The New Pro-Life Movement and Its Critics

Since its inception in 2016, the New Pro-Life Movement has drawn criticism from conservative Catholic writers, not least because the NPLM began with the rejection of the old guard’s unhealthy attachment to conservative/Republican politics. The most recent attack, coming from the Charismatic Episcopal Church’s CEC for Life blog, had some me-too reprinting from Life Site News and Church Militant just as Crux Now published an interview with M.T. Dávila, an NPLM member and associate professor of Christian ethics at Andover Newton Theological Seminary. While some of CEC for Life’s criticisms are worth considering, more of them show why the old movement needs in-house censure.

Semantics Matter

Let’s begin with what the CEC for Life article gets right:

Under the NPLM’s “Women’s Rights and Justice” section of its 11 Pillars, the first paragraph begins, “Since women are the central figures in the abortion debate ….” Women are at the center, sure; they’re certainly not irrelevant to the debate. But neither are the unborn, who are also at the center of the debate. This particular phrasing simply begs to be misunderstood as saying the unborn and their right to life are of secondary consideration. The effect of legal abortion rights on fathers also gets no attention, enhancing this error.

Semantics matter. Murphy’s Law for Writers holds that “whatever can be misunderstood will be misunderstood, usually in the worst way possible.” Granting that opponents will deliberately misrepresent your position, you still write to be understood by those who rely on your words as you state them. Unlike a person in a casual conversation, the writer can’t afford to metaphorically let words just fall out of their mouths under the assumption, “Oh, they’ll know what I mean.” A political manifesto is the last place to be careless in your phrasing.

I’m well aware that no one in the NPLM sets a lower value on the unborn’s life than they do on the mother’s. But I’m not the one that has to be convinced.

Also, CEC for Life points out that, whatever the national leaders of the old movement do, there are more and more localized efforts to address the “demand” side of the abortion equation. “Ultimately, ... [the NPLM] fails to acknowledge a long-standing history of compassion and hard labor made evident through the hundreds and thousands of resources now available for mothers and fathers and their preborn child. Not to mention counseling and services available to abortion workers looking for healing and a new life.” The NPLM would do well to acknowledge these contributions and limit its criticism to the national leadership.

The Chittister Challenge 2: Supply, Demand, and the “Culture of Life”

On Saturday, January 28, Joe Heschmeyer published an essay, “Seven Answers to the ‘Pro-Lifers are just Pro-Birth’ Argument,” in his blog Shameless Popery. The essay offers rebuttals to a meme featuring the quote from Sr. Joan Chittister, OSB, that I wrote of a couple of years ago. I have a lot of respect and admiration for Joe, who is a student at the Pontifical American College in Vatican City (and, I believe, should be coming up on his transitional diaconate this year). I earnestly commend the essay to your attention; it’s very well balanced in its treatment of the argument.

Supply and Demand

However, Joe’s essay did prompt me to do a little more drilling on the subject, to embrace a little more of the political context in which the argument arises. The recent elections brought to the surface a long-standing tension between two different camps within the pro-life movement, camps which I will for brevity’s sake call the supply-side and demand-side branches. While the meme Joe dissects arose in a pro-abortion context, the quote has also had currency among demand-side pro-lifers.

The supply-side pro-life camp, which we could also call the first-wave movement, is mostly concerned with the legality of abortion and euthanasia, along with some related issues such as assisted suicide, cloning, IVF, and contraception. Politically, they tend to be older and more conservative or right-wing libertarian. As Joe rightly points out, conservatives are more likely to donate time and money to support charitable causes than are liberals, so it’s not like they’re stingy. However, precisely because their politics are more conservative, their view of the scope of “pro-life” is, for want of a more charitable word, narrower. They highly resist the importation of other issues, such as Syrian refugees or undocumented immigrants, into the pro-life purview and refuse the creation of government intervention programs. Because their concern is mostly with the legal and political mechanisms permitting the “death industry” to exist, one can say they seek to shut off the supply.

By contrast, the demand-side camp or second-wave movement tends to be younger, as well as more moderate to liberal in their politics though less willing to affiliate with either party or identify with either ideology. The demand-siders recognize that economic and social issues often drive the choice for death; by addressing those issues, they seek to reduce the demand. For this reason, they’re more likely to support government intervention and more willing to pay the taxes required to support the efforts. The pro-life movement as a whole is concerned with what Vice-President Mike Pence called “[society’s] most vulnerable, the aged, the infirm, the disabled, and the unborn.” The second-wave movement, influenced by the consistent life ethic articulated most notably by Cdl. Joseph Bernardin and in St. John Paul II’s Evangelium Vitae, extends its recognition of vulnerability to immigrants, refugees, the homeless, and other socially marginalized people.[*]

Christian and Pro-Life Leaders: DUMP TRUMP! (UPDATED)

Paul Combs, Tribune.org

[ADDED NOV. 9, 2016: Obviously, my crystal ball is working as well as it usually does come election time. I deserve to have the lede carved on my headstone to shame me even after death. Nevertheless, I’m still convinced Pres. Trump will eventually jilt the pro-life movement, and that the leaders of the “official” movement — especially Fr. Frank Pavone — did us no favors by hitching us onto the Trump train.]

I am no longer concerned about the prospect of Donald Trump as President of the United States. It was never a strong likelihood, despite his sense-defying victory in the Republican primaries. In fact, over the last year, The Donald has done just about everything in his power to ensure Hillary Clinton’s election save drop-kick a beagle puppy from the 58th floor of the Manhattan Trump Tower. The revelation of his “grab them by the p***y” remark simply put the final nail in the coffin. What does concern me is the failure of some visible Christian leaders, especially in the pro-life camp, to admit their error in supporting Trump.

Assessing the Damage

As of this writing [4:00pm CDT, Oct. 8], the most recent political post on the Priests for Life site is an action alert item: “Help Us Tell Tim Kaine to Stop Insulting Catholicism!” The latest news from Susan B. Anthony List is Oct. 5’s “Pence Goes on Offense to Expose Clinton-Kaine Abortion Extremism”. Ralph Reed of the Faith & Freedom Coalition thinks that “A ten-year-old tape of a private conversation with a talk show host ranks low on [people of faith’s] hierarchy of concerns.” And Gary Bauer of the Campaign for Working Families stated, “The ten-year-old tape of a private conversation in which Donald Trump uses grossly inappropriate language does not change the reality of the choice facing this country.”

In a sense, Bauer does hit the right nail: in reality, Trump is no worse a candidate than he was a week ago. The only difference is, Republican leaders are finally waking up to the full shambling horror, albeit too late to do anything meaningful about it. And neither Gary Johnson nor Jill Stein presents a better choice on religious and pro-life issues. Johnson has called religious freedom a “black hole”, while Stein has called it a code for “patriarchal domination”. If you eliminate fringe candidacies, such as the American Solidarity Party’s Michael Maturen and (sadly) the independent Joe Schriner, that leaves Christian and pro-life leaders with a Hobson’s choice: either Trump or nobody.

The choice should have been nobody.

The smart Republicans started to abandon ship even before Trump’s nomination was a done deal. Republican strategist Doug Heye called the decision to nominate Trump “a stain on the GOP’s soul,” nor is he the first. Back in August, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson asked Republicans, “If you tell us such a man should be president, why should the nation ever believe anything else you say?” Just a few days earlier, Kathleen Parker of MySanAntonio.com noted, “For many Republicans, the question is: ‘Who’d want to be a member of a party that would have Donald Trump as its leader?’” As for those who are only now trying to distance themselves from this dumpster fire, the cliché “a day late and a dollar short” doesn’t begin to describe their failure of foresight.

Four Life Issues and Catholic Social Doctrine

There are several political issues commonly wrapped in the social-justice banner that are also issues affecting life and the family. In theory, a Catholic ought to support those policies which support life and family regardless of which party proposes them. However, when the two parties split on abortion and (later) euthanasia, so did American Catholics. Now the nation is so polarized politically that, as Scott Eric Alt explains, any Catholic who demands we pay attention to life issues outside of abortion and euthanasia is accused of “trying to kill opposition to abortion”.

“A Catholic CANNOT Vote Democrat”

On August 23, my friend and Catholic Stand colleague Matthew Tyson published “Yes, You Can Be Catholic AND Vote Democrat” on his Patheos blog Mackerel Snapper. On the face of it, I can’t conceive a more quixotic and desperate cause than trying to convert the Democrat Party to a “whole life” position, as the Democrats for Life want to do. Besides, the demographics have been shifting leftward (and away from party labels) for the last three generations, and the Republican Party is shredded in two. There’s arguably as much hope for converting the Democrats to the “seamless garment” as there is for converting the Republicans. (Yes, I went there.) But, as GKC said, hope only begins to be really useful when things appear to be hopeless.

For the record: Though I probably agree with many if not most of Matthew’s positions (I don’t fully know what they are), I refuse the label liberal. Classical liberalism, as I recently pointed out, was and is premissed on a faulty anthropology; the postmodern left’s social liberalism is progressing towards an authoritarian statism, and the postmodern right’s economic liberalism enables crony capitalism. Precisely because I am a Catholic, I hold neither the Republicans’ nor the Democrats’ ideological biases and policy preferences to be above challenge or criticism.

The post’s title was guaranteed to attract a knee-jerk contradiction. Sure enough, a reader (whom I’ll call Cato) declared, “A Catholic CANNOT vote Democrat,” and that “being a [Catholic] Democrat is indistinguishable from being a pro-equality KKK member, a Catholic Nazi, or a Catholic Stalinist.” Why? Apparently, because Cato, bless his heart, believes the national platform makes all the party’s members co-conspirators, despite the fact that individual candidates are not and cannot be required to support every platform plank. It’s stupid sweeping generalizations like this which are driving Gen-Xers and millennials away from party identification.

The Chittister Challenge

Sister Joan Chittister, OSB, is arguably the Church in America’s best-known “Spirit of Vatican II” relic, a visible reminder of why so many orders of nuns are failing. The Limousine Left loves Sr. Joan not only because she’s a programmatic liberal but also because she’s an exponent of the “primacy of conscience” argument, which is the Catholic left’s favorite fig leaf for its divergences from orthodoxy. Nevertheless, occasionally, like a broken clock, she’s right every once in a while.

Some years ago, Sr. Joan said (to the delight of the pro-abortion establishment):

I do not believe that just because you’re opposed to abortion, that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed. And why would I think that you don’t? Because you don’t want any tax money to go there. That’s not pro-life. That’s pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is.

A person on Facebook asked a question that The Blogger Who Must Not Be Named reprinted: “Would you accept a 50% income tax if it ensured that no woman would ever feel compelled to have an abortion because of financial worries?” It’s the same question Sr. Joan asks from a different angle — how far is the pro-life movement prepared to go to diminish the incidence of abortion?

Despite what Leslie Salzillo of the Daily Kos thinks, there are plenty of pro-lifers who support government safety-net programs, especially those geared toward poor single mothers. Contrapositively, there are also those who plug abortion to save tax money paid in welfare; so it’s not as if the pro-life movement has a monopoly on anti-tax tightwads.

Still, as Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig points out, “If a woman considers herself too destitute to care for a child, there is no transvaginal ultrasound demoralizing enough and no accompanying narration excoriating enough to make her decision [to abort] seem any less plausible.” So are we prepared to pay higher taxes if by doing so we could see a reduction in abortions?

Taking offense and taking action

Protest march at OU. (Photo source: Legal Insurrection.)

When an unapologetically über-conservative man and a hard-core leftist woman agree on a point, you can almost bet your life savings the truth is in the opposite direction. Especially when the topic is “offense discourse”.

Steven Crowder’s argument is about machismo more than anything else. “Both men and women respect men who take ownership, men who take action. Choosing to ‘be offended’ is the epitome of inaction. Today’s ‘offended’ men are seen as wimpy simply because they are. Instead of harnessing whatever affront is facing them, instead of facing it head-on, dealing with the problem and coming out the other side a stronger man, the ‘modern’ male chooses to sulk, to whine, and inevitably call Gloria Steinem.” Plus, “chicks dig it” when you take action.

I’m not sure Katherine Cross would agree with that last assessment … or, for that matter, to being called a “chick”. However, she does agree that “offense discourse” leads to inaction:

It has to be one of the most significant rhetorical own-goals of the Left since the 1960s: allowing the word ‘offend’ to become the go-to way of describing the harms of prejudice. “This content offends me,” “your words are offensive,” “his conduct gave offence to x,” etc. What this has always facilitated is the commonplace reactionary response to such moral injunctions, defending some imagined noble right to give offense lardered [sic] with smug Stephen Fry image macros. Cue “free speech”’ arguments ad nauseam that resolve into garrulous nothingness. … It is the deeds that flow from words which concern us, and which cannot be contained by the concept of offensiveness.

Of the two arguments, Cross’ is the more fully developed. Crowder’s post amounts to little more than a couple of chest-thumps and an admonition to “put on your big-boy britches and deal with it”. Both arguments, however, are simply wrong, or at least not fully to the point.

Pope Francis, Humanae Vitae, and Margery Eagen’s devastating fallacies—UPDATED ALREADY?

Filipinos at Pope Francis’ Mass in Manila, Jan. 18.
(Photo: AFP/Ted Aljibe.)

You would think that a writer billed as a “spirituality columnist” for a website that professes to cover “all things Catholic” would have some familiarity with Catholic teaching, especially the most controversial doctrines. However, Margery Eagen, writing for Crux, talks about Pope Francis’ recent speech at the Mall of Asia as though her only knowledge of Catholicism came from Planned Parenthood.

Although he has not lived it himself, I had thought [Pope Francis] understood something about good people living real lives in real marriages. I had thought he even understood something about the beauty of sex in marriage, the need for sex in marriage.

I was wrong.

In the United States, his words will have little practical impact. Most Catholic women have used birth control for decades. There are no more families with 12 and 14 kids in the Sunday morning pews. But his words do reveal a heartbreakingly backward perspective: that the highest calling of married women is sacrificing all to rear children, as many as come along, no matter those women’s talents or skills or dreams.

These aren’t the words of a person who’s well-educated in Catholic doctrine, let alone someone who should be discussing Catholic spirituality. These are the words of a journalist content to work with the straw-man “Catholic beliefs” constructed for her by second-wave feminism, the kind of nonsense which led Elizabeth Dias at TIME to write that “the mainstream media has nearly no understanding of the Church.”

In fact, Francis’ words reveal no such chauvinist nonsense. To be sure, he offered a doughty defense of the goodness of family and childrearing against “ideological colonization”, a branch of “cultural imperialism”. Eagen’s criticism presents us with the kind of false dilemma demagogues love: you’re either for contraception or you’re against women working outside the home.

A matter of trust

I don’t have any links on this because I’m going off of memory (little bits of which seem to be falling out with my hair). However, I’m almost certain you’ll have seen it, too: the latest manipulative trope from the pro-abortion camp, which essentially says, “If you can’t trust a woman to make good decisions concerning her body, how can you trust her with a child?”

The first time I heard it, I was reminded of a child psychologist I once listened to, who said that teenagers equate trust with love. When adolescents say, “You don’t trust me!”, they’re really saying, “You don’t love me!”, and they need to be taught that love and trust are not coterminous. Here, I think the same adolescent thought-process is the same: “If you don’t trust me with this decision, that means you don’t think of me as an equal” … again fallaciously presuming that only men are against abortion.

It’s not as formidable a challenge as pro-aborts may think. In fact, the short and simple answer is, “It’s something of the same way you can trust someone with a home loan but not with bank robbery.”

A loan is an action of trust, one that a person can either deliberately fail or fail for reasons beyond her control. In fact, the banking industry runs on trust; the lengths to which it must be regulated now simply speaks to the fact that, as our society grow larger, the social functions that insure trustworthiness are breaking down. In any event, I could just as well have said “savings account” with “home loan” and the principle would still be the same.

What is that principle? Just that there are actions or powers with which no one should be trusted. Ever.

Pushing social conservatives out the GOP door

The root of the GOP’s problem now is the same as that of the Democrats in 1969: the party’s reputation has been ruined by a botched, unnecessary war — Vietnam in the case of the Democrats, Iraq for the GOP. This may sound implausible: every political scientist knows that Americans don’t care about foreign policy; certainly they don’t vote based on it. But foreign policy is not just about foreign policy: it’s also about culture.

This is the theme that Daniel McCarthy convincingly fleshes out in “The GOP’s Vietnam”. Basically, the Vietnam era created the templates we still use for defining political left and right; however, those templates no longer fit an electorate where “an 18-year-old first-time voter in 1992 was born the year after [Pres. Richard] Nixon withdrew most U.S. forces from Indochina” (1973). The cultural values which created neo-conservatives out of baby boomers disaffected and disenchanted with the New Left no longer obtain for the millennials, for whom “[the] sexual revolution [has] been background noise … since the day they were born.”

The GOP never learned to talk to the post-Vietnam generation in the first place; over the last decade, it compounded the problem by launching wars that, far from resolving the unfinished business of the Vietnam era, only made clear that those who are refighting the conflicts of that time are oblivious to today’s realities.

This generational disconnect showed up at the recent CPAC conference. Brad Todd of FOXNews reports, “For three decades, the locus of the Republican Party family debate has been over social issues. Today, there is no such fight — and that’s the bad news for all of us social and foreign policy conservatives. … The activists who power the elevation of Sen. [Rand] Paul and his ilk are corporately much less interested in the pro-life, pro-family agenda that drove the conservative movement for years, and openly hostile to the muscular foreign policy that has differentiated Republicans from Democrats since the Age of Aquarius.”

So much for “choice” …

Here we go with the third annual Ask Them What They Mean By Choice Day, in which we pro-life bloggers all pretend that, if we pile on with the posts, the pro-aborts will stop communing within themselves, step out of their echo chamber and actually pay attention to what’s really happening with the Great Western Atrocity.  Oh, I’m sorry — that was bitter and cynical, wasn’t it.

Actually, Planned Barrenhood announced that it will be moving away from the word “choice” as “unacceptably limiting”:

“I’m neither pro-choice nor pro-life,” said one woman in a focus group commissioned by Planned Parenthood.  “I’m pro-whatever-the-situation is.” Said another, “there should be three: pro-life, pro-choice and something in the middle that helps people understand circumstances [...] It’s not just back or white, there’s grey [sic].” A recent research push by the organization found that large numbers of Americans feel this way — uncomfortable with both the pro-life and pro-choice labels. And so Planned Parenthood’s newest messaging will be moving away from the language of choice.

PB has also rolled out a companion website and advertisement, with the advert — in a touch that must have Friedrich Nietzsche smiling in whatever part of the hereafter he occupies — titled “Moving Beyond Labels”.

“A growing number of Americans no longer identify with the pro-choice and pro-life labels that they believe box them in,” Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards said in a statement. “Instead of putting people in one category or another, we should respect the decisions women and their families make.” The campaign also has a companion website focusing on abortion as a personal decision.

“The decisions women and their families make”.  “A personal decision”.  Another word for decision is … choice. 

The fallacy of the “‘Hitler card’ fallacy”

"One person with a hereditary disease costs the government 5.50 reichsmarks daily. RM 5.50 a day can support a whole genetically healthy family!"

“Death pathway”.  What an amazingly sterile, bureaucratic way to describe starving and dehydrating your loved one to death.

I had planned to write a third post tying up the loose ends in my previous two posts about the roles of science and philosophy in the “God debate”.  And I may yet write a reflection for tomorrow, the First Sunday of Advent.  But this story in the London Daily Mail’s MailOnline has left me sick with disbelief and disgust:  As part of an ongoing independent investigation into the so-called Liverpool Care Pathway, the ministers of Britain’s National Health System are learning that young people and newborns are also being “placed on the death pathway”.  Part of the “death pathway” is the stoppage not only of certain medications but also of food and fluids. 

NHS is investigating whether cash payments to hospitals for meeting “death pathway targets” influenced doctors’ decisions.  I don’t know if it’s occurred to them that  setting targets was bad enough, never mind creating a monetary incentive to meet them. 

But even when a prognosis of “no hope of recovery” is — you’ll pardon the phrase — a dead certainty, starvation and dehydration multiply the suffering.  Bernadette Lloyd, a hospice pediatric nurse, recounts: “I witnessed a 14 year-old boy with cancer die with his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth when doctors refused to give him liquids by tube.  His death was agonizing for him, and for us nurses to watch.  This is euthanasia by the back door.”

Lloyd is too kind.  I’d call it medical murder.

Feminist sexism and “therapeutic abortion”

Is the “war on women” really a war on men?

Yesterday on The Impractical Catholic I posted a reminder to myself that the sickness from which rape springs is still alive in our culture — marginalized, ostracized, yet still back-handedly justified in some instances by some people, and subtly encouraged by the pornography industry.  While I don’t think this justifies treating every stumbling, bumbling male faux pas as subconscious approval of rape, I do believe men need to be more openly, vocally condemnatory of rape, and less tolerant of any expression that seems to suggest rape is in any sense desirable or deserved.

However, by bringing the issue of aborting the children of forced sex into the foreground, Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock have kicked over a rock in the American cultural landscape to reveal a reverse sexism among feminists … mostly among the pro-aborts but to a lesser extent even among those who are avidly, fervently pro-life.  You can find that reverse sexism wherever you find a variation of the words, “This just goes to show that men don’t understand.”

Lest you think I’m over-reacting to a generalization, let me point out that the “war on women” meme involves heavy reliance on the word misogynist to describe anyone who opposes any item on the feminist agenda, especially abortion and contraception.  A misogynist is by definition a man; “female misogynist” is as much an oxymoron as is “Jewish anti-Semite”.  Women opponents, to gender feminists, are merely blind tools and useful idiots; they haven’t had the “click experience” Kimberly Manning describes in her conversion story: “the exact moment of coming into full consciousness of one’s oppression”.  They don’t count; they’ll come around sooner or later.  But men oppose the agenda only to put women “back in their place”: subordinate, subservient and subdued.

The feminists’ road to self-marginalization

Reprinted by license.

Back in February, I wrote a post arguing that the “war on women” angle had more potential to damage Barack Obama’s re-election bid than it did to hurt the eventual Republican candidate.  What I didn’t explicitly say — what I should have said in just so many words — is that pushing the “war on women” meme would put radical feminists on the road to self-marginalization.

Why?  Because, inevitably, anyone who tries to argue the “war on women” seriously can’t help but present him/herself as a tinfoil-hat-wearing loon, a wild-eyed nutjob completely out of contact with reality.  Moreover, the people who would come to that conclusion would be not just men but women in the center.

For instance, at the DNC, Sandra Fluke, a liar almost as accomplished and egregious as Bill Clinton, found it well within her fertile — er, creative imagination to conjure up a dystopian female future worthy of a Richard Donner film should women be denied free contraception.  But where are the battalions of men waiting to shove shoeless women back into the kitchen?  Too many of them need their wives’ income too much to do that.  (Or perhaps I should say “their roommates’” or “their girlfriends’”; so far as there is a dystopian future for women — particularly black and Latino women — it’s coming as one result of the destruction of the traditional nuclear family.)  The idea that “the great issue of the day, and the appropriate focus of our concern, is making other people pay for her birth-control pills” is what led Peggy Noonan to characterize Fluke in the WSJ as “a ninny, a narcissist and a fool.” 

The Code Pink vulvas dancing outside in protest didn’t help, either.

Apologetics toolbox: Abortion and the silence of Jesus

[Vice-President Joe] Biden is not wrong on gay and abortion, Jesus NEVER took a stand on either of these issues.  Jesus only talked about love and a belief in him, you people better take a deep look into yourselves because he is coming back soon and not loving your neighbor and not taking care of the poor and the less fortunate goes against everything my lord taught and if you do not do the same you spit on him and I would hate to be in your shoes.

This combox entry appeared in Carson Holloway’s piece, “Paul Ryan, Joe Biden and Liberal False Equivalence”, on CatholicVote.org.  Of course, besides our anonymous troll’s factual error — that Jesus talked about much more than love and faith in him is easily demonstrable from the Gospels — s/he also commits an argument from Gospel silence.  Such arguments, as I’ve said before, can become ad ignorantiam fallacies unless the argument to be made from the silence is consistent with what came both before the Gospels (pre-Christian Judaism) and after the Gospels (the New Testament letters; the writings of the Church Fathers).

And yet, there are those who will insist that Jesus the Compassionate would have understood, and implicitly given his approval to, a woman’s desire to abort her unborn child … especially if she were young, poor and in some sense downtrodden.  Not only is this argument hard to sustain without Scriptural proof-texts, it perfectly illustrates why asking “What Would Jesus Do” is bad moral advice: it invites us to turn the Lord into a sock puppet telling us to do what we want to do anyway.

Rush, Fluke and Ms-takes

Right now, there’s a lot of guffawing and name-calling over Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke’s testimony before the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee on Monday.  Among other things, Fluke estimated that “Without insurance coverage, contraception, as you know, can cost a woman over $3,000 during law school.”

Over a three-year period, that’s about $83 a month and change.  A quick browse through the Internet got me a range of prices on generic estrogen-progestogen pills going from $49.52 for a 3-month supply (≈ $16.51/month)[*] to $25.99 for a 1-month supply of Levora or Lutera.[†]  Craig Bannister figured it out at $1 a condom … largely for laughs.  Yet unless the braniacs attending Georgetown Law still don’t know how to go generic, or the Safeway Pharmacy on Wisconsin Avenue is deliberately ripping the rich kids off, there’s still quite a gap between $25.99 and $83.33 a month — Ms. Fluke’s numbers refuse to add up.

But Bannister’s joke calculation that Hoya students are boinking 2.74 times a day is simply another way to express the same point radio loudmouth Rush Limbaugh was trying to get across in his typical talk-first-think-it-through-later style.  “What happened to personal responsibility and accountability?  Where do we draw the line?”

So let’s strip away some of the misconceptions (uh …) about the HHS mandate debate.

Contraception and economic collapse

Having written yet another post on the HHS mandate — think this issue’s gonna go away soon? Fuhgeddaboudit! — I thought I could actually relax and write about something more congenial and directly religious, such as the upcoming Ash Wednesday celebration.

Then Tina Korbe tweeted a link to Mark Steyn’s “Contraception Misdirection”.  The first two paragraphs were enough to make me reach for my hypertension meds, as Steyn described the future of the national debt as illustrated by charts from the Office of Management and Budget:

My favorite bit is Chart 5-1 on page 58 of their 500-page appendix on “Analytical Perspectives” [faithfully reprinted above].  This is entitled “Publicly Held Debt Under 2013 Budget Policy Projections.”  …  Just to emphasize, this isn’t the doom-laden dystopian fancy of a right-wing apocalyptic loon like me; it’s the official Oval Office version of where America’s headed.  In the New York Times–approved “responsible budget” there is no attempt even to pretend to bend the debt curve into something approaching reentry with reality.

The one presented to the budget committee was even worse: “an even steeper straight line showing debt rising to 900 percent of GDP and rocketing off the graph circa 2075.”  According to House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan, “We cut it off at the end of the century because the economy, according to the CBO, shuts down in 2027 on this path.”

Is the mandate issue a blunder for the GOP?

Almost a month after the Department of Health and Human Services reaffirmed its refusal to take First Amendment conscience protections seriously, the battle over the contraception mandate is spinning — or rather, being spun by the MSM and Obama Democrats — into a pseudo-debate about contraception itself, and its role in women’s health.

The “why” of this is fairly obvious.  On face value, to prevail in a SCOTUS challenge to the Obamination’s mandate the Catholic Church doesn’t need to argue why she teaches the immorality of contraception; it’s enough that she does, and that some Catholic-Americans do indeed believe artificial contraception to be wrong — 22%, according to a recent CNN/ORC opinion poll.  As long as the issue is focused on religious liberty, slightly more Americans disapprove of the HHS mandate than approve (50% to 44%, with a margin of error of ± 3%).

But while the mandate can be seen as a part of a larger “cultural war”, conventional wisdom holds that putting it directly in those terms would be a mistake. MSNBC’s First Read argues that GOP strategists believe “Republicans should be talking about the economy, not social issues.”  And Andrew Sullivan writes in Newsweek:

The more Machiavellian observer might even suspect this is actually an improved bait and switch by Obama to more firmly identify the religious right with opposition to contraception, its weakest issue by far, and to shore up support among independent women and his more liberal base. I’ve found by observing this president closely for years that what often seem like short-term tactical blunders turn out in the long run to be strategically shrewd. And if this was a trap, the religious right walked right into it.

No such thing as free contraception

Yesterday, Catholics across the country were merely angry with the Obamination.  Today, we’re not only angry but mortally offended and insulted.

Why?  Didn’t Pres. Obama outline an accommodation on the HHS mandate that would allow religiously-affiliated institutions to not offer contraceptives and sterilizations?  What more could we want?  Isn’t that enough of a compromise?

In truth, it wasn’t an “accommodation” at all.  Under the “accommodation”, the insurance company would offer the employee the coverage … at no additional cost (wink-wink-nudge-nudge).  But since the employer is still paying the insurance company, and because the insurance company doesn’t get a conscience exemption, the net effect is that the employer will still be paying for the contraceptives indirectly through higher rates … the bookkeeping will look a little different, that’s all.

Let’s explain it a different way: Under the old phrasing, the religiously-affiliated employer was subsidizing coverage for no-copay contraceptives.  Under the new phrasing, the employer is still subsidizing coverage for no-copay contraceptives … but she’s allowed to say she’s not.  But she still has to tell the employee how to get the coverage she’s not providing from the carrier she’s paying to not provide the coverage the employee is still getting.  Make sense to you?  It doesn’t to me.

By offering such a transparently phony compromise, Obama told mandate opponents, “Forget it, you’re not gonna get out of paying for birth control.  I’m just offering you this one chance to chalk up a face-saving ‘win’.  Then you might as well just shut up and bend over.”

Two crimes against human dignity: rape and domestic violence

In yesterday’s post, I wrote that second-wave feminism bought into male chauvinists’ devaluation of the domestic sphere — inferior, less valuable, less this, that and the other thing — and turned it into a cult of hatred for motherhood and child-rearing.  A lot of things have changed for women as a result of that denial of female biological difference, some for the better and some for the worse.

Two things haven’t changed: domestic violence and rape.  Well, there’s a slight difference … women don’t have to be married to be battered and abused by the men in their lives.

No Catholic in his/her right mind believes for a second that women are inferior to men, that they can ever “deserve” to be battered or violated.  While more traditional families may subscribe to the doctrine that men have authority over the household, they equally assert that the authority doesn’t make the men superior or better human beings.  To quote Pius XI:

This subjection, however, does not deny or take away the liberty which fully belongs to the woman both in view of her dignity as a human person, and in view of her most noble office as wife and mother and companion; nor does it bid her obey her husband’s every request if not in harmony with right reason or with the dignity due to wife; nor, in fine, does it imply that the wife should be put on a level with those persons who in law are called minors, to whom it is not customary to allow free exercise of their rights on account of their lack of mature judgment, or of their ignorance of human affairs.[1]

Pro-aborts: Don’t bet the farm on the “war on women” talk

As the battle lines over the HHS contraceptive mandate form, a battle which at least one pundit has said may cost Pres. Obama his re-election, both sides are cleaning and polishing their rhetorical weapons.  One weapon on the pro-mandate side, though, promises to be more damaging to the side wielding it than to their opponents.

To wit, the “war on women”.  Let’s look at the ever-nutty Amanda Marcotte:

[The fight over Susan G. Komen for the Cure’s funding of Planned Barrenhood] was a battle about values. Specifically, whether or not we value women as human beings or not. Anti-choicers are trying to marginalize comprehensive health care for women basically to put us in our place, to demote us from the status of people and return us to the status of objects. Saving breasts is all good and well — they are decorative, after all! — but health care for dirty sluts who go around having sex as if they have a right? I think, and said in my Alternet piece, that one reason this really hit home is anti-choice objectification of women had gotten to the point where they were pitting our own body parts against each other, creating a war between wholesome, all-American boobies and evil vaginas.