Punking Hilary Rosen
Posted: April 12, 2012 Filed under: religious extremists, right wing hate grouups, Rush Limbaugh, the GOP, War on Women, We are so F'd, Women's Rights | Tags: Hillary Rosen 36 CommentsHilary Rosen provided the right wing noise machine with a two second sound byte that has been used to reignite the Mommy Wars. They have purposefully obfuscated what Rosen said thinking they will dupe women into voting for Romney. I am not falling for it. I can’t imagine most of the women I know will fall for it either. Any one that thinks that Hilary Rosen 
believes that stay-at-home parents without access to maids, nannies, yard crews, and millions of dollars don’t work, raise your hand! I thought so. It’s different when you have the ability to just write a check to get anything done. Ann Romney does not have the day-to-day experience of 99% of the women in this country, housewife or not. Most women who work inside and outside of the home have to do stuff for themselves. They can’t just write a check and call on an army of servants. Not so with Ann Romney. So, why is every one punking Hillary Rosen? That Punk’d treatment would include that provided by “this is what a feminist looks like” President Obama and his gang of campaign boyz.
President Obama strongly disagreed with Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen’s controversial comment about Ann Romney, saying today that “there’s no tougher job than being a mom.”
“Anybody who would argue otherwise, I think, probably needs to rethink their statement,” the president told Bruce Aune of ABC’s Cedar Rapids affiliate KCRG.
Rosen sparked a political firestorm when she questioned Wednesday whether Ann Romney is qualified to gauge women’s economic concerns, claiming the mother of five has “never worked a day in her life.” The Romney campaign pounced on the comments as an opportunity to boost the GOP frontrunner’s standing among female voters, while the president’s campaign and the White House publicly distanced themselves from Rosen.
My mom was a “housewife” too. However, Mildred cleaned our house. Mrs. Anders watched me and my sister when we weren’t at Miss Margaret’s pre-school, Miss Donna’s ballet lessons, or Mrs. Donna’s swimming classes. My mom played a lot of bridge, spent a lot of time at the country club, and then did things for junior league like volunteering at the hospital gift shop or attending lunches for the local Red Cross. Mrs Olsen did all our laundry except for our clean ironed bed sheets that were dropped off by Kimball’s laundry at our front door. My dad did the grocery shopping since mom hated doing that and he cooked dinner any way so it was pointless for her to do that. So, as you can see the life of an upper middle class house wife is just full of challenges. Most of the women I’ve mentioned here–like Miss Donna who taught me ballet or the Mrs Donna that taught me swimming–were either widowed or divorce. Mildred and Mrs. Anders had husbands that were old and not able to make money any more since their bodies had way gone pass the point of being able to do the kinds of physical work their educations would allow. Mrs. Olsen was putting her son through college. Yup, my mom had the toughest job in the world. Did I mention that we were the poor ones in my family? My mother’s brother and sister had live-ins for all of that. Of course, my aunts were “housewives” too although I came to think of them more as country club wives. They never worried about much of anything except boredom and when to pick us up. None of us were rich enough to have chauffeurs. Some how, I can’t imagine Ann Romney cleaning any of those multitudes of houses, can you? So, I wish I was reading a lot more articles in support of Hillary Rosen, like this one from The Nation. My mother had the ability to pay a lot of other people do a lot of things. She didn’t have to worry about making ends meet, for example. She had other women doing a lot of work because they needed that money just to stay in their houses. I don’t think my mother could’ve related to Mrs. Olsen’s concerns any more than Ann Romney could relate to most women. The issue is not if you choose to work or not. The issue is if your life is completely underwritten by millions of dollars or a struggle to keep food on the table.
Rosen was responding to Mitt Romney’s constant trotting out of Ann when he gets a question on women’s issues:
What you have is Mitt Romney running around the country saying, well, you know, my wife tells me that what women really care about are economic issues. And when I listen to my wife, that’s what I’m hearing.Guess what, his wife has actually never worked a day in her life. She’s never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school and how do we—why do we worry about their future?
There’s nothing there about stay-at-home moms, or the idea that that raising children isn’t work. Rosen was referring to the fact that Ann Romney—an incredibly rich and elite woman—likely does not understand the economic concerns of most American women. Again, it was unfortunate choice of words—but she wasn’t wrong.
The Romney campaign, predictably, has grabbed onto this “controversy” in an attempt to divert attention from their missteps around equal pay and the war on women yesterday. Ann Romney joined Twitter, and her first two messages were about the flap, writing that “all moms are entitled to choose their path” and that she “made a choice to stay home and raise five boys.”
Since all moms are “entitled” to “choose” their path, I’m very much looking forward to the Romney’s plan for national mandated paid parental leave. I’m also wondering, since they believe that women’s domestic labor is valuable and real work, when they will come out in support of wages for said work. (Or perhaps women are only entitled to make their “choice” when they have the financial means to do so.)
Focusing on this slip-up just brings more attention to the way in which a Romney presidency wouldn’t support mothers. Because empty platitudes about motherhood “being the hardest job in the world” doesn’t change the reality of most moms’ lives, or make their job any easier.
But it’s not just that Romney is bad for women (whether they work outside the home or not). What’s being lost in this conversation is the incredibly facile and insulting notion that just because a woman made the decision to marry Romney and occasionally talk to him about other women, that he is somehow well-informed on women’s issues. Ann Romney is not an expert on women’s issues just because she happens to be one. And she’s not an expert in what mothers need just because she has children. Believing otherwise is infantilizing and reduces women’s very important and complex concerns to beauty parlor chitchat.
What’s disappointing to me is that most of the press and even many Democrats are allowing the right wing to frame and punk single mother Hillary Rosen. Here’s a little sample of the right wing smear going on right now.
No one is arguing that raising children isn’t work. Democratic strategist and CAP Action board member Hilary Rosen is a single mother of twins who had to go through the expensive and challenging process of adoption with her then partner Elizabeth Birch. Now, she’s trying to stick up for other mothers who don’t have the luxury of millionaire husbands to help fund their child-rearing duties, and the backlash is getting ugly. Catholic League president Bill Donohue attacked her family on Twitter this morning:
@CatholicLeague: Lesbian Dem Hilary Rosen tells Ann Romney she never worked a day in her life. Unlike Rosen, who had to adopt kids, Ann raised 5 of her own.
So, just so you know this is right wing spin, here’s Limbaugh and the newly fabricated “democratic war on mothers”. So, the defunding and removing access to prenatal care, school lunches, family planning services, preschool, maternal leave, and a myriad of other family-friendly programs wasn’t enough evidence of a republican war on mothers that we need to invent things out of thin air?
Rush Limbaugh jumped into the firestorm on Thursday created by Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen’s jab at stay-at-home-mom Ann Romney as the radio talk show host accused the Democratic Party of launching a “war on mothers.”
Limbaugh spent the bulk of his three-hour afternoon program griping about Rosen’s charge Wednesday that Mitt Romney’s wife has “never worked a day in her life,” telling listeners that the comment summed up the Democrats’ position on women’s role in society.
“This is big because it’s such a teachable moment. It’s such an illustration of who these people are, the left. It’s such an illustration of phonies of feminism. It is an illustration of the absolute hostility that the left has for women who stay at home,” the conservative radio host said, speaking before Rosen issued a statement apologizing to Ann Romney.
He continued, “Obama and the Democrats are not content to just divide men and women. They want to go deeper and dive working mothers from stay at home mothers. And they want to attach the virtue to working mothers and assign no virtue to stay at home moms. Now you talk to most women, even those who consider themselves feminists … they will tell you that they thought that was a battle they fought and won and ended years ago.”
Limbaugh also personally defended Ann Romney, referring to her as a “role model.”
“They’ve gone after the wrong woman here. Ann Romney is not disliked. Ann Romney is not unlikeable. Ann Romney isn’t controversial. Ann Romney isn’t telling anybody how to live. … Ann Romney’s a role model. Don’t care what you think of Mitt. That’s not the point here. She is a role model for living and trying to live a fulfilling life,” he said.
No one but Ann Romney knows if her life is fulfilling and if she considers herself any kind of a role model. I would hope my daughters would not consider Ann Romney’s life one worth copying but then that’s my values. For one, I love my father a lot. If he were an outspoken atheist like Ann Romney’s was, I certainly would have never allowed any one to sneak-baptize him into any religion after his death. I consider that the panultimate disrespect. I also would not for a minute raise my daughters in any tradition where women must call 18 year old man children “elders”, where tons of money is spent defeating the ERA, and where women are not allowed access to “heaven” with out a husband sponsor. That’s just the short list of the kinds of patriarchal, women-hating stuff that goes on in Romney’s religion. I don’t consider that much of a role model for self respect. I also would’ve put my husband on the roof of the car if he’d have tried to put the family dog up there. However, Ann Romney has to live with all of these decisions and her life. That’s the deal with being a mother, you should be able to choose the way you do it. I can’t imagine any one thinking Ann Romney’s choices or lifestyle is common to all but a few women and I challenge all of us that see this backlash and stand behind Hillary Rosen. For a group of people that scream class war at the drop of a hat, the misogynists sure have done a great job of missing the point of class and money in Rosen’s comments.
endnote:
I’ve just been told that David Pflouffe is on Lawrence O’Donnell acting lie a complete ass. He just called the pillorying of Rosen a “rare moment of bi-partisan agreement”. This is just another example of the inability of Democratic men to really stand up for what’s right. Unbelievable! This is akin to them joining in the swift boating of Kerry. This has nothing to do with the choice of not working or working. It has everything to do with being a member of a privileged elite that’s far removed from the rest of us. We need to be very vocal about this.
or as Hillary herself puts it on her facebook:
I’ve nothing against @AnnRomney. I just don’t want Mitt using her as an expert on women struggling $ to support their family. She isn’t.
Sunday Reads … and now for something completely different
Posted: April 1, 2012 Filed under: morning reads, right wing hate grouups, Voter Ignorance, We are so F'd 27 Comments
or not…
I’ve spent some time wondering how a few segments of our population seem to have lost track of reality. We all have access to libraries and the world’s combined knowledge on our little laptops these days. Still, we seem to be surrounded by folks that are reading books in some alternate reality. So what’s the deal? Can you point to some one like Michelle Bachmann or Rick Santorum and then find something in their brains or their genes that’s not like ours? Or, did something go horribly wrong with them at some point in their life so they just prefer to live a life of fact denial?
Scientists have been looking at brain chemistry and composition and genetics and have found that certain traits tend to run in certain kinds of individuals that tend to do things a specific way. Take this example from Crime Times linking brain dysfunction to the traits of risk-avoidance or thrill-seeking and criminal behavior. Many of these kinds of behaviors have been linked to genes and certain regions of the brain.
Richard Ebstein and colleagues, at Herzog Memorial Hospital in Jerusalem, studied 124 unrelated Israelis. The researchers administered a test, devised by C. Robert Cloninger, which evaluated four personality traits: novelty seeking, harm avoidance, reward dependence, and persistence. They found that many subjects with high novelty-seeking scores had a slightly longer form of the D4 dopamine receptor (D4DR) gene than deliberate, reflective subjects. According to Ebstein, “this work provides the first replicated association between a specific genetic locus involved in neurotransmission and a normal personality trait.”
Jonathan Benjamin and colleagues, at the National Institutes of Mental Health, conducted a similar study involving 315 subjects who were evaluated on five personality measures: extroversion, openness to experience, neuroticism, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. None of these traits showed any association with the D4DR gene. Novelty-seeking, however, was again associated with the long version of the gene.
Behavior researchers note, however, that the D4DR gene variant accounts for only about 10 percent of the variation in the trait of novelty-seeking. Cloninger suggests, also, that each personality trait is modified by other traits; thus, a thrill-seeker who is also biologically inclined to be reward dependent, persistent, and optimistic may be a successful business executive, while a thrill-seeker who is low in both reward dependence and anxiety may turn to criminal pursuits.
Are there similar kinds of things at play in the brains and behavior of Bachman and Santorum? Here’s a preview of a book by Chris Mooney in a MoJo article titled “Diagnosing the Republican Brain”. Mooney shows some of the more looney tune entries in Conservapedia. It’s the right wing answer to Wikipedia and it’s just full of baloney science. There’s even some arguments that against the theory of relativity. Is absolute belief in absolute nonsense a medical or mental condition?
Take Conservapedia’s bizarre claim that relativity hasn’t led to any fruitful technologies. To the contrary, GPS devices rely on an understanding of relativity, as do PET scans and particle accelerators. Relativity works—if it didn’t, we would have noticed by now, and the theory would never have come to enjoy its current scientific status.
Little changed at Conservapedia after these errors were dismantled, however (though more anti-relativity “counter-examples” and Bible references were added). For not only does the site embrace a very different firmament of “facts” about the world than modern science, it also employs a different approach to editing than Wikipedia. Schlafly has said of the founding of Conservapedia that it “strengthened my faith. I don’t have to live with what’s printed in the newspaper. I don’t have to take what’s put out by Wikipedia. We’ve got our own way to express knowledge, and the more that we can clear out the liberal bias that erodes our faith, the better.”
You might be thinking that Conservapedia’s unabashed denial of relativity is an extreme case, located in the same circle of intellectual hell as claims that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS and 9-11 was an inside job. If so, I want to ask you to think again. Structurally, the denial of something so irrefutable, the elaborate rationalization of that denial, and above all the refusal to consider the overwhelming body of counterevidence and modify one’s view, is something we find all around us today.
Kevin Drum also looks at the idea that “conservatives” are just plain wired differently from the rest of us. I have always been at a loss for words for the number of stubborn believers in things that have been completely disabused by facts. The worst examples are the number of republicans that insist that Obama is a foreign born Muslim despite all evidence to the contrary. Drum thinks there has to be more than that because it seems that most of are worst examples appear to be American. Is there something uniquely nutty about our American Nuts?
I’ve long been sold on the idea that liberalism and conservatism are at least partly temperaments, and it’s those temperaments that lead us to different political conclusions rather than any kind of rational thinking process.
But the problem I have with Chris’s piece is this: temperament is universal, but Republicans are Americans. And it’s Republicans who deny global warming and evolution. European conservatives don’t. In fact, as near as I can tell, European conservatives don’t generally hold anti-science views any more strongly than European progressives.
I’m going to keep this post short because, as I said, I haven’t read the book. Maybe Chris addresses this at greater length there. But in the MoJo piece, at least, he doesn’t really address the question of why differences in brain wiring have produced such extreme anti-science views in American conservatives but not in European conservatives. So consider this an invitation, Chris. Is your contention that American conservatives are unique in some way? Or that American brains are wired differently? Or am I wrong about European conservatives?
Let me tell you a secret about Bible believers that I know because I was one. Most of them don’t read their Bibles. If they did, they would know that the biblical model of sex and marriage has little to do with the one they so loudly defend. Stories depicted in the Bible include rape, incest, master-slave sexual relations, captive virgins, and more. Now, just because a story is told in the Bible doesn’t mean it is intended as a model for devout behavior. Other factors have to be considered, like whether God commands or forbids the behavior, if the behavior is punished, and if Jesus subsequently indicates the rules have changed, come the New Testament.
Through this lens, you find that the God of the Bible still endorses polygamy and sexual slavery and coerced marriage of young virgins along with monogamy. In fact, he endorses all three to the point of providing detailed regulations. Based on stories of sex and marriage that God rewards and appears to approve one might add incest to the mix. Nowhere does the Bible say, “Don’t have sex with someone who doesn’t want to have sex with you.”
Furthermore, none of the norms that are endorsed and regulated in the Old Testament law – polygamy, sexual slavery, coerced marriage of young girls—are revised, reversed, or condemned by Jesus.
Yup. Polygamy is the norm. Most of the big patriarchs had concubines which are basically sex slaves. Is that what literalists like Pat Robertson see as our proper path?
Biblicalpolygamy.com has pages dedicated to 40 biblical figures, each of whom had multiple wives. The list includes patriarchs like Abraham and Isaac. King David, the first king of Israel may have limited himself to eight wives, but his son Solomon, reputed to be the wisest man who ever lived had 700 wives and 300 concubines! (1 Kings 11)
Concubines are sex slaves, and the Bible gives instructions on acquisition of several types of sex slaves, although the line between biblical marriage and sexual slavery is blurry. A Hebrew man might, for example, sell his daughter to another Hebrew, who then has certain obligations to her once she is used. For example, he can’t then sell her to a foreigner. Alternately a man might see a virgin war captive that he wants for himself.
In the book of Numbers (31:18) God’s servant commands the Israelites to kill all of the used Midianite women who have been captured in war, and all of the boy children, but to keep all of the virgin girls for themselves. The Law of Moses spells out a purification ritual to prepare a captive virgin for life as a concubine. It requires her owner to shave her head and trim her nails and give her a month to mourn her parents before the first sex act (Deuteronomy 21:10-14). A Hebrew girl who is raped can be sold to her rapist for 50 shekels, or about $580 (Deuteronomy 22:28-29). He must then keep her as one of his wives for as long as she lives.
Rape, incest, sexual slavery, and polygamy are all biblical values.
So, let me go back a moment to the widespread Republican notion that President Obama is some kind of Muslim Manchurian Candidate. TruthDig features an article on this by writer John Feffer. Once again, we have evidence that points to something completely different. More brain chemistry perhaps?
Despite right-wing charges, Obama has maintained a tight relationship with Israel and the Israeli leadership. As former New Republic editor Peter Beinart concludes, “The story of Obama’s relationship to [Prime Minister] Netanyahu and his American Jewish allies is, fundamentally, a story of acquiescence.”
It’s no surprise, then, that surveys in six Middle East countries taken just before and two months after the Cairo speech in 2009, the Brookings Institution and Zogby International discovered that the number of respondents optimistic about the president’s approach to the region had suffered a dramatic drop: from 51% to 16%. A 2011 Pew poll found that U.S. favorability ratings had continued their slide in Jordan (to 13%), Pakistan (12%), and Turkey (10%).
And yet, perversely, the hard right in the U.S. maintains that the Obama administration has behaved in quite the opposite manner. “There’s something sick about an administration which is so pro-Islamic that it can’t even tell the truth about the people who are trying to kill us,” Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich typically said while campaigning in Georgia.
Pro-Islamic? That’s news to the Islamic world.
But it’s nothing new to the world of the U.S. right wing, which portrays Obama as anti-Israel and weak in the face of Islamic terrorism. At best, the president emerges from these attacks as a booster of Islam; at worst, he is the leader of a genuine fifth column.
Although the administration’s policy on Iran is virtually indistinguishable from those of his Republican challengers, they have presented him as an appeaser. The president who “surged” in Afghanistan somehow becomes, through the magic of election-year sloganeering, a pacifist patsy. Although Obama never endorsed the location of the “Ground Zero mosque,” his opponents have suggested that he did. Although he was slow to withdraw support from U.S. allies in the Middle East like Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Ben Ali in Tunisia, Republican candidates have accused the president of practically campaigning on behalf of the Islamist parties that have grown in influence as a result of the Arab Spring.
Barack Obama, the right wing has discovered, does not have to be Muslim to convince American voters that he has a suspect, even foreign, agenda. They have instead established a much lower evidentiary standard: he only has to act Muslim.
So, we’ve had some discussion about the relationship between Republicans and worship of Ayn Rand. George Monbiot insists that Rand wrote “A Manifesto for Psychopaths”. Ah, it’s the brain chemistry argument once more.
Rand’s is the philosophy of the psychopath, a misanthropic fantasy of cruelty, revenge and greed. Yet, as Gary Weiss shows in his new book Ayn Rand Nation, she has become to the new right what Karl Marx once was to the left: a demi-god at the head of a chiliastic cult(4). Almost one-third of Americans, according to a recent poll, have read Atlas Shrugged(5), and it now sells hundreds of thousands of copies every year.
Ignoring Rand’s evangelical atheism, the Tea Party movement has taken her to its heart. No rally of theirs is complete without placards reading “Who is John Galt?” and “Rand was right”. Ayn Rand, Weiss argues, provides the unifying ideology which has “distilled vague anger and unhappiness into a sense of purpose.” She is energetically promoted by the broadcasters Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santelli. She is the guiding spirit of the Republicans in Congress(6).
Like all philosophies, Objectivism is absorbed second-hand by people who have never read it. I believe it is making itself felt on this side of the Atlantic: in the clamorous new demands to remove the 50p tax band for the very rich, for example, or among the sneering, jeering bloggers who write for the Telegraph and the Spectator, mocking compassion and empathy, attacking efforts to make the world a kinder place.
It is not hard to see why Rand appeals to billionaires. She offers them something that is crucial to every successful political movement: a sense of victimhood. She tells them that they are parasitised by the ungrateful poor and oppressed by intrusive, controlling governments.
It is harder to see what it gives the ordinary teabaggers, who would suffer grievously from a withdrawal of government. But such is the degree of misinformation which saturates this movement and so prevalent in the US is Willy Loman Syndrome (the gulf between reality and expectations(7)) that millions blithely volunteer themselves as billionaires’ doormats. I wonder how many would continue to worship at the shrine of Ayn Rand if they knew that towards the end of her life she signed on for both Medicare and Social Security(8). She had railed furiously against both programmes, as they represented everything she despised about the intrusive state. Her belief system was no match for the realities of age and ill-health.
So see, Kevin, there are some of these nuts over on Monbiot’s side of the pond. Maybe they just haven’t gotten as well funded or well organized as our nutters. Which reminds me, there is some of this poor little oppressed-by-the-government me narrative that really bothers me. I can’t for the life of me figure out how the death of Trayvon Martin has been turned into a whining opportunity by white people who think that are really oppressed by pointing out institutional racism. It’s kind’ve like those silly people on Fox crying over the US having THE highest corporate tax rate while ignoring the effective corporate tax rate is THE lowest in the world. It’s the same with the people screaming about how every one is persecuting the faithful of the majority religion. Facts completely bear witness to these falsehoods, yet we can’t get rid of them and their silly hairshirts.
I guess they have a complete news channel and a lot of AM radio time to shill and recruit. Plus, there is all that Koch Money floating around just dying to fund phony science and economics. Maybe it’s because many of our nutters have air time and money. So, is it brain chemistry and genes? Vulnerability to hype? Mental Illness? Rational or irrational ignorance? I have no idea. But, I am getting tired of it. Oh, and btw, that’s a bacon cup, sauce and spoon up there at the top. It’s there to remind me that I need to read a few escape novels and think about something completely different for a change.
What’s on your mind, reading, and blogging list today?
Republican Men Stop Women from Testifying on Birth Control in House Hearing: Their Religion=Slavery
Posted: February 16, 2012 Filed under: religious extremists, Reproductive Health, Reproductive Rights, right wing hate grouups, War on Women 54 Comments
Well-known Republican thug Darrell Issa has stopped minority witnesses and women in general from testifying before a house committee hearing on contraception stating the hearing is on “religious” liberty.
A Capitol Hill hearing that was supposed to be about religious freedom and a mandate that health insurers cover contraception in the United States began as an argument about whether Democrats could add a woman to the all-male panel.
“Where are the women?” the minority Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., asked early in the hearing.
She criticized the Republican committee chairman, Rep. Darrel Issa, for wanting to “roll back the fundamental rights of women to a time when the government thought what happens in the bedroom is their business.”
“We will not be forced back to that primitive era,” she said.
Issa bristled at the charge and said Democrats could not add their witness because she was not a member of the clergy, but a student at Georgetown. He also faulted Democrats for not submitting the name of the witness, Sandra Fluke, in time.
Fluke would have talked about a classmate who lost an ovary because of a syndrome that causes ovarian cysts. Georgetown, which is affiliated with the Catholic Church, does not insure birth control, which is also used to treat the syndrome.
Issa said the hearing is meant to be more broadly about religious freedom and not specifically about the contraception mandate in the Health Reform law.
Maloney and Eleanor Holmes Norton left the room in protest.
Ranking committee member Elijah Cummings (D-MD) had asked Issa to include a female witness at the hearing, but the Chairman refused, arguing that “As the hearing is not about reproductive rights and contraception but instead about the Administration’s actions as they relate to freedom of religion and conscience, he believes that Ms. Fluke is not an appropriate witness.”
And so Cummings, along with the Democratic women on the panel, took their request to the hearing room, demanding that Issa consider the testimony of a female college student. But the California congressman insisted that the hearing should focus on the rules’ alleged infringement on “religious liberty,” not contraception coverage, and denied the request. Reps. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) walked out of the hearing in protest of his decision, citing frustration over the fact that the first panel of witnesses consisted only of male religious leaders against the rule. Holmes Norton said she will not return, calling Issa’s chairmanship an “autocratic regime.”
Maddow Blog reminds us that both Catholics and self-identified GOP voters agree with the HHS mandate that provides universal birth control coverage to women with insurance, medicare, and medicaid. Republicans and the Catholic Bishops continue to make this about religious freedom after numerous Constitutional lawyers have stated that the policy will not conflict with the first amendment right of “free exercise”.
The ostensible point of a congressional hearing is to provide lawmakers with information they need to shape public policy. In this case, Issa has invited nine “expert” witnesses to discuss contraception coverage — and all nine are men who represent religious institutions.
How many of the witnesses will offer testimony in support of the administration’s position? According to Democrats, zero. How many can speak to issues regarding contraception and/or preventive health care? Again, zero. Issa invited nine people to testify, and each of them will tell Issa exactly what he wants to hear.
Dems were initially offered a chance to have one witness testify, but when they selected a female law student at Georgetown, Republican committee staffers rejected the choice, arguing that she would only be able to speak to issues regarding contraception access — and this was a hearing about religious liberty.
ECHIDNE of the snakes provides this photo showing the stacked deck.
Notice the number of old boys on the panel who are supposed to not be involved in politics and are given tax exemptions as a religious institution. I guess starting a war on women isn’t considered political.
SCOTUS and the Free Exercise Clause
Posted: February 9, 2012 Filed under: religion, religious extremists, right wing hate grouups, SCOTUS 42 Comments
A large portion of my family--Jewish and French Huguenot people from Alsace Lorraine also known as the Rhinelands–came over to the British colonies because their homes, lives, businesses and farms had been handed to the Catholic Church as part of hundreds of years of persecution by the state of France and its state religion. Many had fled to other places–specifically England–as the persecution of French Protestants and Jews was extraordinary in the late 1600s during the Nine Year War. This was nothing new since it also occurred in the 16th century. It was still occurring under Cardinal Richlieu and Louis XIII. French Protestants (Huguenot) and Jews did not really receive full rights in France until the establishment of the Napoleonic Code in 1804. The stories of these horrors were handed down in my family from generation to generation along with the pride all felt in being early American colonists who participated in the writing of the Constitution and the signing of the Declaration of Independence. I grew up with a strong sense of what religious persecution meant as well as what was behind the so-called Free Exercise Clause of the US Constitution. It’s been burned into our family memory. While not a lawyer myself, I come from an extremely long line of barristers and lawyers. My uncle argued a lot of constitutional cases for the Roosevelt administration. I grew up with huge debates around family tables. I have spent the last few days completely distraught about the recent suggestion that a birth control provision for hospitals, universities, and other organizations run by the Catholic Church smacks of religious persecution. It simply does not represent the truth of the Supreme Court findings on what is and is not “free exercise” and what the government can and cannot regulate when it comes to religious institutions, practices and believers.
There seems to be a raging misunderstanding in the press right now about what constitutes separation of church and state and free exercise of religion. It is extremely bothersome to me because the free exercise clause and its meaning is well established. There is very little ambiguity about what it is and what it is not.
In 1878, the Supreme Court was first called to interpret the extent of the Free Exercise Clause in Reynolds v. United States, as related to the prosecution of polygamy under federal law. The Supreme Court upheld Reynolds’ conviction for bigamy, deciding that to do otherwise would provide constitutional protection for a gamut of religious beliefs, including those as extreme as human sacrifice.
The Court stated that “Laws are made for the government of actions, and while they cannot interfere with mere religious beliefs and opinions, they may with practices.”
This ruling has stood the test of time. It continued to be applied in the 1960s under the Warren Court. There were some decisions that moderated the original finding that come under the heading of “accommodation”. Oddly enough, the free exercise clause narrowed again in the 1980s and Antonin Scalia was one of the driving forces. In the 1990 case of Employment Division v. Smith. the court found that a law against peyote use was fine even though it had a religious use by some Native Americans. A 1993 law called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act was passed in order to broaden the interpretation. However, many parts of that law were struck down as unconstitutional. Here are a few examples of cases that didn’t pass muster with SCOTUS. Now remember, by the time these cases came up in the late 1990s, the court had clearly shifted to the right.
In the case of Adams v. Commissioner, the United States Tax Court rejected the argument of Priscilla M. Lippincott Adams, who was a devout Quaker. She tried to argue that under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, she was exempt from federal income taxes. The U.S. Tax Court rejected her argument and ruled that she was not exempt. The Court stated: “…while petitioner’s religious beliefs are substantially burdened by payment of taxes that fund military expenditures, the Supreme Court has established that uniform, mandatory participation in the Federal income tax system, irrespective of religious belief, is a compelling governmental interest.”[15] In the case of Miller v. Commissioner, the taxpayers objected to the use of social security numbers, arguing that such numbers related to the “mark of the beast” from the Bible. In its decision, the U.S. Court discussed the applicability of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, but ruled against the taxpayers.[16]
For some time, members of specific religious communities–like Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Scientists, Quakers, and the Catholic Bishops–have taken cases to the Supreme Court based on the Free Exercise clause and lost. This is why I am so confused by the complete lack of understanding in the TV Press of the current attack on birth control coverage in the HCRA. Since I am not a lawyer and have only had undergraduate classes in constitutional laws, I will defer to some one who is a well known constitutional lawyer, David Boies. He has been appearing on The Last Word show and has calmly explained why all the hysteria about free exercise of religion is just that; badly motivated hysteria.
The high, in terms of reason and clarity, came from famed attorney David Boies on MSNBC’s “The Last Word.” Lawrence O’Donnell has let male “liberal” pundits like Mark Shields wax a little shrill on his show, but to his credit, he offered the best rebuttal to all the shrieking I’ve seen so far: Boies calmly and clearly explaining the new regulations as an issue of labor law, and the government’s regulation of employers (relatively minimal, compared to other countries) on issues of health, safety and non-discrimination.
I’ve tried to make the same points: What if Catholics didn’t believe in child labor laws? Would we let church-run agencies flout them? Boies used the example of a religion that believed people shouldn’t work after age 60: Could they legally ban older people from employment? Of course, they could do neither. This is indeed an issue of religious freedom: the freedom of non-Catholics not to be bound by the dictates of the Catholic Church in the workplace.
But Boies, fresh off his 9th Circuit victory defending gay marriage, brought the legal knowledge.
Lawrence O”Donnell writes directly about this conversation.
Constitutional expert David Boies said there’s no basis for a constitutional fight with the birth control mandate. On The Last Word, he compared the current debate that’s heating up in Washington to simple tax law or labor laws.
“There isn’t a constitutional issue involved in this case,” he told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell on Wednesday. “You don’t exempt religious employers just because of their religion. You are not asking anybody in the Catholic church or any other church to do anything other than simply comply with a normal law that every employer has to comply with.” Boies, who represented Vice President Al Gore in Bush v. Gore, said “this case would have trouble getting to the court.”
So, I have one other reason that I’d like to bring all this up. We know that a few specific religious groups have a problem with Roe V. Wade and Griswold V Connecticut. We know that these people have been trying to stack the courts with sympathetic whackos for about 40 years now. It seems they’re attacking Reynolds too. If you read BB’s morning post and Peggy Sue’s last post you can see that many Republicans would just like to outlaw the judicial branch. Newt Gingrich makes it a campaign staple.
Did you know that THREE of the SCOTUS justices turn 80 in the next five years? Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Antonin Scalia, and Anthony Kennedy are the three justices. So, let’s think about what is at stake if any of these Republican presidential wannabes get to appoint a SCOTUS or three. How about major appointments to courts like the one that just overturned Prop 8?
Blowback against Specific acts of Religious Intolerance seeking legal status is not a War against Religion
Posted: February 8, 2012 Filed under: 2012 primaries, religion, religious extremists, right wing hate grouups, science, U.S. Politics 10 Comments
For a group of people obsessed about the possibility that Shari’a law might creep into US Law, christofascists sure seem to thrive on forcing their own brand of it. All the while, there’s this claim of a “war against religion”. Forcing other people to suffer from unjust and unconstitutional laws in the name of religion is not the kind of religious freedom the founders had in mind when they penned the first amendment. Religious status does not give any person or institution the ability to ignore law. Asking for enforcement of law against narrow religious doctrine does not constitution a war against religion. Our country is not suppose to favor any one religion or enshrine its pet biases into law. However, it seems every major Republican candidate hates our Constitution. How can these people truly seek an office where they are sworn to uphold it yet desire to twist the Age of Reason right out of it?
These are the same folks that have declared jihad on women’s reproductive health, science, and mathematics. Yes, remember Copernicus who had the audacity to discover that the earth revolved around the sun JUST, FINALLY got a proper burial in 2010. It only took him 600 years and hundreds of years of science to get his ticket out of hell for heresy. Meanwhile, Rick Santorum–who swept a round of beauty contests with record low turnouts–is still proving there are people out there that probably think that Galileo and Copernicus are wrong. Galileo got his apology in 1992 nearly 600 years after his death. He died in 1642. Let’s not forget the persecution and stalking of Jean-François Champollion whose Rosetta stone proved that Egypt had existed straight through the supposed dating of the great flood. That’s just a few examples from science. The use of religious texts to support slavery, ownership of all married women and children, persecution of GLBT populations around world, and wars and acts of terrorism is omnipresent. Standing against these things and creating laws to make them illegal does not mean you’re against religion. It means you are for the constitutional separation of church and state and ensuring the basic constitution granted rights of all individuals. No one’s “God” wrote the Constitution. Men afraid of religious dictatorships and intolerance did.
Why wouldn’t rational, freedom loving people want to stop the creep of christofascist biblical law wherever possible? It’s not a war against religion. It’s blowback against those who are trying to force narrow religious doctrine onto the rest of us and into law. Luckily, even Antonin Scalia has written about the complete unconstitutionality of all this.
As conservative (and Catholic) Justice Antonin Scalia explained in a Supreme Court opinion more than twenty years ago, a law does not suddenly become unconstitutional because someone raises a religious objective to it — if this actually were true, anyone at all could immunize themselves from paying taxes or from any other law simply by claiming they have a religious objection to being a law-abiding citizen.
We have all just about had it with the Catholic Bishops, Pat Robertson, and all that crap that seems to have come to culmination in the candidacy of Rick Santorum. Where’s that trademarked Santorum outrage about Cardinal Edward Egan who withdrew his apology for illegally covering up instances of pedophilia on his watch? Nope, don’t wait for it. Santorum’s too busy insisting that President Obama wants to force the Catholic Church to accept women priests. The one thing that I’ve really learned in this primary election is that Republican politicians feel so emboldened by the current hatefest in the base that they will lie about anything and know that Fox News will repeat it every chance they can.
For weeks, Republicans have pretended that President Obama is waging some kind of war on religion because his administration recently approved regulations requiring insurers to cover contraceptive care — spurred on in large part because the conservative U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops opposes the contraceptive care regulations. Their claim is utterly absurd. The new rules exempt churches from the requirement to offer insurance that covers contraception. And they align closely with the beliefs of actual Catholics, 58 percent of whombelieve that employers should be required to provide insurance that cover contraception.
On Fox News this morning, GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum doubled down on this bizarre claim that Obama is going after religion — falsely claiming that the president wants to tell Catholics who they can hire as priests:
What they’ve done here is a direct assault on the First Amendment, not only a direct assault on the freedom of religion, by forcing people specifically to do things that are against their religious teachings. . . . This is a president who, just recently, in this Hosanna-Tabor case was basically making the argument that Catholics had to, you know, maybe even had to go so far as to hire women priests to comply with employment discrimination issues. This is a very hostile president to people of faith. He’s a hostile president, not just to people of faith, but to all freedoms.
Again, if the first amendment was really serious about that then as a Buddhist, I’d like all my war tax money back now. I’d also like to argue that Rastafarians should be allowed all the legal pot they want for their sacraments. Then, let’s just go back to letting all those Mormons have multiple child brides. Religious organizations do not get to exempt themselves from laws. Again, check the Scalia reference above.
The deal is that Santorum and the Bishops and some of these other full time misogynists posing as Pharisees have had trouble with every law that’s given women the ability to make adult decisions about their own selves. This includes the SCOTUS decision giving women the constitutional right to birth control and abortion. Ron Paul has pretty much said that he doesn’t believe it’s possible for a husband to rape a wife. That falls under the laws that existed in this country prior to 1882 when women were literally written in as an appendage of the husband. Married women were not considered separate individuals which is why in many states they couldn’t own property.
It gets worse. Paul hangs around with Christian Reconstructionists. These folks are truly scary.
Reconstructionism, the right-wing religious-political school of thought founded by Rousas John Rushdoony. The ultimate goal of Christian Reconstructionists is to reconstitute the law of the Hebrew Bible — which calls for the execution of adulterers and men who have sex with other men — as the law of the land. The Constitution Party constitutes the political wing of Reconstructionism, and the CP has found a good friend in Ron Paul.
When Paul launched his second presidential quest in 2008, he won the endorsement of Rev. Chuck Baldwin, a Baptist pastor who travels in Christian Reconstructionist circles, though he is not precisely a Reconstructionist himself (for reasons having to do with his interpretation of how the end times will go down). When Paul dropped out of the race, instead of endorsing Republican nominee John McCain, or even Libertarian Party nominee Bob Barr, Paul endorsed Constitution Party presidential nominee Chuck Baldwin (who promised, in his acceptance speech, to uphold the Constitution Party platform, which looks curiously similar to the Ron Paul agenda, right down to the no-exceptions abortion proscription and ending the Fed).
At his shadow rally that year in Minneapolis, held on the eve of the Republican National Convention, Paul invited Constitution Party founder Howard Phillips, a Christian Reconstructionist, to address the crowd of end-the-Fed-cheering post-pubescents. (In his early congressional career, Julie Ingersoll writes in Religion Dispatches, Paul hired as a staffer Gary North, a Christian Reconstructionist leader and Rushdoony’s son-in-law.)
At a “Pastor’s Forum” at Baldwin’s Baptist church in Pensacola, Florida, Paul was asked by a congregant about his lack of support for Israel, which many right-wing Christians support because of the role Israel plays in what is known as premillennialist end-times theology. “Premillennialist” refers to the belief that after Jesus returns, according to conditions on the ground in Israel, the righteous will rule. But Christian Reconstructionists have a different view, believing the righteous must first rule for 1,000 years before Jesus will return.
They also believe, according to Clarkson, “that ‘the Christians’ are the ‘new chosen people of God,’ commanded to do what ‘Adam in Eden and Israel in Canaan failed to do…create the society that God requires.’ Further, Jews, once the ‘chosen people,’ failed to live up to God’s covenant and therefore are no longer God’s chosen. Christians, of the correct sort, now are.”
Responding to Baldwin’s congregant, Paul explained, “I may see it slightly differently than others because I think of the Israeli government as different than what I read about in the Bible. I mean, the Israeli government doesn’t happen to be reflecting God’s views. Some of them are atheist, and their form of government is not what I would support… And there are some people who interpret the chosen people as not being so narrowly defined as only the Jews — that maybe there’s a broader definition of that.”
Again, if you hang around folks that basically want to tear apart the constitution and insert their own religious views in place of secular law, you’re not a conservative. You’re not a libertarian. Hell, you’re not even really supporting our Constitution and basic shared American Values. Again, these are the people that say there is a religious war because they’ve basically started one. They and their Republican Toadies need to be stopped.
I wont even get into the Romney/Mormon thing because BostonBoomer has already covered a lot of that. These are not just simply pious folks that you meet at your local church potluck. They are all fanatics and they deserve all the blowback we can muster. It would be one thing if they all weren’t so politically active and they didn’t have such a huge impact on one political party. Again, this isn’t just the practice of religion, this is the practice of a zealotry akin to political terrorism. We need to recognize and call it exactly that before our rights are crushed by their very narrow interpretations of what’s science, what’s American, and what’s moral.
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