Let them get pregnant, like God intended.

By Capt. Fogg


What's worse than a bunch of creepy old man religious perverts conspiring against the health and well being of women? Well, perhaps a creepy young woman trying to make sure -- using copious amounts of taxpayer money -- to fight a requirement that health insurers cover the modest cost of birth control. Worse still, she's fighting something that in some cases is a medical necessity and in very many cases will prevent women from becoming unable to work and winding up in poverty and their children on public assistance.

Such things don't seem to matter to GOP apparatchiks like Pam Bondi, Florida Attorney General who is suing the Federal Government over the Affordable Care Act, a law that is starting to provide health care to Florida's 4.5 million uninsured and access to contraception. As the ACA will come before the US Supreme Court this month, the redundancy of this suit is as obvious as the smug unconcern Bondi has for truth, justice and freedom from the tyranny of religious nuts.

Sold as another attempt at "smaller" government, it's really nothing but a power play by the Religious Rich to make their perverted, obsessive, inhumane and antique dogmas into public policy no matter the cost. Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi may not be one of these foul, disgusting old men, but she sure as hell works for them while collecting a salary paid by the people she'd like to keep barefoot and pregnant and poor and in thrall to the superstition salesmen with the effrontery to use our freedom of religion and our tax revenues against us.

(Cross posted from Human Voices)

Too many Mormons

By Mustang Bobby.

It's posted as an "exclusive" on Buzzfeed:

In the compelling personal narrative that has helped propel Florida Senator Marco Rubio to national political stardom, one chapter has gone completely untold: Rubio spent his childhood as a faithful Mormon.

Rubio was baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with his family at around the age of eight, and remained active in the faith for a number of years during his early youth, family members told BuzzFeed.

Rubio spokesman Alex Conant confirmed the story to BuzzFeed, and said Rubio returned to the Catholic church a few years later with his family, receiving his first communion on Christmas day in 1984 at the age of 13.

And...?  So what?

Well, apparently it complicates matters in his path to being the vice presidential candidate with Mitt Romney because according to the GOP prophets of fear, loathing, and bigotry, you can't have two people of the same faith on the ticket unless they belong to the right church.  Mr. Rubio states he is a Roman Catholic, which is now acceptable in the GOP, although to hedge his bets he's also attended the megachurch here in Palmetto Bay.  (Ironically, the Constitution only prohibits two people from the same state from being president and vice president.  Mitt Romney has lived in a lot of places, but Florida isn't one of them, so Mr. Rubio is good to go on that count.)

Mr. Rubio has enough baggage, including his somewhat interesting financial history here in Florida as well as his embellished story about his family's emigration from Cuba, that he doesn't need a revelation about his faith to make him problematic in the eyes of some political strategists.  On the other hand, playing fast and loose with other peoples' money and fudging his history to make him more appealing to hard-liners gets high marks on the GOP hypocrisy meter.  All he needs is an ex-wife that he dumped when she was in the hospital to hit the trifecta.

Personally (and to paraphrase the immortal Hawkeye Pierce), the instrument has yet to be invented that could measure my indifference as to what church a candidate does or doesn't go to in terms of deciding whom to vote for.  It shouldn't even enter the picture.  That said, any candidate who declares that his or her religious beliefs would be a deciding factor in the matters of state, be it economics, foreign policy, defense, or social issues such as reproductive choice or marriage equality is instantly disqualified in my book.  If they want to keep it private -- like silent prayer -- that's a different matter, but to use their faith and practice as their defense is a cop-out because it relieves them of the responsibility of standing up for their own views.  "I'm against gays getting married because my imaginary friend Jesus H. Reagan Christ said so" gets them off the hook instead of telling the truth: "I'm against gays getting married because the idea of two men in bed makes me all tingly with ... um, moral outrage."

It is kind of funny, though, to see the Republicans hoisted on their own petard of religious bigotry.  They've gotten enough mileage out of Barack Obama's secret Muslim tropes, and they're on the verge of nominating a man who, according to Franklin Graham, isn't even a Christian.  Now they're about to disqualify one of their rising stars because at the age of eight he and his family joined the Mormons for a few years.

That's their cross to bear.

(Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Bishops, Bibles and tyranny

So let me get this straight, refusing to allow a Church to make its tenets, prohibitions and taboos the law of the land means that Barack Obama has

“cast aside the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, denying to Catholics our Nation’s first and most fundamental freedom, that of religious liberty”

thus confirming the paranoid fears of Know Nothings and anti-Catholic bigots everywhere. How can we deny that the Arizona Bishop who wrote those words in one out of many letters from Bishops read aloud last Sunday to congregations around the US has perverted the First Amendment to advocate political control of private lives by Churches -- exactly in opposition to the amendment's intent? That intent, of course it precisely to deny such power, or "freedom" if you prefer, to faith based organizations whether elected or not.

I'm sure some will try to dress this up in Sunday clothes, but it's the same old ecclesiastical evil that's been bedeviling us for millennia. What it's about, is the administration's recent decision to make birth control available to women through their private health care plans, thus making "people of faith" second class citizens, according to Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted in a display of dishonest, convoluted and perverted logic describing the demand that women be denied their rights in the name of religious freedom. Perhaps he'd like to explain why his organization pretends to hold all the moral cards here and other "faiths" would not be allowed to take rights and freedom away from their women in the name of some mangy god or demiurge -- perhaps not since it would entail exposing his Church's obscene claim to worldwide tyranny over the minds of men (and bodies of women) as Jefferson put it so unambiguously.

"Our parents and grandparents did not come to these shores to help build America’s cities and towns, its infrastructure and institutions, its enterprise and culture, only to have their posterity stripped of their God given rights.”

No they didn't and many of them came to get away from the gruesome and eldritch horrors your ilk have perpetrated in the old country.

Catholics should pray to the Virgin Mary, says he, to "intercede for the nation" since God himself seems uninterested and I would be quite satisfied if that were the extent of this blatant political power grab for which we have to pay through tax policies that allow these plutocratic men of poverty to force their nasty, inhumane policies down our throats as though we were all helpless choir boys and without having to register as a lobby. There's little to suggest that such power would be enough, as anti-democratic and anti-American and inhumane as it may be.

Personally I'd prefer to pray to Dagon or Wotan or Yog-Sothoth, my grandson's teddy bear or even to Anton Kalashnikov that our freedom can continue to endure the unremitting assault from ecclesiastical tyrants of all stripes and as we all know, Yog never forgives anything.

Amen