Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, but IUDs have been widely used in this country for contraception since the late 1950’s. If IUDs cause abortions, they would have been illegal prior to Roe.
Why is Hobby Lobby even allowed to argue in court that IUDs cause abortions? Why are we going backwards?
Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby does not require any legal determination about the religious rights of for-profit corporations.
This case can, and should, be decided on the facts, which are that the birth control methods Hobby Lobby objects to (Plan B, Ella and IUD’s) are contraceptives, not abortifacients.
The religious right, willfully in my view, continues to confuse Plan B with RU-486, which is an abortifacient and is not covered under Obamacare.
This is just another infuriating example of religious nuts refusing to accept non-controversial medical and scientific facts and trying to impose their ignorant views on the rest of us.
Listening to Hobby Lobby’s lawyers and the conservative justices today, I was reminded of Galileo and the Catholic Church or the Scopes trial.
It’s going to take more than the re-make of Cosmos to turn this country around.
I agree that the Little Sisters of the Poor should get a religious exemption under Obamacare and not have to provide contraceptive coverage to their employees.
Where they lose me is with their refusal to sign the form claiming that exemption. This is where the Catholic Church stretches its constitutional right until it breaks. By being unreasonable and obnoxious in their demands, they lose any sympathy they might have had about the issue.
This phony fight is an insult to the Catholics who really are being oppressed — to the point of death — in other parts of the world today.
North Dakota is going to have a “personhood amendment” on its ballot in 2014.
You know, the provision that says a fertilized egg has the same constitutional rights you and I have. The thing that would ban not only all abortions (rape, incest, life of the mother), but also hormonal birth control and in vitro fertilization.
The provision that those wild and crazy leftist radicals in Mississippi defeated.
Having measures like this on the ballot will generate lots of attention beyond North Dakota in 2014 and affect other races, just as ignorant extremists like Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin tainted the GOP beyond their own losing races and hurt the party across the board, including Mitt.
As regular readers know, I am a practicing Catholic.
The lawsuit the Catholic Church has filed against President Obama on coverage for contraception isn’t about freedom of religion. It isn’t even really about contraception. It’s much more about abortion and defeating President Obama.
Back in 2004, Catholics voted for Bush over Kerry, 52 to 47%. In 2008, despite being harangued by their priests not to vote for someone who is pro-choice, Catholics voted for Obama over McCain, 54 to 45%. The Church is determined to reverse that result in 2012. They want Mitt to win.
Having failed to get their flocks sufficiently “wee wee’d up” about abortion in 2008, the Church is now trying to convince them that freedom of religion is under assault.
But if that’s the case, why hasn’t the Church made a big fuss about contraception coverage at the state level, where it’s been in place for years. Many states have coverage rules that are stricter than the Obama compromise. The Obama rule makes things easier for the Church in those states. This mandated contraception coverage exists in the vast majority of states, including big states like California and New York, and red states like Arkansas.
Back in 2005, then Gov. Huckabee of Arkansas signed a contraception coverage law that was like Obama’s original proposal that drew such outrage. So Obama’s compromise puts him to the right of Mike Huckabee!
I feel as if some of the money I put in the collection basket at my parish church is in effect a political contribution to Mitt Romney because it will be used for this ridiculous lawsuit and attendant publicity to try to hurt Obama. That’s a donation I have no interest in making. Then as a taxpayer, I am paying to defend the lawsuit. I would rather that both my church money and my tax money help feed and care for the people who are struggling right now. I think that’s what Jesus would prefer as well.
“This isn’t going to be about dogs or children’s toys or birth control pills.” Stuart Stevens, one of Mitt’s senior strategists.
Frank Rich has an excellent article, “Stag Party,” in New York Magazine, available at nymag.com. He writes about not only the GOP’s current war on women, but also the history going back to the Nixon Administration, after years of Republicans supporting women’s rights. Some excerpts:
“At the very top of the Washington GOP Establishment, however, there was a dawning recognition that a grave danger had arisen — not to women, but to their own brand. A month of noisy Republican intrusion into women’s health and sex organs, amplified by the megaphone of Limbaugh’s aria, was a potentially apocalyptic combination for an election year. No one expressed this fear more nakedly than Peggy Noonan …on ABC’s This Week. After duly calling out Rush for being ‘crude, rude, even piggish,’ she added: ‘But what he said was also destructive. It confused the issue. It played into this trope that the Republicans have a war on women. No, they don’t, but he made it look that way.’
“Note that she found Limbaugh ‘destructive’ not because he was harming women but because he was harming her party. But the problem wasn’t that Limbaugh confused the issue. His real transgression was that he had given away the GOP game…. That’s why his behavior resonated with and angered so many Americans who otherwise might have tuned out his rant as just another sloppy helping of his aging shtick. It’s precisely because there is a Republican war on women that he hit a nerve. And surely no one knows that better than Noonan, a foot soldier in some of the war’s early battles well before Rush became a phenomenon.
“GOP apologists like Noonan are hoping now that Limbaugh and Limbaugh alone will remain the issue — a useful big fat idiot whom Republicans can scapegoat for all the right’s misogynistic sins and use as a club to smack down piggish liberal media stars. The hope is that he will change the subject of the conversation altogether, from a Republican war on women to, as Noonan now frames it, the bipartisan ‘coarsening of discourse in public life.’ That’s a side issue, if not a red herring. Coarse and destructive as sexist invective is — whether deployed by Limbaugh or liberals — it is nonetheless policies and laws that inflict the most insidious and serious casualties in the war on women. It’s Republicans in power, not radio talk-show hosts or comedians or cable-news anchors, who try and too often succeed at enacting punitive measured aimed at more than half the population. The war on women is rightly named because those who are waging it do real harm to real women with their actions, not words.”
In 2010, the gender gap that had plagued the GOP for about 30 years disappeared. Women and men voted about the same. But I believe that in 2012, the gender gap will be back, and with a vengeance.
In a presidential election, voters who are not part of either party’s base, look not just at the candidates themselves, but at whether the far left or the far right looks scarier for that particular cycle. It’s about where the pendulum has swung since the last election and moving it back toward the middle.
For women, the far right will look scarier. Even if they don’t mind Mitt personally, he will lose votes because of the baggage his base brings on birth control and abortion rights. They have stirred the pot too much since 2010 both at the state and national level, and the atavistic rhetoric during the presidential primary has only exacerbated the outrage and sense of backsliding, the visceral sense that the GOP is bad for women.
The far left won’t look very scary because we’ve already had one term of President Obama, and we don’t have a hammer and sickle on our flag. The mansions on the Upper East Side haven’t been broken up into apartments for “the people,” and the estates in the Hamptons haven’t been turned into summer camps for workers.
There are five segments in the electorate. There are the two segments who always vote R or D. For them, campaigns are more about entertainment than edification, since their minds are made up. There are the two segments who “lean” R or D, some of whom register in that party and some of whom register as Independents. Then there are the people who truly are Independents, who don’t lean consistently and who pretty much start at square one for each presidential race.
Mitt is going to lose many women who lean R and many women who are true Independents, and therefore he will lose the election.
It’s seven months till the voting, but for me, the election was over at the debate when George Stephanopoulus asked Mitt if he thought states could ban birth control. From the look on Mitt’s face, I think he knew it too.
Now there’s an oxymoron for you. Bombing for life.
Yesterday evening a bomb exploded at a Planned Parenthood office in Wisconsin. The FBI is investigating.
These sick people are our own version of radical Islamic terrorists. They are violent extremists, who don’t really care about “life,” only about imposing their ideology on the rest of us by force and intimidation. They are no better than the bastards who took over the planes on 9/11. They are using the same tactics the Taliban is using this very minute in Afghanistan.
I worry about threats like Iran and Al Qaeda, but I also worry about a country where your life is at risk if you go get a prescription for birth control pills.
This is a war on American women, and I’d love to do a drone strike on the nut jobs who did this.
Romney surrogate Bay Buchanan (Pat’s sister — nuff said) believes that Mitt will do fine with women voters and argues that the Republican party “hasn’t made its case yet with women.”*
I would say the GOP has made its case loud and clear, and it’s one that’s going to lose by huge margins, a gender chasm rather than a gender gap. Don’t probe me, Bro!
* “Romney surrogates say GOP can win with women in November,” Emily Schultheis, Politico
Embattled Farmers 