Komen Cut Funds to Planned Parenthood Under Pressure from Catholic Bishops

Posted: March 15, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: abortion rights, birth control, religion, U.S. Politics, War on Women, Women's Healthcare, Women's Rights | Tags: , , , | 9 Comments

Timothy Dolan, Cardinal-Archbishop of NY and President of the US. Conference of Catholic Bishops

According to a Reuters story published this afternoon, the decision by the Susan G. Komen for the Cure to end the charity’s donations to Planned Parenthood for breast cancer screening came in response to Bishops in several states ordered Catholic churches and schools not to donate to Komen. Yet, at the same time, Catholic Church-run organizations receive millions in funds from the breast cancer charity.

The earliest signs of discord came in 2005, when South Carolina’s Catholic diocese pulled out of the local Komen fundraiser. It was followed over the next four years by individual dioceses in Arizona, Indiana, Florida, Missouri and other states, where bishops either spoke out against Komen or took steps to stem donations to the charity, mainly because of its Planned Parenthood link.

The momentum picked up in 2011 when top Ohio clerics met in Columbus. High on their agenda was the question of whether the state’s nine dioceses should participate in Komen fundraisers.

Eleven Ohio Bishops agreed to ban all donations to Komen from the state’s Catholic schools and churches.

No Planned Parenthood clinics in Ohio receive Komen money. But the bishops decided that diocese funds should no longer benefit the charity, for fear that money sent from local Komen affiliates to the Dallas headquarters could wind up in Planned Parenthood’s coffers or help fund research on stem cells collected from human fetuses, according to church officials….

The Ohio bishops would soon be joined by the North Dakota Catholic Conference, which cautioned its nearly 190,000 parishioners against donating to Komen. The charity’s officials in California also say they received their first request in two decades to meet with Catholic bishops, who expressed concern about Planned Parenthood but took no action.

According to Reuters, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops hasn’t been officially involved in these decisions, because they are made at the local level, but

Observers say the local bishops’ focus on Komen and other social issues reflects a larger conservative shift within the American church since New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan became chairman of the Conference in November 2010.

Under Dolan’s leadership, the conference last year set up a new ad hoc committee on religious liberty to oppose government policies that conflict with church teachings on abortion, contraception and gay marriage.

So now we know. When the Tea Party candidates swept into Congress in 2010, Dolan saw an opportunity to step up attacks on abortion, contraception, and therefore on women’s health generally. Yet at the same time, Catholic hospitals and universities accept millions in donations from Komen. These are the same organizations that are opposing the Obama administration’s ruling that health insurance plans must cover contraception without co-pays.

What a tangled web! But the one thing we know for sure is that the Catholic Bishops are using every available avenue to pursue their war on women.

Open Thread: Regulating Men’s Reproductive Health Choices

Posted: March 11, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: fetus fetishists, Republican politics, U.S. Politics, War on Women, Women's Healthcare, Women's Rights | Tags: , , , , , , | 23 Comments

Ohio State Senator Nina Turner

Last week Ohio State Senator Nina Turner introduced state bill 307, which would require men to have several sessions with a sex therapist, a cardiac stress test, and obtain a notarized statement from their sexual partners saying they are really impotent before they could get a prescription for Viagra or any other “erectile dysfunction” drug. In addition, doctors prescribing the drugs would have to notify the patient in writing of all their possible side effects, and all documentation, including the statement from the man’s sexual partner would be kept in his medical records. From the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

Turner says she also wants to rally women across the country to push for similar bills in their states.

“It’s not a joke,” Turner told The Plain Dealer this week. “I’m dead serious. I want to continue this strong dialogue about what is fair and what is equal.”

“It is crucial that we take the appropriate steps to shelter vulnerable men from the potential side effects of these drugs,” she said in a written statement.

“The men in our lives, including members of the General Assembly, generously devote time to fundamental female reproductive issues. The least we can do is return the favor.”

Furthermore, Turner is concerned about the serious side effects of ED drugs:

“The side effects of these drugs are very real,” she told The Plain Dealer. “I want to [protect] fragile men who are vulnerable and are not able to make decisions for themselves.”

Turner says her bill is based on medical recommendations for the use of these powerful drugs::

Under Senate Bill 307, men taking the drugs would continue to be tested for heart problems, receive counseling about possible side effects and receive information about “pursuing celibacy as a viable lifestyle choice.”

“Even the FDA recommends that doctors make sure that assessments are taken that target the nature of the symptoms, whether it’s physical or psychological,” Turner said. “I certainly want to stand up for men’s health and take this seriously and legislate it the same way mostly men say they want to legislate a woman’s womb.”

Illinois State Rep. Kelly Cassidy

In Illinois, State Senator Kelly Cassidy has proposed an amendment to a state sponsored rape bill bill requiring ultrasounds for women seeking abortions. The amendment would require any man who asks for a prescription for Viagra to “watch a graphic video on the side effects” of the drug first. From HuffPo:

“If they’re serious about us not being about to make our own health care decisions, then I’m just as serious about them not being able to make theirs,” she told HuffPost on Monday….

Cassidy is one of a string of female lawmakers across the country who have introduced gender-equity amendments to anti-abortion bills. Wilmington, Del. City Councilwoman Loretta Walsh authored a resolution that declares “each ‘egg person’ and each ‘sperm person’ … equal in the eyes of the government.” Oklahoma Sen. Constance Johnson (D) proposed a “spilled semen” amendment to the state’s fetal personhood bill that would declare it an act against unborn children for men to waste sperm. Va. Sen. Janet Howell (D), meanwhile, introduced an amendment to a mandatory ultrasound bill that would require men to have a rectal exam before being prescribed Viagra.

Women Of Courage

Posted: March 11, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: abortion rights, Feminists, Festivities, fetus fetishists, Hillary Clinton: Her Campaign for All of Us, Human Rights, Violence against women, War on Women, Women's Healthcare, Women's Rights | 9 Comments

To read the biographies of this year’s recipients of the Women of Courage awards is nothing short of inspiring.  These are women who have put their lives and futures on the line to improve the quality of life for others, most specifically women and girls in parts of the world where to be female is extraordinarily difficult, even life-threatening.  These are women who would make our Bread and Roses mavens proud, infuse enough energy to conjure those slumbering spirits for another boisterous rally, another yelp for dignity and freedom.

Maryam Durani, a member of the Provencial Council, Kandahar, Afghanistan was one of ten women cited and honored last Thursday in a ceremony, hosted by First Lady Michelle Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  Here’s a wee bit of her story:

Afghanistan as we all know is not an oasis of women’s liberation.  But Ms. Durani  has pitched herself against the traditional Afghani sensibility, standing as a role model and leader in a country of ancient tribal traditions and strict paternalistic mindsets.  She is the director of the nonprofit Women’s Center for Culture and owns and operates a radio station, which focuses on informing women of their rights.  And the inherent risks of demanding those rights.

She should know.  A suicide bomber nearly ended her life, leaving her with serious injuries.  The death threats haven’t stopped.  Yet, she persists as do the women she serves because in a world where women, by virtue of their gender are considered the enemy, a threat by merely existing as autonomous human beings, there is only one response: fight back.

Here is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton introducting Ms. Durani during the Awards Ceremony last week:

Many of the women honored this year and in the past have put themselves on the frontline, encountering serious security threats to themselves and their families.  They are not the first and sadly, they won’t be the last.  The complete list of awardees can be found here.

In January 2011, many people were horrified when the body of Susana Chavez was discovered in a shallow grave.  Chavez, a young poet activist, gave voice to the disappeared women in Juarez, Mexico, nearly 800 women at the time, only to be ‘disappeared’ herself. She was later found tortured, strangled, her body mutilated.

What was her offense?

She would not stop questioning, haranguing, annoying public officials for their inadequate investigations into the deaths of so many women. She was making trouble because she gave voice to those who had no voice, often no identity because their bodies had been disfigured, disposed of, forgotten.

Chavez refused to forget. She refused to be silent.  Giving voice to the abuse of others seems to be a constant thread in all these stories.

In addition to the official US awards, PEN International remembered the murdered women writers of Mexico, eleven murders in 2011, five of whom were women. Since 2006, forty-five writers/journalists/bloggers have been murdered or disappeared because of their investigative/ activist work.

Susana Chavez is on the PEN International list. So is Yolanda Ordaz de la Cruz, the mother of two and a veteran crime/political reporter.  She was abducted by gunmen in front of her home, only to be later found decapitated.  The message is clear: remain silent or this could be you.

Threats, torture, rape, imprisonment and murder is too often the fate of women who will not be silent, who refuse to get with programs that would restrain and silence them and their sisters.  And yet, like Maryam Durani and others, they persist.  They refuse to back down.

We have our own homegrown fight in the United States, those who would roll back a woman’s right to direct her reproductive life, choose her own destiny.  Here the punishment is humiliation, censor, scorn, name-calling, legislative measures to equate a woman’s fully realized life with that of a zygote, even the willingness to probe a woman’s decision-making process [because authoritarians find women incapable of ‘right-minded’ action, otherwise known as ‘their way or the highway’].

In all these efforts, the purpose is to demean, limit, control, even eliminate women because the Daughters of Eve are traditionally viewed as a danger, a threat to the status quo.  There’s a reason Lilith is rarely mentioned.  She was wa-a-ay too uppity.

But here’s the thing: even for those of us not facing mortal danger, we can have an impact by the way we live our lives, support other women, raise our daughters and sons and in the way we give voice to those who have pushed back against female abuse in all its forms, here and around the world, past and present.

Because to quote Hillary Clinton’s famous line: Women’s Rights are indeed Human Rights.  Our quest should be to fulfill Susana Chavez’s words:  Ni Una Mas.  Ni Una Mas.

Not One More.

Women's Empowerment

In The Land Of The Delusional

Posted: March 2, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Austerity, double-speak, Economy, income inequality, Mitt Romney, religious extremists, Republican presidential politics, the GOP, U.S. Economy, War on Women, Women's Healthcare | 16 Comments

In the Land of the Delusional the Koch brothers are principled citizens who merely disagree with Democratic policy stands and are aghast at the vindictive slurs leveled against them and all other sincere, freedom-loving Republicans.  In the Land of the Delusional, the hate and rage on review is a product of pink-bellied Lefties, Alinski acolytes, looking to take down American virtue and reduce the country’s might and glory.  In the Land of the Delusional bankrupt ideas, economic mayhem and privateering can be obscured by attacks on woman, gays and the down and outers.

March is living up to its reputation—coming in like snarling Lion.  Rush Limbaugh exposed a full Monty of misogyny, his comments on Sandra Fluke provoking even House Speaker Boehner to suggest the diatribe was ‘inappropriate.’  What inspired the outburst?  Several weeks of desperate frontal attacks on women’s healthcare issues, thinly veiled and wrapped beneath ‘religious liberty’ arguments.

Let’s not kid ourselves!  This is little more than shifting the conversation from discussion over economic issues, for which the Republican party has no credible position.  The US Budget Watch has reported that Republican plans to slash taxes on corporations and high-income earners would explode the national debt up to $3 trillion. And for all the ballyhoo by the Norquist group the Washington Post reported [as well as many other sources] that the country’s revenue-collection has eroded to a 60-year low.

From the WP report:

Polls show that a large majority of Americans blame wasteful or unnecessary federal programs for the nation’s budget problems. But routine increases in defense and domestic spending account for only about 15 percent of the financial deterioration, according to a new analysis of CBO data.

The biggest culprit, by far, has been an erosion of tax revenue triggered largely by two recessions and multiple rounds of tax cuts. Together, the economy and the tax bills enacted under former president George W. Bush, and to a lesser extent by President Obama, wiped out $6.3 trillion in anticipated revenue. That’s nearly half of the $12.7 trillion swing from projected surpluses to real debt. Federal tax collections now stand at their lowest level as a percentage of the economy in 60 years.

Trickle Down Economics in Nature

But why let facts stand in the way.  Paul Ryan, the Republican’s designated ‘serious thinker’ certainly doesn’t.

Ryan also complimented Romney’s economic plan. The congressman’s stamp of approval has been important for Republicans since he earned praise last year for his ambitious budget — which would dramatically change Medicare— from strong conservatives.

“Very credible. They are talking about entitlement reform. They are putting specifics on the table on Medicare and Social Security reform. The president, knowing that these are the big drivers of our debt, is ducking it,” Ryan said of Romney’s proposals.

Ah, yes.  The ideologically blind leading those blinded by ambition.  That certainly gives me confidence.

But as Paul Krugman suggested a mere 10 ten days ago, Mitt Romney let slip a truism in the swirl of Michigan campaigning when he said:

“If you just cut, if all you’re thinking about doing is cutting spending, as you cut spending you’ll slow down the economy.”

Over which the ideological purists set the dogs loose.  The Club for Growth immediately denounced the Romney slip, insisting that it was a clear indication that Mitt was an imposter, not a ‘true’ limited government conservative [translation: not willing to drown all government in that Norquist bathtub].

What’s a candidate to do?  Retreat, of course, in the same way Romney flipped on the Blunt Amendment, breaking all records, I would guess. In less than an hour, Candidate Romney twisted from ‘not going to go there’ to ‘of course, I support it.’  Enough to make your head spin.  This is a political party in the death throes.

So, what’s the best way to distract?

Let’s pillory the women, start calling them sluts or suggest they film sexual exploits for the sake of some overweight, mean-spirited shock jock.  Or let’s pretend that the perceived decline of the Nation rests squarely on the shoulders of the Gay Community and their screechy insistence that they too expect and deserve [can you believe the gall of these people] basic civil rights.  And don’t forget the statistics on the ever-expanding numbers of Americans slipping into poverty.  We tried calling them losers and moochers.  How about we deny they exist, the way a North Carolina legislator recently announced.  Yes sir, that’s the ticket!

In the Land of the Delusional schizophrenics rule the day, magical thinking replaces reason and bare-foot and pregnant is a very good thing.  In the Land of the Delusional all things are possible.

Except the truth.

Thursday Reads: Happy Animals, Dickish Theocrats, Jurassic Fleas, and ET’s

Posted: March 1, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, 2012 primaries, morning reads, religious extremists, Reproductive Rights, Republican presidential politics, U.S. Politics, War on Women, Women's Healthcare | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | 85 Comments

Good Morning!!

I thought I’d start out with something upbeat. How about some photos of happy animals? Buzzfeed has 26 of them. Here are some of my favorities:

How can you not smile at those? Check out the rest at Buzzfeed, and don’t miss the joyful anteater!

Now let’s get to the news. I thought Michigan was a winner-take-all state, but I guess not. The Santorum campaign claims the result was really a tie, because Willard and Rick the Dick will each get 15 delegates from Michigan.

While there has been no final determination of who won how many delegates in Michigan on Tuesday, current results suggest both candidates won seven of the state’s 14 congressional districts, each of which award two delegates to the winner. In addition, Santorum adviser John Brabender said the state’s two at-large delegates are likely to be split between Romney and Santorum because the vote was so close.

So I guess it’s winner-take-all by district? I don’t understand the GOP delegate system at all.

“It’s highly likely this is is going to end up being a tie, based on the data that we have,” Brabender said. “I don’t know how you look at that as anything besides this being a strong showing for Rick Santorum and anything short of a disaster for Mitt Romney.

“If we can do this well in Romney’s home state, this bodes well for Super Tuesday.”

Romney won the popular vote in the state by about 3 percentage points, according to the latest tally.

The final delegate totals haven’t been determined yet, according to the WaPo article.

According to numbers whiz Sean Trende at Real Clear Politics, Odds of a Brokered Convention Are Increasing

We’re finally close enough to Super Tuesday to get a sense of how the overall delegate count might work out in the GOP primary. The end result: Assuming that none of the four candidates drops out of the race, it looks increasingly as if no one will be able to claim a majority of the delegates. The candidate with the best chance is Mitt Romney, but he probably wouldn’t be able to wrap up the nomination until May or even June. The other candidates will probably have to hope for a brokered convention.

Trende lays out the Super Tuesday math state by state. Check it out at the above link. Can you believe Super Tuesday is less than a week away? I can’t decide if I should vote on the Dem or Repub ballot. I guess I’ll decide at the last minute. I don’t think Elizabeth Warren has any real competition, but I’ll need to find out for sure.

Ed Kilgore had an interesting post yesterday at Political Animal. Rick Santorum lost the Catholic vote to Romney in Michigan 44-37. I guess Rick has the Bishops but not the rank and file Catholics who like to plan their families. Kilgore:

Immediately there was speculation that Rick’s visceral dissing of JFK’s church-state relations speech might have contributed significantly to this result, or had perhaps cost him Michigan altogether.

That was my initial reaction, too, until I started wondering: why did we all assume Santorum had an advantage among Catholics in the first place? …. as I and others have amply documented, the idea that Catholics are more conservative than Americans generally, even on “social issues,” is pretty much a myth. But you had to figure that the kind of Catholics who choose to vote in Republican primaries are pretty significantly correlated with “traditionalists” like Rick, right?

That’s actually not so clear at all. The last contest with exit polling by the networks was Florida. There Santorum won 13% of the overall vote, but just 10% of Catholics; Mitt Romney ran a bit better among Catholics than he did overall. Now maybe you could say Florida’s heavily Latino Catholic vote is atypical. What about South Carolina? There Santorum won 17% of the overall vote, but just 15% of Catholics. Again, Romney performed a bit better among Catholics than among voters generally.

It doesn’t really surprise me. I wonder why Kilgore didn’t break down the gender numbers? I’ll bet Catholic women didn’t care for Santorum’s act.

The New Civil Rights Movement blog has more interesting details on which population groups voted for Rick the Dick and which ones preferred Willard.

Speaking of dickish theocrats, Darrell Issa may have topped Rick the Dick Tuesday at the latest War on Women hearing in the House. From the estimable Sarah Posner at Religion Dispatches:

One of the strangest moments at yesterday’s very strange hearing on whether a regulation duly promulgated under a law passed by Congress was “executive overreach” and an infringement of religious freedom was when Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Not Catholic) asked to have the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae entered into the Congressional Record.

His point, obviously, upon questioning the now-ubiquitous Bishop William Lori of the Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, was to show the authoritative (or rather, authoritarian) roots of the Catholic opposition to “artificialqui” contraception.

There it is now, part of the Congressional Record! A document few Catholics follow, and which provoked dissent from (believe it or not) American bishops when Pope Paul VI issued it in 1968.

I’m really starting to tire of bishops testifying before Congressional hearings and now we have quotes from Papal Encyclicals in the Congressional Record?! WTF?

Via Think Progress, disgusting misogynist pig Rush Limbaugh opened his bit yap yesterday and

called Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown student whom House Republicans wouldn’t let testify at a contraception hearing last week, a “slut” and a “prostitute” today, because, Limbaugh argued, she’s having “so much sex” she needs other people to pay for it:

LIMBAUGH: What does it say about the college co-ed Susan Fluke [sic] who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex. What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex.

You can hear the clip at Media Matters if you are so inclined. I decided not to listen.

Also at Think Progress, check out Alyssa Rosenberg’s Pop Culture Guide to the War on Women.

In science news, an article in Nature reveals that Dinosaurs had giant fleas–about an inch long!

Female (left) and male fleas from the Jurrassic Period

Primitive fleas were built to sup on dinosaur blood in the Jurassic period, more than 150 million years ago. The potential host–parasite relationship has been uncovered thanks to a set of beautifully preserved fossils found in China.

Today, the varied group of parasitic insects known as fleas frequently infests mammals, birds and thankfully we have products like Comforits amazon to remedy those woes. But little is known about their origins. The flea fossil record consists mainly of modern-looking species from the past 65 million years, and the identity of possible fleas from the Cretaceous period (145 million to 65 million years ago) has been debated by experts. But Michael Engel, a palaeoentomologist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, and his colleagues have now extended the history of the parasites by at least 60 million years. Their work is published online today in Nature1.

Engel and his co-authors studied nine flea specimens from two sites: the 165-million-year-old Jurassic deposits in Daohugou and the 125-million-year-old Cretaceous strata at Huangbanjigou, both in China. The insects were not quite like fleas as we now know them. Whereas modern fleas range from 1 to 10 millimetres in length, the Jurassic and Cretaceous species were between 8 and 21 millimetres. “These were hefty insects as far as fleas are concerned,” says Engel.

If you’re more interested in futuristic science, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is going “live on the web.”

Announced at a technology conference in Los Angeles, the site Setilive.org will stream radio frequencies that are transmitted from the Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Allen Telescope Array in Northern California.

Participants in the project, being run by Jillian Tarter of the Seti Institute’s Center for Seti Research, will be asked to search for signs of unusual activity in the hope the human brain can find things automated systems might miss.

“There are frequencies that our automated signal detection systems now ignore, because there are too many signals there,” Tartar told BBC News.

I think just about anyone can volunteer to help sort out unusual frequencies from radio and TV signals.

Finally, Davy Jones of the artificially created ’60s group The Monkees died yesterday of a heart attack at 66. From TMZ:

An official from the medical examiner’s office for Martin County, Florida confirmed with TMZ they received a call from Martin Memorial Hospital informing them that Jones had passed away.

We’re told Davy suffered the heart attack at a ranch near his Florida home, where he was visiting his horses. Davy began experiencing distress while he was sitting in his car, and that’s where a ranch hand found him.

The ranch hand told Sheriff’s detectives … the singer began to complain that he was not feeling well and was having trouble breathing. Paramedics were called and Jones was taken to a nearby hospital where he was pronounced dead. Authorities say there are no suspicious circumstances surrounding his death.

Here’s one of the group’s classic bubblegum hits. RIP Davy Jones.

That’s it for me. What are you reading and blogging about today?

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