith dialogues about the movie – dialogues I organized: I was the host of a pre-release screening of the Passion, and personally saw to it that about 1/3rd of the invitees were Jews – I saw how easy it was for Jews who watched, say, the Sanhedrin cast in a bad light 2,000 years ago to jump to the conclusion that modern Christians blamed them for Christ’s crucifixion and, by extension, hated the Jews.
At the time, I saw how my Jewish brethren reacted with a view that attacks on any Jews were attacks on the Jewish faith, and therefore were attacks on all Jews. And I saw how the Christians were shocked that the Jews would feel this way. But when we all talked it through, Christians could see how parts of the movie were insulting to Judaism, and Jews could see that Christians were oblivious to these insults. And once the Christians saw how the movie was intemperate in parts, they better understood why the Jews were upset.
Now, if you really believe that Jews and Christians should be partners, perhaps you should be less intemperate, and less accusatory, and less insulting of the Catholic Church. Criticisms of individuals behavior, like pederast priests or cowardly bishops? Sure.
But to take that next step – to attack and hate the Church herself, as you have done in your biased, distorted screeds – casts you in the role of Mel Gibson. Are you sure that’s what you want?
For my part, I will simply add you to my prayer list, and wish you the best.
Cheers,
L3
The terrible burden of birth control…
Obama tramples on our religious liberty to protect women from the terrible burden of paying $9 a month for “the Pill” (generic) at Walmart.
Nine stinking dollars.
Utopia Parkway – But there is a liberal (leftist, statist) plot to take over the world.
It’s not just in the US, of course. If wikileaks is to be believed, not only is the RH (reproductive health bill) being pushed by liberal US/EU NGO’s but the Obama administration is pressuring our president to pass it.
And if the bill passes, it too will fine/punish those who won’t give out contraceptives, both individuals and Catholic hospitals, and employers will be required to pay for insurance, no religious exemptions allowed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproductive_Health_Bill
http://wiki.lawcenter.ph/index.php?title=Reproductive_Health_Bill
And the bill is worse than what Obama plans to do:
and the bill would fine health care practitioners 10thousand pesos (200USD) if they don’t do it, or even if they “… maliciously engages in disinformation about the intent or provisions of this law. ” (i.e. criticize it).
Both Archbishop Tangle and the Pope have warned that there is going to be an expose of “abuse” by Catholic clergy in the near future. Since priests having girlfriends is nothing new here, they will find plenty of “evidence”, and if not, well, 500 pesos will buy someone to claim they were abused…so, we are waiting for the next shoe to drop.
and needless to say, the many prolife demonstrations are not being reported on the front pages of our newspapers.
I support family planning and we included it as part of our maternal child health outreach when I worked in Africa: but you have to work within the culture, which this bill is not doing.
Here in the provinces, you can buy condoms in our grocery stores, there are plenty of outreaches and private clinics to get birth control. NFP/Breastfeeding and private outreach have lowered the fertility rate from 7 to 2.6 over the last 20 years.
Yet in a country where 30 percent of women have no trained birth attendant, and many of those “free government midwives” require a nice thank you gift that our farmers can’t afford, I don’t think you will improve things by making it impossible for pious Catholic midwives to work. And remember: nurses can always get a good job in Saudi…
Something that has puzzled me for years now. And when I ask people, they can’t give an answer. Maybe Mr. Levavi can help me. This is not a trick question. I really don’t understand it.
Why do so many American Jews dislike (some hate) the United States of America, and our form of government? So many of them are members of organizations intent on turning the country into a socialist country. They belong to organizations that are trying to irradicate our laws and traditions, and destroy our Constitution as it is written.
Thank you for an honest response.
I forgot to note in my previous post that I live in a small rural town in the Philippines, and Obama is pushing the government elites to institute a “reproductive bill” mainly to lower our population growth.
I also want to correct those comments which unjustly made snide remarks against the Muslims.
Many Muslim countries allow family planning for health reasons, (e.g. Iran, Bengladesh). However, unless the life of the mother is at stake or the child is deformed, abortion is not allowed in most Muslim countries.
And many pious Muslim doctors won’t do abortions or give out the “morning after” abortifactant pill in the US: Since many of them work in Emergency rooms, this might cause problems in the future since Obama has already removed much of the civil protection against health care workers refusing to cooperate with deeds that go against their conscience.
Here in the Philippines,the Muslim clergy are backing the Catholic bishop’s fight against the RH bill here in the Philippines. Why? Because it is being pushed by the elites who want to stop population growth, and everyone knows it.
The Muslims in Mindanao are already being pushed out of their ancestral lands by poor land hungry Tagalog Christians, and view this as a way to lower the Muslim population to steal more.
The irony is that if they used the “spacing children” arguments they would be more successful. Higher pay for village midwives, and stopping the custom of giving them gifts to be cared for would do more for maternal child health than having an authority figure “suggest” you to take the pill (which in Philippine culture is essentially the same as ordering the women to do so).
Tee:
Thanks for intelligent and sincere response. The issues in question speak to me because I’m writing a novel that involves policemen and Jewish-Catholic relations at its core. BTW: Apropos of nothing, it happens that Jews and Irish Catholics both served in the Seventeenth-Century New Amsterdam Colony’s rattle squads.
As for the cops/priests analog, it brings to mind a basic cultural difference between priests, ministers and rabbis. Rabbis are teachers; ministers are preachers, priests are policemen.
The culture of the Irish was shaped (or misshaped) by centuries of service as mercenary soldiers. Irish kings rounded up their own young villagers and sold them to any European gangster wearing a crown or a miter able to pay the cost of their uniforms, boots and muskets in addition to a fee per head to their Irish King. Only natural that Irish Catholics prefer their cops and priests and schoolkids in uniform.
Filipinos are interesting folk. The Philippines is the only place where the Spanish seaboard expansion encountered the Chinese. Filipinos are Spanish-Chinese and it is a physically attractive mix. Filipinos do suffer in the darker corners of the world. In Muslim lands they, along with Indonesians and Africans, are enslaved and monstrously abused.
My youngest, a Biblical Archaeologist at Tel Aviv U, recently attended the Circumcision of my Israeli farmer cousin’s son’s third boy. The infant’s mother is Filipino, a maid hired by my cousin with whom the entire family and especially his younger son, fell in love. Beautiful, Hebrew-speaking, converted to Judaism and happy to be a part of a strong and robust Jewish democracy. No one, including Palestinians, is treated like dirt in Israel.
I’ve met some nuns and I’ve met some priests in my sixty-five years. When I swam regularly, I often shared my lane and chatted between laps with a fine nun. Followed her advice on breathing and conserving energy religiously.
The first person protagonist in my novel, a thoroughly corrupt Jewish cop, remarks that, though any hospital ER will rock and roll when an injured cop is brought in, some cops nonetheless prefer to be brought to a Catholic hospital because care in Catholic hospitals transcends that ordinarily provided by members of Local 1199 of the Hospital Workers Union. The fictional comment is based on care I received for several days by Sisters of Mercy in a Catholic hospital. I was brought in by ambulance and the hospital was a slum I would not have chosen if I was not unconscious on the sidewalk. But the care I received was truly humbling.
I’ve known several priests, as well as nuns, all Jesuits and all gay. The most memorable was an Italian-American musicologist I knew years ago. He directed the choir at a pretty little Catholic Church in the East Village. I was living with a German-Catholic pianist and a lovely singer who joined the choir for Christmas Mass every year. I sat upstairs with the choir for evening and morning Mass every Christmas for five years. After morning mass we would all walk together from church to the old apartment full of dark, heavy, furniture where the choir director’s three unmarried sisters lived, for a blowout Italian meal.
The Jesuit musicologist was thin and ascetic and always superbly turned out. His sisters were enormous ladies in frilly tents with hairy warts on their cheeks and chins. Seen together, they were a foursome from a Fellini movie.
Trudging through snow one Christmas morning after Mass, I remarked on how much I enjoyed Church music, especially the Gregorian Chants which my girlfriend had on vinyl and which I often listened to. Carmello found my enthusiasm amusing. Informed me that I probably liked the music because it was familiar. The Gregorian chants along with lots of other Church music was “borrowed” from the Hebrew cantorals.
I knew that the entire Christian canon –Old Testament and New, Hebrew and Greek alike, was authored by Jews. I knew that the Pope dressed in the Holy linen vestments and miter of our Levitical High Priests. I knew that the holiest Christian ceremonies and the bulk of the Christian liturgy were copied from ours. But I had no Idea, until Carmello told me, that even our Jewish music was “borrowed” without honest license or attribution.
It is sad that those closest to the Jews most hate the Jews. Buddhists and Hindus, who owe nothing to the Jews, evidence no hostility to Jews or Judaism. Christians and Muslims, who owe the Jews everything, detest us vehemently. There is a downside to pouring new wine into old skins and we Jews have long suffered its consequences.
My core values and yours, Tee, flow directly from Holy Text. “What would Jesus do?” is a question made popular by American Evangelicals. The Galilean was a righteous and sincere Jewish reformer of the very best kind. If all of us, Catholics, Protestants and Jews do as Jesus would do, what a good and peaceful and bountiful world we would enjoy.
Looks like we can see another taboo that has been broken recently. The taboo of talking about Jewish hostility to and hatred of Christendom.
I guess Lumiere had a time machine, because David Levavi claims:
“Silent moving pictures are taken with a motion picture camera of the Pope at play with the boy. The flickering black and white images are intended to show how happy the newly saved boy is in the company of the Holy Father. Instead, the images horrify everyone who sees them…”
38 years before Lumiere invented his motion picture camera.
Or did someone take the photos with their cellphone?
It’s good to see Jews openly talking about their hatred of Christendom. Ive already observed that behavior at the Jewcy website.
Drop the double talk and get right down to it, I say.
Don’t see something that isn’t there, Mabuse. I don’t resent the Catholic Church. I truly wish them all the best as I know how good some of their clergy can be. Unfortunately, there are also a lot of bad ones and the actions of those people has seriously hurt the Church and deeply impaired its ability to wield moral authority.
If telling the truth about a problem is resentment, then I’m guilty. However, wishing the Church would never have let itself get into such a situation because of the damage it has suffered is not resentment. Instead, it should be taken as what it is: sadness and sympathy at the unnecessary weakening of an organization that could have been a far stronger ally in helping fight off the real demons we face.
Save your enmity for your real enemies. I’m not one of them.
117. David – My core values and yours, Tee, flow directly from Holy Text. “What would Jesus do?” is a question made popular by American Evangelicals. The Galilean was a righteous and sincere Jewish reformer of the very best kind. If all of us, Catholics, Protestants and Jews do as Jesus would do, what a good and peaceful and bountiful world we would enjoy.
Evangelicals are such policy wonks though, and you have to admit they set the bar high.
I’m kidding. Thank you for your response, and I wish you and your novel great success.
4/4
Re 75. Tee
“the insurance portion of labor & delivery and newborn care charges for my youngest totaled $12,500, for natural childbirth with a midwife”
Wow, I hope the midwife wasn’t charging 5 digits! We paid our midwife and assistant $2000 total (negotiated down from $3000). The midwife was late anyway and I caught the baby. They did clean up after and made sure the whole placenta came out.
I suspect as the government/insurance health system gets more and more bizarre, people will turn to home birth.
Re 76. Hangtown Bob
Where I live the state recently allowed free market pricing and we can shop for energy providers. It took some research but I found a 2 year fixed rate of 8 cents/kWh.
The statists first destroy an economic activity through regulation, then the government must provide means or production.Private mortgages are unenforcible so now Feds must fund mortgages.Private health care is strangled by rules so now healthcare is socialized. As the EPA strangles private energy, that is now government controlled.Every nuance of education is now fed controlled.If this isn’t socialism, what is?
Re 103. David Levavi, 105. mac
I think what you’re getting at is that historically, the best and the brightest Catholics became priests and nuns, and had to be (officially) celibate. If there is no sanctioned outlet for a person’s natural inclinations, then inclinations can find unsanctioned outlets.
In other religions, the best and the brightest became rabbis, faith healers, ministers, and snake charmers – and were encouraged by their society to get married and have children. A religious leader with a wife and kids is certainly more qualified to give his congregants advice about family. YMMV.
Re 115. Deano41
“So many of them are members of organizations intent on turning the country into a socialist country. They belong to organizations that are trying to irradicate our laws and traditions, and destroy our Constitution as it is written.”
Oh, you’re asking why a lot of Jews still support the democrats. There has been a lot written on that, try google.
119. tioedong@hotmail.com:
Love the name. Dong rhymes with and translates to schlang. But what does tioe mean?
Lumiere. Don’t hear that name too often. I was probably a kid when I last heard it. Probably an article in Popular Mechanics or Popular Science or some such.
I looked up the case on the internet and you are correct in your criticism. The incident predates the movie camera. Nonetheless I have a good memory and I do remember seeing a film.
The answer probably lies in the fact that the affair was dramatized several times in several media–books, plays film. Miramax even began a new film project recently but ran out of development or production funds.
Anyway I compressed the facts somewhat–I probably read the story thirty or forty years ago–but the narrative facts are fascinating and instructive and worth everyone reading.
The secretly Baptized, kidnapped, sexually and spiritually perverted Jewish boy’s name was Edgardo Mortara The pedophile Pope was Pius IX, perish his name and memory, whose foul canonization is pending.
119. tioedong@hotmail.com:
Love the name. Dong rhymes with and translates to schlang. But what does tioe mean?
Lumiere. Don’t hear that name too often. I was probably a kid when I last heard it. Probably an article in Popular Mechanics or Popular Science or some such.
I looked up the case on the internet and you are correct in your criticism. The incident predates the movie camera. Nonetheless I have a good memory and I do remember seeing a film.
The answer probably lies in the fact that the affair was dramatized several times in several media. Miramax even began a film project recently but ran out of development or production funds.
Anyway I compressed the facts somewhat–I probably read about it thirty or forty years ago–but the story is fascinating and worth every Catholic and Jew studying.
The secretly Baptized, kidnapped, sexually and spiritually perverted Jewish boy’s name was Edgardo Mortara The pedophile Pope was Leo IX, perish his name and memory, whose canonization is pending.
125. Jay:
With respect, how do you know that “…the best and the brightest Catholics became priests and nuns…?”
Consider the pathetic history Ireland and the Irish who are, by far, the saddest victims of the Church. In the beginning (to quote the Book of Genesis) the Irish enjoyed a native religion and a native culture. They had divine deities and shrines and shamans who guided and ministered the holy services. Then English Catholics arrived in Ireland. They destroyed the shrines, slaughtered the shamans and forbade the worship of the ancient deities.
The native, ancestral religion, culture and language of the Irish was obliterated from common memory. The Irish were orphaned. In place of their Irish ancestors, the English priests gave the newly orphaned Irish my ancestors, Abraham Isaac and Jacob. In place of their ancestral shrines, churches. In place of their shamans, Catholic priests, first English, then as the replacement faith took hold, Irish.
The naturally evolved native Irish shamans of the naturally evolved native Irish ancestral religion, certainly were the best and the brightest of the Irish. But the Holy English churchmen and their Holy Soldiers of Christ exterminated them as ruthlessly as the Soviets exterminated the Polish Officer Corps in WWII.
Later, the priests picked and chose their favorites for promotion. If these promotions were based on Novices’ intellect rather than their physical appeal, then, perhaps, the best and brightest rose to the top. But if the best and the brightest were selected for celibacy, what the church was enforcing was devolution. The Irish were being genetically lobotomized.
Great. Just what we need. Another novel from a nihilist.