And here’s where the Catholic women come in. According to the Public Religion Research Institute poll released today,

A majority (55%) of Americans agree that “employers should be required to provide their employees with health care plans that cover contraception and birth control at no cost.” Four-in-ten (40%) disagree with this requirement.

Key breakdowns

• 58% of all Catholics agree employers should be required to provide their employees with health care plans that cover contraception. That slides down to 52% for Catholic voters, 50% for white Catholics.
• 61% of religiously unaffiliated Americans say employer plans should cover contraception.
• 50%of white mainline Protestants want the coverage. However, for evangelical Protestants, that drops to 38%.

And perhaps of greater note among election-watchers:

Women are significantly more likely than men to agree that employers should be required to provide health care plans that cover contraception (62% vs. 47% respectively).

This is from pandagon.net:

The religious arguments have no real effect on men’s support or non-support of it; they either think it’s a benefit or they don’t. And the majority don’t. The spread between men and women on whether or not contraception should be a covered benefit is 15 points. The non-existent spread between Catholics and non is drawing a bunch of attention, but here is the real story. The only reason this is controversial is that a majority of men oppose it.

So. I have some questions. Boehner has a wife. Her name is Debbie. Debbie has two daughters, Lindsay and Tricia. Does the fact that they have two kids mean that they only had sex twice or does it mean Debbie does birth control? I wonder if John knows?

Then there’s Mitt and Ann Romney. They have five kids but wait, they were married in 1969. Kid 1 came in 1970 so probably no birth control there. Kid 2 appeared in 1971 so maybe Ann had a few weeks of no sex with Mitt after kid 1 was born and maybe there was no contraception between the the two births. But then kid 3 didn’t appear until 1975. So what does that mean? No sex? A string of miscarriages? Mitt succeeded in the pull-out lottery (why doesn’t that count as birth control?)? Then kid 4 shows up in ’78 and kid 5 in ’81. And none since. Hmmm. Curious. I wonder how they managed that?

And Santorum and crew…well they have 8 kids. Here’s the wikipedia paragraph about that:

Santorum met his future wife, Karen Garver Santorum, while she was a law student and he was recruiting summer interns for the Kirkpatrick & Lockhart firm.^[18] They have seven living children. In 2008 at the age of 48, Karen gave birth to her eighth child Isabella, who was diagnosed with Trisomy 18 Edwards syndrome, a serious genetic disorder, with only a 10% chance of survival past the first year of life.^{[162][163][164]}

In 1996, the Santorums’ son Gabriel was born prematurely and died two hours after birth. Karen wrote that she and Rick brought the deceased infant home from the hospital and introduced him to their children as “your brother Gabriel”, before a funeral and a burial.^[1][165] The handling of their infant son’s death attracted criticism in January 2012 following Santorum’s success in the Iowa caucuses. However, mental health experts interviewed by ABC News said what the Santorums did was encouraged at the time, although no longer recommended.^[166] Writers who had experienced a stillbirth defended the Santorums’ actions, with columnist Charles Lane writing that he personally regretted not showing the body of his stillborn baby to his then-six year old son,^[167] and Jessica Heslam, writing that holding her own stillborn baby brought her “much peace”.^[168] Four of the Santorum’s children appeared with their parents on Piers Morgan Tonight in January 2012, and said they were all glad to have seen Gabriel because they were able to see him, and they hold a place in their hearts for their brother.

So let’s grant for a moment that Rick and Karen haven’t used any form of birth control (even the pull-out lottery). Is Karen’s life (if you take away the money and power) what most women want? Frack no. Oh so decidedly frack no.

If Karen is happy doing not much else but be pregnant and mother, OK. The Santorums can afford help, health care for their last baby and the rest of the family (The Santorums have stopped having sex or what? Karen’s menopause probably isn’t over yet and she still has a chance at yet another pregnancy). But many of the rest of us can’t afford to “choose” such a life thanks to policies created by “thinkers” like Santorum. Can you imagine the result of a yearly salary of around $12,000 and 7 children? Oh right. The poor in societies that don’t much like women.

“I’m a little bit stunned with how far they have gone on birth control with absolutely no regard for the political consequences,” Shipp continues. “Whether it’s Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney—I don’t think Newt Gingrich—if any of these guys think they’re going to be able to come back to the middle after the attacks they’ve made on birth control, they’re sadly mistaken, because the general public thinks they’re just whack-a-doodle.”

Hilarious. With the GOP it’s like watching a totally out of control five year old throwing a fit on the Walmart floor. I wonder if in a couple of years they’re going to feel any shame at all. I also wonder what we (the parents in the scenario) are going to do about this when the screaming is over.

7M Californians had their rights stripped away today by activist 9th Circuit judges. As president I will work to protect marriage.

There was some reaction to that. Hilarity ensues.

He seems to have problems with numbers. There’s the actual population numbers of California for example as opposed to just the ones that are so afraid of gay marriage that they wanted to use the constitution to prevent civil rights for some by protecting the mythology of some.

Then there’s his “big” win in Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado. Look at these numbers if you would:

So tomorrow’s news reports will say it was a big win for Rick Santorum. The numbers, however, are so low as to be laughable: if the vote-per-precinct ratio holds up, a total of 65,000 people will have participated in the GOP caucuses [in Minnesota]. This compares with 1,275,409 Minnesotans who voted for John McCain in 2008, so something like 5% of Minnesota’s Republican voters participated tonight. That is hardly enough to give Santorum a ringing mandate, but, on the other hand, that’s how democracy works. You have to show up.

(via here)

His big win adds up to a picture of growing GOP apathy. 65,000 people as a total turn out in Minnesota? 5%? Ouch. On the national stage that isn’t going to amount to much.

Which is good news for the sane and those committed to the idea of actual civil rights and things like compassion, equality, fairness and democracy.

It’s just amazing really.

There’s lots of silliness but one really struck me and I’ve been thinking about it since I read one particularly nasty comment about Margaret Sanger, the founder of PP.

Then I ran across Romney’s idea that Komen shouldn’t provide money to PP because PP provides abortions. That’s when I decided to write this post.

Here’s where reality comes in.

1) PP has raised $3Million since that battle got started. That’s a lot of angry citizens donating to PP, and I do expect the majority of donations are from individuals (I would love to see stats on that.)

2) 3% of what PP does is provide abortions. So what? Cancel all the mammograms because 3% of what they do is a legal service provided to women who CHOOSE to use a LEGAL service?

3) The rate of abortion in nations with easy and reliable access to contraception is lower than in societies that try to take away women’s rights to such services. There’s a push on in conservative circles (Catholic Church, for one, Physicians for Life, for another) to discredit the relationship between access to contraceptives and lower abortion rates. In part, they are right, but only in as much as it is not a simple one-to-one ratio. There are other factors involved in reducing rates of abortion. One is social tolerance and another is the assumption of freedom of and competency in women. Look here and here for an interesting study and fact sheet.

OK, so why would Romney not get that trying to sink PP is a bad idea?

Because reason isn’t his strong suit.

Related thinking styles: I ran into this comment on one of the sites I was reading (don’t remember which one now) — the writer said that PP was a bad organization whose mission it was to kill black babies and this could be shown because Margaret Sanger was a racist. Therefore, the argument went, PP should not be funded in anyway by the government.

Oh, I groaned.

One point in the various posted comments was that it was obvious that PP wants to support eugenics against Black women because there are always PP clinics in Black neighborhoods. Gads. Of course the fact that PP supports women’s health care for poor women and there are a disproportionate number of Black poor women wouldn’t be the reason one finds PP clinics in Black neighborhoods?  Are PP clinics in white areas just a smoke screen or is there some other reason that they are there? Is this just another one of those conspiracy nut things?

Another point was that because Sanger thought that the lighter the skin the better, therefore the whole enterprise of contraceptive planning is a racist enterprise and should be abandoned. Another groan and a good gadzooks! You can read three of Sanger’s works on Gutenberg to get the full flavor of what she actually said if you want to be a bit more informed about her.

Sanger was a complicated woman born into a time when race was considered a legitimate criteria for social analysis and judgment – a white man, therefore he must be… Stupid of course but that was what was believed, and I would like to point out that her writings show she was not so simple minded. If a history of bigotry is enough of a reason to dump Sanger’s belief in the right of women to choose how many children she cared for, then by the same argument any overtly racist or otherwise bigoted group in history ought not become the foundation of current day systems. Yes? Same argument?

Have you read what some of the signers of the Declaration of Independence believed about race? What about the beliefs of those people who crafted the Constitution and the Bill of Rights? Uhuh. Racists. Therefore what? Dump the Constitution because some of the founding fathers were slaveholders? Read here and here.

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

Anyway,  as I said Sanger was complicated. Here’s a bit from Woman and the New Race the end of chapter 3.

We must set motherhood free. We must give the foreign and submerged mother knowledge that will enable her to prevent bringing to birth children she does not want. We know that in each of these submerged and semisubmerged elements of the population there are rich factors of racial culture. Motherhood is the channel through which these cultures flow. Motherhood, when free to choose the father, free to choose the time and the number of children who shall result from the union, automatically works in wondrous ways. It refuses to bring forth weaklings; refuses to bring forth slaves; refuses to bear children who must live under the conditions described. It withholds the unfit, brings forth the fit; brings few children into homes where there is not sufficient to provide for them. Instinctively it avoids all those things which multiply racial handicaps. Under such circumstances we can hope that the “melting pot” will refine. We shall see that it will save the precious metals of racial culture, fused into an amalgam of physical perfection, mental strength and spiritual progress. Such an American race, containing the best of all racial elements, could give to the world a vision and a leadership beyond our present imagination.

These are workers she’s talking about. Immigrants, non-whites, the poor. This is Sanger’s eugenics.

In fact, “race” for Sanger had more to do with lifestyle than with what we today recognize as racial lines. This is from The Pivot of Civilization — the bold is mine.

Dr. Austin Freeman has recently pointed out (3) some of the physiological, psychological, and racial effects of machinery upon the proletariat, the breeders of the world. Speaking for Great Britain, Dr. Freeman suggests that the omnipresence of machinery tends toward the production of large but inferior populations. Evidences of biological and racial degeneracy are apparent to this observer. “Compared with the African negro,” he writes, “the British sub-man is in several respects markedly inferior. He tends to be dull; he is usually quite helpless and unhandy; he has, as a rule, no skill or knowledge of handicraft, or indeed knowledge of any kind…. Over-population is a phenomenon connected with the survival of the unfit, and it is mechanism which has created conditions favorable to the survival of the unfit and the elimination of the fit.” The whole indictment against machinery is summarized by Dr. Freeman: “Mechanism by its reactions on man and his environment is antagonistic to human welfare. It has destroyed industry and replaced it by mere labor; it has degraded and vulgarized the works of man; it has destroyed social unity and replaced it by social disintegration and class antagonism to an extent which directly threatens civilization; it has injuriously affected the structural type of society by developing its organization at the expense of the individual; it has endowed the inferior man with political power which he employs to the common disadvantage by creating political institutions of a socially destructive type; and finally by its reactions on the activities of war it constitutes an agent for the wholesale physical destruction of man and his works and the extinction of human culture.”

Isn’t that a hoot!

Pivot of Civilization was published in 1922. Woman and the New Race was 1920. Should we compare the Catholic Church’s track record of bigotry by looking at how it handled the danger to the Jewish people some decade and a bit later? What would the commentors think then, that we should dump every Charity funded by the Catholics of the world? What about the Mormon attitude toward African Americans? Dump all Mormons?

Reality is a complicated affair but it runs on fact and so it becomes doable, if one spends a bit of time becoming informed and thinking through at least a bit of what we believe. But the minds of those that don’t!? Both hilarious and terrifying. Imagine such a racist, misogynistic dweeb as Romney becoming the ruler of the “free” United States. It would put back the arc of civilization at least 100 years.

Bill Maher comes closer to my main disagreement with such acts as Romney perpetrated on the dead guy in this “unbaptism” video clip.

I can imagine the outrage from the various religious pundits should a reddit crowd call a flashmob to ritually unbaptize the whole populace of city after city in the US.

Personally, I’d think it was hilarious but that’s because the dead don’t give a shit, and neither baptisms nor unbaptism have any effect on something that doesn’t exist. Their true effect is on the living.

And this is the root of my disgust with Romney and the kinds of religious people who are so deeply uncivil as to frack with other people’s choices.

Romney wants to be the leader of a democratic nation. It is a nation built on the idea that we as individuals have the right to make choices, and the obligation to live by those choices in a manner in accordance with civil law. This means Romney and his wife had a choice about becoming Mormons. They still have a choice to stay Mormon, or to desist.  Edward Davies, Romney’s father-in-law, also had a choice. And he made it. He was an atheist.

What Romney did by having the man baptized was declare that Davies’ choice did not matter and should not be considered sacrosanct. This is not a man I would like to see ruling a government that says it holds choice sacrosanct. I mean if he can so disrespect his own father-in-law, imagine what he might do to people he “rules”?

Of course since Davies’ is dead it doesn’t matter at all to him, but were he alive, I suspect he would be deeply ashamed of his daughter. I know I would be.  Shame on you Ann. You had the right to choose and expect that choice to be honoured. You should do the same.

So perhaps we should all just follow Bill Maher’s example, organize a flash mob and unbaptize all those people who were added (against their wishes) to the Mormon rolls in what is a very uncivil act against democracy. The dead don’t care, but the living do. And I expect it might stir up some interesting “conversation.” What such an unbaptism flash mob would declare is that choices do matter and that even if we do not agree with a specific choice, as long as it accords with the civil law by which we all must be guided, we will respect the right to choose and that we will act against those that do not respect the legal choices made by others.

Who do you think should get the Green Party Nomination for President in 2012?

• Jill Stein (MA) (68%, 1,223 Votes)
• Roseanne Barr (CA) (29%, 526 Votes)
• Kent Mesplay (CA) (2%, 35 Votes)
• Harley Mikkelson (MI) (1%, 8 Votes)

This day just keeps getting better.

Susan G. Komen for the Cure, which recently announced that it is ending grants to Planned Parenthood for breast cancer screening because of a controversial investigation launched by an anti-abortion Republican congressman, currently funds cancer research at the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center to the tune of $7.5 million. Like Planned Parenthood, Penn State is currently the subject of a federal government investigation, and like the Planned Parenthood grant, the Penn State grant appears to violate a new internal rule at Komen that bans grants to organizations that are under investigation by federal, state, or local governments. But so far, only the Planned Parenthood grants appear to have been cancelled.

Hmmm. This gets funnier by the hour.

Since the Susan G Komen Foundation stopped funding Planned Parenthood because of extremist pressure, they have taken a real beating.

The comments of Facebook!And the comments on their own forum…oh my they have made some women pretty mad.

I donate to various charities and normally I choose ones in particularly disadvantaged regions. In this case I’ve just made a donation to Planned Parenthood in the US. The US is turning into a 3rd world country the way political and religious extremism is being allowed to harass and harm citizens that don’t agree with them. I mean really, make a woman get an unnecessary ultrasound before she can qualify for an abortion, and now just refuse to fund breast cancer screenings because they don’t like the fact that abortions are legal and that women want the right to decide for themselves. What next? Defund women’s health entirely if we refuse to cover our hair in public?

I understand that the Komen foundation is back pedaling like crazy, and at least one person has resigned from the foundation in protest.

The ostensible reason for Komen’s decision is a new policy prohibiting it from funding organizations under government investigation. Planned Parenthood is the subject of an inquiry by Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL), who is searching for evidence that government money has been used to fund abortions. But Stearns’s investigation is a highly partisan affair based solely on evidence from anti-abortion groups.

Uhuh. In other words, facts need not apply for this rationale.

I will be very careful in the future to not support organizations that fund Kormen.

She attached an amendment to that bill that would also require men to have a rectal exam and a cardiac stress test before obtaining a prescription for erectile dysfunction medication.

ROTFLMAO for real

Too bad it didn’t pass.

Oh good. More evidence of hypocrisy.