Dammit, And Today Was The Day I Planned To Show My Support For Chick-Fil-AYYY

Holy Weekend Olio: Miraculous Imprints Of The Inside Of Your Own Eyeballs Edition

• If there was a God She'd be way too embarrassed to allow this Shroud of Turin horseshit to come up year after year after fucking year. Q.E.D.

By the way, for extra laughs, there's the usually authoritative Wikipedia slog, which spends its entire "Science" section referring to people who don't believe this is the single, gosh-darned, authentic proof of something no one's ever found a scrap of other evidence for, in a couple thousand years of a billion people trying, as "skeptics". 

• Shorter Michael Gerson,  Fred Hiatt's Petting Zoo Sennightly:  All the gravestones at the American Normandy cemetery are either crosses or Stars of David. Things were much better then.

Those cheering the trend of religious disaffiliation should consider some broader social consequences. The rise of the nones is symptomatic of the decline of many forms of belonging. According to Pew, all of the recent growth in the nones has come among those who are not married. This indicates a group of people distrustful of institutions, with marriage being the most basic of institutions. The unaffiliated donate less to charity than do the affiliated. They participate in fewer volunteer organizations. Individualism can easily become atomization. Whatever else you may think of the communitarian creeds, they help create community.

Really, th' fuck happened to you people? How did religious observance turn into an infomercial? Yeah, there are a few crackpots out there like me, who like to poke you for praying on the hustings, and demanding Special Recognition for your own particular peccadilloes, but most people would be content to leave you alone to believe whatever it is you believe. Just turn the volume down, huh? It's for your own good

And, for the record, that's "the affiliated self-report donating more to charity. They also report attending church twice as often as they, uh, actually do. 

• Dear Lord, is it not simply enough to report that the title of this thing is "Time to stop hooking up. (You know you want to.)" ?

If not, then this is:

When I was an undergraduate at Georgetown University in the early 1990s, my roommate and I dressed up like prostitutes for Halloween. We bought fishnets, wore our tightest, sexiest clothes and sauntered out like we were the hottest girls alive.

I remember that night fondly, even though my feminist sensibilities cringe a little now. For me, that costume was a form of sexual experimentation. I chose to dress sexier than I ever had and to stretch the boundaries of what I considered acceptable. And back then, I didn’t know anyone else who had done it.

Yeah, back in the 90s, when everyone was prudish.

Half the damned research, you should pardon the expression, involves the rather obviously Catholic Freitas interviewing Catholic students at Catholic schools, and finding a distinction between what they do and what they say they believe, or "feel." Stop the Presses! Alert the Curia! Then blaming The Culture. One forgets, sometimes, just how valuable Commies were in their day. 

Dating is Dead! We might call this the Lawrence Welk Conundrum; the Welk Show's still playing on PBS, despite the fact that anyone who volunteered to watch that blend of de-sensualized music and blinding polyester hues the first time around is long since dead. That it still exists, and that the "Welk Stars" continue to pack 'em in in Branson, is to cultural studies what claims of mysterious scat piles are to Bigfoot. 

Why don't you fucking worry about guns? Or the economy? And not whether young adults like the sex, or have the sex, or might regret having the sex? Take it from someone who's had it more than once: it doesn't need the evil cachet of trendiness to recommend it.

• Pope washes female feet; crowd goes wild. Both fer and agin'. Wasn't this guy infallible as little as a week ago?  

Her Lips Are Moving

OKAY, so by now everybody's had his little fun with that Noonan column. So all I want to add is that, being dedicated to a sportive enjoyment of Bronze Age superstition on a daily basis, I watched every fifteen-to-twenty-minute segment the CBS morning program opened with while it had Charlie and Nora in Rome, and they kissed more rings in a week than Vince Lombardi did in a lifetime. I also watched the locals, of course, and stopped any time I saw a shot of that chimney, or a progression of men in lace, and I never caught a moment when the coverage didn't take this stuff at least as serious as it takes itself. And that is Damned Serious, indeed.

If Nooners doesn't like the fact that the teleprompter readers might've mentioned “gender” and “celibacy” and “pedophile” a couple times, in between bouts of mass Stendahl syndrome caused by the pageantry of it all, she ought to take it up with her fellow American Catholics, whose concerns those are. Because as far as I'm concerned "news" coverage of the RCC ought fairly to scream a reminder every thirty seconds that these same child rapists, professional erotophobes, and cosmogonical sexists are, when they aren't out playing dress up, tapping vast sources of untaxed cash in an attempt to keep women who don't share their faith from controlling their own reproductive systems. Care to comment, Peg? There was so much fluffing of Timothy Cardinal Dolan (he of the private masses for The Media), to name the most egregious example, that if the thing had gone on through the weekend I think his vow of chastity would'a been compromised. I saw two interviews with the man where the toughest question was whether the mic was at the right height for him.

Look, Peg: your Church already had a nineteen-hundred year history of avarice, torture, enslavement, genocide, class warfare, theft, usury, deception, gluttony, and aerodynamically unsafe wimple design. The Catholic Church had, let's be charitable for no reason other than it puts the mock to the euphemism and call it a questionable relationship with European fascism in the living memory of, among others, your Pope Emeritus. And which was, in the postwar world, given a pass Werner von Braun must've envied. The new guy, was a mere child, and should be asked only to justify his own relationship to the sometimes unpleasant realities of Argentinian politics and assassination. And who will, no doubt, be as forthcoming as his recent predecessors have been.

I'm sorry, but if "church observers" on "th' teevee" brought any of that up I missed it. The Church managed, without a bit of outside assistance, to add to that history an organized ring of boy buggery and fucking topped that with a systematic program of avoiding the problem, as well as the laws of men. That didn't happen once, or twice. It happened often enough to invoke RICO statutes. It is so shocking, and so extensive, that swoon apologists such as yourself are required to admit it existed.

But the rest of us are supposed to apologize to you for noticing.

Abortion Rights Have Nothing To Do With Women, Says Noted Catholic Man

Ross Douthat, "Divided by Abortion, United by Feminism". January 26

EVERY so often I like to ponder Ross Douthat's place in American letters. I always enlarge his Times headshot to screen size and stare at it while I do. It's a real cure for seriousness. Lock yourself away from sharp objects sometime and try it.

Hey, I'm from the American Midwest, and not the particularly hip part. I haven't much cared how other people looked, or dressed, since Disco, and I don't give a fuck if you like my jeans. All I know about the fashion sense of people under thirty is that they have atrocious taste in eyewear, and good taste in hats. Or that pretty much everyone in the boho sections of town dresses like Johnny Depp.

So maybe there's some semiosis of joy in Douthat's teenage beard/receding-hairline-with-the-little-poofy-thing-in-front combo that I'll never get. Maybe blues and browns of exactly the same tint are the perfect choice for his skin tone. I'm no expert. But the eyes! Eyes are not subject to the cruel mockeries of fashion designing. I've done this little experiment three or four times, and I can't decide if those are the eyes of a pudgy sixth grader intimidating a second grade boy on the playground, or those of that same sixth grader caught with his hands in his lap by Sister Immaculata. Do they not allow retakes at the Times? They gave me three at the BMV. Fuck you, pal. Goddam James Reston used the same pic for twenty-five years!

Or is this some sartorial recapitulation, intended or otherwise, of Douthat's intellectual world? He did, after all, consciously choose a worldview which would either stick him in time at age seventeen, or have to be renounced. He hasn't renounced it, and time is up, unless he wants to change sects again, in which case he's gonna have to go in for something with robes, because just another Christian denomination won't cut it.

Those stereotypes link the anti-abortion cause to traditionalist ideas about gender roles — to the belief that a woman’s place is in the home, or at least that her primary identity should be maternal rather than professional. Writing in the Reagan era, the sociologist Kristin Luker argued that this dimension of the debate trumped the question of whether unborn human life has rights: “While on the surface it is the embryo’s fate that seems to be at stake, the abortion debate is actually about the meaning of women’s lives.”

There are two possibilities here: one, that Douthat has carefully considered Luker's work over a thirty-five year career; or, two, that this is a remembered "Reagan era" pull-quote from his prep school debate society.

You decide.

At any rate, since Luker has actually taken the time to argue the point, maybe presenting it as though it is axiomatic to the entire pro-choice movement is, oh, a skosh unfair. Although it probably wowed 'em at Hamden Hall.

This remains a dominant pro-choice understanding of the abortion conflict — and not without reason, since it finds vindication to this day in the idiot “mansplaining” of amateur gynecologists like Todd Akin.

Also Known As the dominant anti-abortion understanding of the issue.

(Mansplaining. Jesus Christ, why do we even care anymore?)

But such an understanding was too simplistic when Nellie Gray founded the March for Life, and it’s grown steadily less compelling with time. As Jon Shields of Claremont McKenna College pointed out last year, pro-life sentiment has been steady over the last four decades even as opposition to women in the work force (or the military, or the White House) has largely collapsed.

"Sure, the metaphysical certainties which serve as the foundation of the anti-abortion movement have, with time, crumbled to dust. But our contemporary apologetics trump your pronouncements from The Reagan Era, so we win."

The pro-life cause has proved unexpectedly resilient, in other words, not because millions of Americans are nostalgists for a world of stricter gender norms, but because they have convinced themselves that the opportunities the feminist revolution won for women can be sustained without unrestricted access to abortion.

Yeah, and these same millions believe you can bomb cities to rubble and kill only bad guys. It's called "having the confidence of not having to think things through".

This conviction is crucial to understanding why opinion on abortion has been a persistent exception to the liberalizing cultural trends that have brought us gay marriage, medical marijuana and now women in combat.

Oh, jeez louise. "Gay marriage, medical marihuana, and now women in combat"? I'll believe you've transcended stereotypical gender roles when you stop sounding like David Gergen debating Abbie Hoffman.

It helps explain, too, why public opinion on the issue doesn’t break down along the gendered lines that many liberals expect — why more women than men, for instance, told the latest Pew survey that abortion was “morally wrong” and (in smaller numbers) that Roe should be overturned. 

It also has long-term implications for how the abortion debate plays out. The best way to argue with a Todd Akin is to dismiss him as a chauvinist, a creep and the enemy of a more enlightened future. But the best pro-choice rebuttal to the young idealists at the March for Life or the professional women who lead today’s anti-abortion groups isn’t that they’re too reactionary — it’s that they’re too utopian, too radical, too naïve.

Thanks for the advice, Ross. I'm sure everyone will take it the way it's intended.

But a couple things, here. First, fuck single-issue responses in a single fucking Pew poll. I will readily concede that the vast majority of Americans, of any of a half-dozen genders, asked if innocent, blue-eyes babies should be freely sacrificed on the altar of Sluttiness, will answer No, if you'll concede that this is, in fact, a too-accurate summary of the debate over the last forty years. Utopian? Naïve? More like self-righteous and devoid of responsibility to fact.

Second: Todd Akin is yours. Evangelical gynecology may be an embarrassment, but it's one even some of your OB/GYNs agree with. Richard Mourdock didn't even bother defining "legitimate rape". He just stated the official Republican position, that rape's not a suitable grounds for terminating a pregnancy. He got slaughtered, in Indiana, in a Republican year (but I repeat myself!), in large measure because a majority of women voters missed that Pew survey.

This means that the abortion rights movement, once utopian in its own fashion, is now at its most effective when it speaks the language of necessary evils, warning Americans that while it might be pretty to think so, the equality they take for granted simply can’t be separated from a practice they find troubling.

Troubling? People do not say they find Murder "troubling".

Look, once again, here's a big part of your problem: your side lost this argument in the late 60s, lost it on simple rational grounds (which, by the by, happen to coincide with that Great Libertarian Inclination your party keeps spouting about) and, as a result, stopped talking to anyone but itself. It's a very simple argument: there are circumstances which develop, sometimes late in pregnancy, where the fetus becomes a threat to the woman's continued existence. And at that point two decisions have to be made: Which will doctors try to save, and Who makes that decision?

There's a (bullshit) Christian folk-theology which requires the mother to go down with the ship, as it were, but this has no real historical existence; the vaunted Roman Catholic respect for Life dates at most to the 19th century, and calls upon some obscure 3rd century text no one pays attention to otherwise for its justification. Into the 20th century all this was moot, because such medical problems couldn't be detected ahead of time, and much less could be done--especially for the fetus--once they were. It is, in short, a modern problem for which the Bronze Age is no guide even if you could clearly demonstrate its beliefs. Which you can't.

So we have, now, the tiny but significantly-placed leak which washes out mighty dams, let alone ad hoc political positions. You can't proclaim the Sanctity of the Zygote and then act like you haven't taken a position on this, and one, in fact, that most Americans would find abhorrent if Pew explained it to them. If a blastocyst is a fully-protected (funny, if you look at it right, innit it?) human being, then terminating one's life is homicide. Doing so willfully is murder. (And it's subject to the various jurisdictions of the various states, according to the lights of the local DA, a rather pleasant artifact of the Let The States Decide argument.) It means that if you're driving along at the speed limit, drop your glasses, reach for them, get into a fender bender with the car in front of you which has stopped suddenly, and the pregnant woman passenger goes into labor, delivering a premature, stillborn infant, you've committed vehicular homicide. Hell, bump into someone with a shopping cart and the same result could obtain. Last week Indiana courts released a woman who'd been jailed for two years on feticide charges because she tried to commit suicide. She was released on a technical objection to the autopsy. The question of whether charges will be refiled is a political football. Your little font fucking overflows with human compassion.

That's before we come to rape, and the complete insanity (and inhumanity) of the Defenders of Life. It's before we come to the question of whether a woman who has too much to drink one night should be sentenced to twenty years hard labor. It's before we ask whether a citizen should control her health, or have the state explain what's best.

It's before we talk about contraception.

The right to privacy was the best, smartest, and most enlightened solution to the question. The legitimate response (thanks, Todd) of anti-abortionists, and religious absolutists, and the Life affirmers, should be to offer lifelong support for mothers and infants. Not to do the old wink wink We Won't Object to Abortions for Rape or to Save Mothers' Lives if You Just Let Us Ban the Rest routine. Especially when it comes from Catholic males.

Call me when you've got that sorted out, Ross.

Let Me Count The Ways

I WAS at a funeral last week. Three family members spoke, each expressing a heartfelt conviction that the recently deceased was, at long last, reunited with her dead husband. In heaven, not just below the frostline.

And, scoffer and mocker that I am, I enjoyed the umpteenth occasion in my life when some Official Licensed spokesman for God had to get up and step gingerly around the magical, and un-Scriptural, thinking on display, and add a little actual Christian teaching about Death while hoping no one noticed enough to stiff the collection. I didn't envy him his job. My wicked enjoyment came from the knowledge that he and I, alone in that room, in all likelihood, understood that he routinely spoke to roomsful of fellow believers who do not believe the same thing he does.

At this point I read Gregg Easterbrook just because I'm curious whether the mounting religious mania is going to take him over completely before ESPN cans him for writing five consecutive football columns that fail to mention football.

I may be given to a bit of hyperbole concerning religious mania, but the fact is that this is mostly an artifact of its political uses. I have nothing but respect for real religious maniacs, provided they observe two simple rules: they have to permit everyone else in the world to be his or her own kind of religious maniac, too. And they can't proselytize unbidden. Not even--perhaps especially--their dependent children. That is, just respect the fact that your religious experience is yours alone, and is not to be inflicted on anyone who doesn't seek you out. Admittedly this reduces the exceptions, statistically, to zero.

I don't mean you cannot make your preference known, if you see fit; I just mean that you should recognize that it can't possibly convince anyone, and no one else should be expected to believe you, agree with you, or imagine you to be sane. In exchange you can have whatever flights of religious fancy/insanity you choose, write all the religious books you want, and bore the chi-pants off anyone who asks you about it.

It's no different than sex, is it? We don't let parents do that in front of the children. We think sexual orientation is your business, and you're free to make it known, or keep it hidden.  Your thoughts on felching, or fisting, or stigmata are your own, and should stay there. Just as others should be free to pursue their own thoughts without you shouting your way into them without warning.

And leave it out of your goddam football column.

And on the Seventh Day, God Asked for a Refund: Since Washington politicians want to avoid dealing with the federal deficit, why not use time debating the origin of the universe? Republican bright light and possible 2016 presidential hopeful Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) recently said about the origin of the cosmos: "I don't think I'm qualified to answer a question like that. There are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created and I think this is a country where people should have the opportunity to teach them all. I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says. Whether the Earth was created in seven days, or seven actual eras, I'm not sure we'll ever be able to answer that." This caused commentators to recall that in 2008, Barack Obama, then a presidential candidate, said, "I believe God created the universe and that the six days in the Bible may not be six days as we understand it. It may not be 24-hour days, and that's what I believe."

Obviously a politician asked a question like this is trying to come down firmly on both sides, seeming to endorse science and religion both.

Of course, even if by some Divine Miracle, or sudden outbreak of Scriptural observance, every Christian in America took his prayers to his closet, Facile Libertoonianism as a cover for folk cosmogony would be with us always. No one was "reminded" of what Barack Obama said; somebody dug that up in hopes of deflecting the latest model of Can't Miss "Conservative" revealing the wholly mazed worldview behind him. Rubio wasn't tiptoeing a line. He was claiming that Young Earth Creationism is on an equal footing with Sanity. In public science courses. (None of these guys seems to think we should "Teach the controversy" on our coinage.) Rubio hasn't come down on both sides. He's specifically refused to back his own side in explicit terms. The President stated his personal views outright. Maybe he fudged them, but if so he did it in a way which "conforms" to Western scientific thought since Copernicus. Maybe they're full of shit, too; "six days might not mean six twenty-four hour periods" does tend to gloss over, just a tad, the fact that the general run of the Creation tale in Genesis doesn't jibe with the facts, six days, six millennia, six ways from the Sabbith, but that doesn't mean the President can't believe it.

No, Senator Rubio didn't actually come out and say "Science is bunk." What he did say, effectively, is that Science can fairly be treated as bunk. That's not straddling. That's weaseling.

Saying that the six days of Genesis may be a metaphor for a far longer period seems a reaction to a sense that an entire universe could not have been created in just 144 hours.

It's not a "sense". It's a fact. The universe is billions of years old.

But why not? If God is omnipotent, there's no barrier to a very rapid creation.

Why is this so difficult? Only because people wish to make it difficult, because they don't like the simple (and obvious) answer. Yes, an omnipotent God could, at every turn, create a universe precisely as described in Genesis (except for the small problem that the Creation tale of Genesis 1 contradicts that of Genesis 2, but let's leave you a few cherished idiocies). And then, for whatever Mysterious reason, He could create a chain of evidence designed to fool every thinking person since the invention of the telescope. Just as an omniscient God could have written all this vital stuff down 6000 years ago in Ancient Hebrew, the one universally understood and utterly unambiguous human tongue.

And if so there's no fucking way to know anything, including the accuracy of your Book, and certainly not the "best" way to understand it:

The Bible is best understood as an accurate record of actual events -- it may not be, but that's the way the Bible is best understood. Other biblical references to days are to regular 24-hour days. Why shouldn't the six days of the creation also be regular 24-hour days?

It "may not" be? It ain't. The only way that "literally" is the best way to take the Bible is if that's what you've pinned your hopes of being right about Everything on. Look, there was no Exodus. There simply wasn't. There's no archaeological evidence of Egyptian captivity, no archaeological evidence of a million Israelites wandering in the Sinai for forty years, not contemporary record of any of this except in Hebrew writings, despite the fact that the Egyptians kept records of every sheet of toilet paper they used. There was no conquest of Canaan. No Battle of Jericho. The foundational stories of the people who "transmitted" the "word of God" are the same sort of mythological tale-spinning every culture we know about has engaged in. They are pre-science, pre-history, and non-contemporary. They're beautifully written, often, and a world treasure, but the only way they can be understood by a sentient 21st century Westerner is as a collection of folk tales.

Suppose the cosmos came into being entirely via natural forces. This does not necessarily eliminate God from the equation, it only means that the universe began naturally, as we observe many other aspects of existence to be natural.

It does, however, eliminate the Bible as a literal guide, don't it?

The current Big Bang consensus holds that all the material needed for a cosmos of 100 billion galaxies was once within an area much smaller than a baseball, that the triggering event of the universe was a random quantum fluctuation and that in the initial moments, space expanded far faster than the speed of light.

I'm no physicist. Is this the "consensus", or is it the consensus that without faster-than-light expansion the current Big Bang model is mired, maybe hopelessly? That wouldn't reset the default back to "King James Version".

Maybe that is actually what happened. But that description -- a hundred billion galaxies in a tiny place -- in many ways seems more speculative, more freewheeling, than placing God in command of the show. And if a natural-origin universe was able to expand much faster than the speed of light, then creation in six days doesn't sound so out of the question.

The last time "what sounds commonsensical" was a way to understand physics, Einstein was still refusing to learn to talk.

In any event, a supernatural could exist, and natural forces (the Big Bang, evolution) also exist. You wouldn't want to rely on religion for explanations of the natural world. But you wouldn't want to rely on science for morality, either. As William Jennings Bryan said at the Scopes trail -- Bryan believed the Earth to be 4.5 billion years old and often said so, the play "Inherit the Wind" took many liberties with facts of that trial -- "Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals."

However closely Bryan's personal beliefs accorded with the science of the day, he was not a scientist. Marco Rubio may be a secret String Theorist, for all we know. If so he's denying the truth for his own enrichment. Does the Bible have anything to say about that?

And the religious pleading that "morality depends on us" is basically refuted by looking at what religious people do. Or at what non-religious people do. If public morality depends on religion, God help us.

Words Don't Mean Things. And Allow Me To Explain.

Jennifer Rubin, "Richard Mourdock and media misrepresenttation." October 24

Mona Charen, "Rape, God, and Liberals". October 26

I MADE the mistake of turning on the local news yesterday morning, not because I meant to hear what they had to say, or sound out phonetically, about Richard Mourdock, but just because I was still on FOX from watching Game One of the Series the night before when I hit the power button.  

Lemme just say this about the local FOX affiliate news: a decade or more ago the always illuminating combination of greed and desperation gave someone in upper management the age-old delusion brilliant idea that a Young, Hip morning newscast would draw in the delusional desired Young, Hip audience. This being America, they did not go out and find Young, Hip talent, or Hip, Young writers; they swiped the Morning Zoo format, sanitized it for television, staffed the studio with something like a dozen careerist graduates of the Communications departments of various Middle Western land grant colleges, and directed them to behave as if a) every day was Casual Friday; and b) they were slightly buzzed.

The results were even more gruesome than that sounds. If possible. The thing had all the wit and charm of a backyard barbecue three houses over in some godawful treeless subdivision, at just the point where everyone's had at least three beers and somebody decides to crank up the radio. It sorta broke up the same way, as I recall: you looked up and realized there were just six people left, then four, then they had new graphics, and the host and hostess were seated at a desk, slightly hung-over, trying to hide their sheepishness, and trying, with even less success, to behave like adults.

They've never recovered; the effect on their news division was much like the effect on Egypt when Nasser had all the intellectuals taken out and shot. I immediately hit the button on the remote than sends you to the previous channel, which turned out to be CBS, and before I could punch in some other number--this was all pre-coffee, fer chrissakes--got to hear their Top of the Hour pitch for the upcoming interview with a woman who was conceived when her mother was raped.

And who was bravely speaking out for brave Richard Mourdock.

In an audio interview.

Channel 8 used to be the gold standard of local news, back when "local news" meant a half-hour of people reading news, weather, and sports, not ninety minutes of Jack in the Box openings. It's fallen on hard times, and has made a rather clear effort to gain viewership by stovepiping Republican talking points. I don't know if this is cynical, manipulative, or both. I do know that these people willingly rode along with the dumbing-down of the news, beginning with the Happy Talk format of the 70s, and now, a generation later, if they want to convince the audience of some ideological point or other the result is a sea of virtual blank stares. Petards are for hoisting.

At any rate, the story was a Channel 8 exclusive, and, at any rate, it turns out that:

• The facts of the case rely exclusively on the woman's say-so. (I'm not suggesting we doubt her, but I am suggesting this was perhaps reason to do some reporting, try to interview the mother, that sorta thing.)

• She was adopted, under circumstances left unexplained, making her a) whiteness and b) health, proper number of limbs, and relative trainability important factors in today's market.

• She met her mother twenty years ago, which is when she got the story.

• She now spends her time as a "Pro-Life" speaker.

• The rape occurred in 1972.

• That's prior to Roe v. Wade. Abortions were illegal in Indiana.

• The fact that an abortion was not a legal option is dealt with by having the mother consider an illegal one.

• This point--that the mother and rape victim still had the option to terminate the pregnancy, only at extremely greater risk--seems to get lost immediately.


As is so often the case in the Faux Balance world, an instance which screamed for real balance didn't even get the Faux treatment.

IT'S hardly surprising that the attempts to walk Mourdock back have avoiding addressing his actual point; that's been the stock in trade of Right to Lifers for forty years. Mourdock wasn't asked about his metaphysical beliefs. He used them to answer the question. He said, essentially, that there should be no exceptions to a total ban on pregnancy termination except the life of the mother. He said, essentially, "Well, we've had two months to refine what Todd Akin said, so here goes: he was wrong about that 'no-pregnancy-from-rape' thing, and spot-on otherwise. Thank you very much."

And this, as has been pointed out many a time since, is the Republican position on reproductive rights. And it's theocratic malarky. And, despite all the comments that "at least Mourdock is standing on principle" it's bullshit. Point me to the Bible verse where God exempts the mother when her life is threatened. It's not principle. It's the lowest form of political convenience masquerading as principle. People who actually have principles about the issue ought to be the loudest complainers.

I found it instructive to consult two of the premier Beltway voices for Ladies Against Women. First up, Jennifer Rubin, Ben Domenech Chair of Applied Lunacy at WaPo Test Prep:

For a moment, let’s understand what Mourdock meant by that. Like some pro-life Americans, Mourdock believes that all life is sacred and, absent a risk to the life of the mother, it is murder to abort the unborn child. Man from the moment of conception, these people believe, is made in God’s image.

Thanks, Jenny. But, y'know, I fucking got that from what Mourdock said. The moderator didn't ask him for a plerophory on conception, he asked about a rape exemption to the anti-choice views the entire fucking lineup of Senatorial worthies--including the fucking Libertarian--espouses. In response Mourdock claimed God as his wingman. Not only is that much fucking clear, it's the only part of the answer that is. Calling a zygote "Life" does not change the equation. Contrary to the convenient Manicheism of Right to Life supporters, there are many people who believe that Life does begin at conception, but that a mother may have the right to terminate a pregnancy anyway.

One of those people being Richard Mourdock. He would require that the mothers life "be in danger" first.

Like Rubin, dour and dull life defender Mona Charen thought the real problem was Democrats (and their Puppet Media) having a contrary opinion, and expressing it.

The very fact that a couple of ill-chosen words by pro-life candidates have become lightning rods this election season betrays the overwhelming bias of the press on this issue. Most Americans consider themselves to be pro-life. The pro-life posture is accordingly the mainstream view. An August CNN survey found that 52 percent say abortion should be illegal in all (15 percent) or most (37 percent) circumstances. A May Gallup survey found that more women call themselves pro-life (46 percent) than pro-choice (44 percent). But the press allies with the Democrats to smear pro-life candidates as “extremists.”

Yes, because anything 15% of the population tells a pollster it believes in can't be extremist.

Look, if you're gonna lecture everyone on willful misrepresentation, maybe you should try to achieve something like accuracy. Like, instead of squinting in order to make that crowd you estimate look homogeneous, you could tell us how many Americans believe, point blank, that every rape victim should be forced to carry her little gift from God to term, then support it for eighteen years, and maybe leave herself open to lawsuits from her rapist over visitation and child rearing practices?

It’s obviously a ghastly thing for a woman to be raped and to find herself pregnant as a consequence.

But?

But the liberal answer — abort the child or else be accused of approving of rape — is a slimy abuse of tragedy and a disgrace to civil discourse.

While portraying the "liberal" position as "abort the child" is the very essence of civility.

Fer cryin' out loud. Moudock's moral principles, or excuses, are irrelevant to the argument. We're talking about a Constitutionally-protected right; at minimum your side has to admit that is the case before there can be any discussion, civil or no. I'll just wait here. In the meantime, the past forty years has driven the extremist religious maniacs of your party above ground, and they have no concept of discourse on this issue. Nor of internal consistency. Those of you in the business of milking them for votes have tried to keep 'em quiet about it, or at least on message, but the message was always ill-considered, illogical, and emotional. When George W. Bush was riding high in 2004, this element decided it could show itself as anti-abortion in all cases, and anti-contraception into the bargain. If you wanna talk about principle, there's where the principle lies. And you know that forcing rape victims to carry fetuses to term, let alone banning rubbers, is a huge electoral loser. A coalition breaker, in fact. That's who has really responded to this summer's White Male rape defenders. (Sorry for the incivility.) That's what you think is unfair.

You want civility, Ms Charen, civility defined as a continued free ride for the religiously mazed on the issue, unfettered by the rules of logic. What you emphatically do not wish is discourse.

Petards Are For Hoisting

HERE'S the thing about D'ines'h D'Souza: he found himself a nice little sinecure in America defending the Raj. That comes with a price, of course. Not in swallowing the understandable anger and disgust the Anglo-American Man's Burden must engender in its erstwhile subjects; that sort of thing seems to go down easy with second or fifth-generation mandarins. It's just that, inevitably, someone with D'Souza's rh'torical gifts has got to figure (and rightly so) that These People Are Dumb As Stumps, and go looking for further fields of plunder. 

Lacking Hitchens gifts, D'inesh had to settle for life as a Toolbelt to the neocons, and pan for gold among the evangelical dross, jettisoning his Catholicism somewhere along the way. Sorta.  (Again, fortunately for D'Souza, in those circles one can now be a best-selling Christian apologist without taking sides on the Reformation, which has apparently been relegated to the intellectual dung pit alongside the Trinitarian debate, the question of translation, and the George W. Bush administration.)

However, as you probably already know, this seems to've gotten D'Souza in a spot of bother when some of the more morally inflexible members of the flock objected to his apparent dalliance with his new, mid-twenty-something "fiancée". 

Finally, near 11 p.m., event organizer Tony Beam escorted D’Souza and Joseph to the nearby Comfort Suites. Beam noted that they checked in together and were apparently sharing a room for the night in the sold-out hotel. The next morning, around 6 a.m., Beam arrived back at the hotel and called up to D’Souza’s room. “We’ll be down in 10 minutes,” D’Souza told Beam. D’Souza and Joseph came down together, and Beam took them to the airport.

This information eventually gets to Warren Cole Smith at World ("Todays News/Christian Views"), and all H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks breaks loose. Yesterday D'Souza resigned from his post as President of Kings College (Manhattan) after its board met for two days drafting his resignation. ("So it could move on," of course. Nothing to do with his time in the limelight.)

Then, of course, began the CYA Tour (FOX, Christianity Today); one wishes at such times to have Jesus's super-hearing, or ability to change into a fly on the wall, in order to've checked in on the rebranding efforts. ("Look, it's not too late to change your name to Bobby.") D'Souza came out swinging, calling Smith, World, the event organizer, the attendant event-roving moralists, and the hotel night clerk a pack of liars out to destroy his career. Because that's what Christians do; the Bible tells 'em so. Oh, wait, I mean "Conservatives". 

The really fun part of that was his interview with CT:

When CT asked D'Souza directly for his response to charges of infidelity, he responded: "It's absolutely not the case that [pause] . … Look, the issue here is that World is attributing to me an admission that I never made—is attributing to me a quotation that I never said. That to me is the problem. … They are just claiming based upon my non-assertion that I did something that I didn't do."

This naturally led Christianity Today to headline the article "CT Exclusive: Dinesh D'Souza Denies Infidelity."  

There's also this bit for those of us who're terminally amused by the work of theologians:

D'Souza, a former CT columnist, said he did not know that Christians generally do not approve of engagements prior to divorces being finalized.

"I asked a lawyer whether there was anything wrong in being engaged while separated but prior to being divorced," he said. "I was told there's no problem with that and actually that happens all the time. I proposed to Denise and we became engaged."

"I believe I have good biblical grounds for divorce and was going through the legitimate process," said D'Souza. "The thing I will admit: I did not have any idea that it is seen as wrong in Christian circles to be engaged prior to being divorced even though separated. … That was a true error of judgment, but it was truly a case where I didn't know better."

The man was raised a Catholic. I guess that means he'd be more familiar with the etiquette of annulments. 

Anyway, look: when you were thoroughly intellectually depantsed by Stephen Colbert it was a warning to invest soundly and keep your head down. 

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Just too much money to be made on the Obama: Voodoo Anti-Colonialist trail, I guess. Well, we're not morally judgmental in these parts, or not so much, but we do like to get to the truth, Dinesh. So, Exhibit A--that thing on your head:

Totally doing her, weren't cha? Jumble up your theology anyway you like, it's still a sin to tell a lie.

Okay, Who Mentioned S-E-X In Front Of The Child?

Ross Douthat, "The Democrats' Abortion Moment". August 25

ALL right, so we've all had our little fun with the Akin spectacle, with everyone in the Republican party (aside from the people whose votes keep it in power) from Mitt Romney (despised of the party not so long ago for, among other things, having changed his point of view on abortion rights) on down explaining, or "explaining", that Akin's comments on rape do not represent the more reasoned, nuanced view of abortion as murder all mainstream Republicans hold. The fact that this distinction has yet to be put into anything resembling a declarative sentence in modern English just demonstrates how nuanced it really is.

[And isn't this the perfect, and perfectly timed, example of what's gone on this entire election cycle with a party which is beyond its Sell By date, beyond its Use By date, and beyond the point where its stench not only fills the refrigerator but permeates the milk?  Republicans reneged on the Jesus Crazies, they reneged on the Evil Deficit (with the Ryan Plan), then they reneged on the Ryan Plan. The party which has been in charge of Not Doing Business As Usual for the past thirty-five years nominated the poster boy for 'Conservative' Lip Service, on the grounds that he was the only thing they had approaching electability. Remember when Lisa points out that the engine warning light is on, and Homer fixes it by replacing the fallen piece of tape that covers it?]

Who better, really, to straighten all this out than Douthat, a man who is simultaneously an Ivy-League-educated Eastern establishment Republican and a reformed snake handler?

IN 1971, two years before Roe v. Wade, the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson used an arresting thought experiment to make the case for legalized abortion.

First, as I understand it, Jarvis Thomson was actually making the case against the idea that "personhood" automatically confers an absolute protection to fetal tissue. Second, I'm not sure how "arresting" the argument is; apparently it did arrest Douthat's predecessors in the Right to Life movement, at least while they came up with a way to change the subject, and long enough they were still yammering about it when Young Ross (b. 1979) came to them to be educated. So, yet one more time, a Ross Douthat column consists of him contemplating someone else's navel, circa The Reagan Administration.

Finally, don't you feel a "I Refute This Metaphor With Some Literal-Minded Objection That Totally Misses The Point" moment coming on? I know I do.

Imagine, wrote Thomson, that you awoke to find yourself lashed to a famous violinist. The violinist suffers from a lethal kidney disease, and because only your blood type can save his life, his admirers have kidnapped you and looped your circulatory systems together. If you consent to remain thus entangled for nine months, he will make a full recovery. Disentangle yourself, however, and he dies….

Provocative as it is, there are obvious problems with this analogy. It implies that there’s no difference between declining to provide medical treatment and taking a life directly, and no difference between the moral obligations owed a stranger and the obligations owed one’s own child.

The biggest difficulty, though, is that most women considering an abortion were not kidnapped and impregnated against their will. They freely chose the act that brought the fetus into being, and analogizing their situation to a kidnap victim implies a peculiar, almost infantilizing attitude toward female moral agency.

Now, it seems to me in the first case that refuting the "experiment" because you have a moral objection to abortion by raising a moral objection to abortion is akin to answering the Queen's Gambit by "accidentally" kicking the corner of the board. The very point of the metaphor is that disengaging yourself from the contraption takes the violinist's life. The reverse is also so; a pregnant woman could terminate her pregnancy strictly by withholding "medical treatment". It seems like, in forty years, you might've either come up with a competing thought experiment, or learned to defend your answer to the original.

The second, of course, is more to our current point: pregnancy is God's punishment for you spreading your legs in the first place. (Oh, and don't look at me; the Democratic party is the real infantilizer of women. Sweetie.)

This, of course, is where Republicans collide with Akin (not, as Douthat will try to make it, with the "unique agony" of the rape victim, though let's give him points for admitting it may have a little something to do with "political impossibility", too).

We have no need of a thought experiment here. If you're going to make absolute moral pronouncements, then they're absolute. You can start trying to weasel out of Thou Shalt Not Kill ("It means murder" or "Except when ordered by your political superiors"), but ultimately you're stuck. The Bible doesn't enjoin anyone from abortion; the moral argument is all yours, and the moment you're pressed you withdraw like a doused cat. The simple fact is that Akin spoke the truth. Not with his words, which were totally batshit, but he was absolutely clear on the concept. In his "desire to escape from the dilemma" sez Ross, but there isn't any dilemma. At least there isn't one with regards to meaning. Either terminating a pregnancy is murder, or it isn't. That includes rape victims, and that includes the medically unviable, and that includes, Mr. and Mrs. Santorum, when the life of the mother is at stake. It can't be both. You can make a distinction in law, but you're doing so because it's the popular thing to do, not because it's morally justified.

So leave us not quote statistics about what percentage of the public agrees with whom. Or not until you come clean. It's you folks who are literally and metaphorically chained to a corpse. Telling us all that you don't like the looks of some of the links doesn't free you.

Sigh.

Y'KNOW, it's no accident that the birth of the modern political Gotcha! moment can be traced to the same year Barbara Walters lisped her way to a million-dollar contract. 

In 1976, kids, in a Presidential campaign, Jerry Ford said something like "There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe". It was immediately seized upon as evidence that he'd never heard of the Warsaw Pact.

This has led to the point where it's no longer necessary to even consider the meaning of words, let alone to recognize that people sometimes misspeak. Or, conversely, where Representative Akin can use "misspeaking" as a (temporary, in his case) defense when his meaning was absolutely clear.

And it's the people who are supposed to be the guardians of words and meaning who are debasing the stuff. I know I'm not the only person to point this out, and heaven knows I'll never be the first, but the real semantic questions here are a) what, exactly, is Mitt Romney, and the rest of the Republican establishment, objecting to, beyond being saddled with their own positions, suitably in a nutshell? and b) how is it we do not recognize, and pummel, public figures such as Akin who so obviously are not conversant with the issues they spew about, or even the "principles" they suppose us to imagine they hold? Akin's hardly the first religious maroon to get hisself elected to Congress. The question is how we've gone forty years without the Right to Lifers being questioned, philosophically, theologically, or scientifically? Akin could only be that unclear on the concept if he'd never been required to answer an essay question. He didn't erroneously substitute a word, except that he fumbled his lines. He substituted patent nonsense for thought. And neither is original with him.

And it just happens, then, that he slid all the way down the slope. If there's no exception for rape, according to the Republican party, no exception for incest, none for viability, genetic disaster, or the life of the mother--until it's the mother of Rick Santorum's children--then say so. If there is, then on what basis? If there is, then the termination of a pregnancy is not murder.

Those people have been abusing the English language for five decades, now. 

If You Look Away The Monster Can't Eat You

David Weigel, "Leave Chick-fil-A Aloooooone". July 24

IT'D be one thing if Weigel tried to downplay all the insanity on his end of the political spectrum (it'd also be a full-time job). That, of course, would brand him as something other than the objective observer and independent thinker we all know him to be.

Instead Weigel has an interesting, oh, let's call it tendency to treat religious-based crackpottery as though the market had already permanently discounted it, freeing the urbane thirty-something to promote his own thirty-something, urbane social reasonableness as the real soul of the real Republican party. Whereas the Teabaggers were a real, sui-generis grassroots political movement which just happened to look and sound precisely like the Republican party since the mid-1970s, a brand-spanking-new organization free of the unpleasant whiff of back-dated culture war and the fetor of racism, and single-mindedly focused on lowering taxes for the successful, urbane, thirty-something.

Maybe it's age gives one a different perspective. Or maybe it's that I live in Indiana, where I've been laughing off snake-handlers and kerosene-drinkers for forty years, and they're poised to win the Governor's office this fall.

Wish 'em away, Dave:

The Chick-fil-A controversy has been confounding from the outset. Who eats at that chain and doesn't know about its founder Truett Cathy's conservatism?

You mean aside from the 85% of our fellow citizens who're utterly oblivious to politics?

Has nobody walked there on a Sunday and seen the message from Cathy, explaining that the restaurant is closed because the company honors the Sabbath?

Funny thing about that: I first became aware of the joint maybe twenty years ago or more, when one turned up at the local mall. I refused to eat there because of the atrocious spelling (swear to God!), then, later, because they did enough business that the aroma of plastic food was unmistakable. I had, however, spent about a decade or so giving them grudging respect for the Sunday closing thing. Hey, at least they put their money where their faith was, unlike the vast majority of faith-spewers. Then I learned the closing was designed "to give our employees the opportunity to go to church." Which is a little less noble and a little more "that oughta keep 'em subservient for six days worth of split shifts a week". Do you suppose Jews are guaranteed Saturdays off? Or Muslims Wednesdays? Hey, just kiddin'.

Did nobody notice how Cathy got an honorary degree from Liberty University the same day that Mitt Romney did?

Boy, I guess I'm not the keen-eyed observer of the American political scene I thought I was.

I'm gonna guess here that people eat at that joint for the same reason they eat at most joints: the car was traveling past it. It helps, of course, that few if any Americans know what a chicken is supposed to taste like when it isn't raised in an industrial ant farm. I've been astonished by the number of liberal commenters who've praised their crap in the interim. "Their chicken sandwich is really good." Take it from someone who'll never have one: No, it isn't. It's the processed body parts of a bird pumped with chemicals to avoid dying of any of the hundreds of diseases God in His mercy would visit on the simplest of creatures rather than see them "live" like that. What's "really good", apparently, is the fat they fry that crap in, if you go for that sort of thing.

Which is beside the point; like any modern progressive I'm Kantian about food and a free-thinker about sex. The point is that closing on Sunday, admirable or not, does not signal that the whole operation is devoted to close-minded bigotry. Yes, getting a statue from Liberty U does, but I missed that.

So I concur in part with Terry Mattingly's head-scratch about the start of the controversy. He points out that K. Allan Blume's original, soft-focus interview with Dan Cathy (Chick-fil-A operatures on a primogeniture management style) never actually got into gay marriage. This is the key section:

[snip]

Mattingly points out that the word "gay" never appears. "While the story contains tons of material defending traditional Christian teachings on sexuality," he writes, "the controversial entrepreneur never talks about gay rights or gay marriage. Why? Because he wasn’t asked about those issues in the interview. This raises an interesting journalistic question: Is a defense of one doctrine automatically the same thing as an on-the-record attack on the opposite doctrine?"

The interesting thing here to me is that this fabulist hair-splitting is remarkably similar to the attitude which allows us to call that stuff "chicken" in the first place.

To be fair, Weigel objects:

"Traditional family," in this context, was a way for the Baptist Recorder to avoid the word gay in an article about a company that uses some of its profits on campaigns against gay marriage. Maybe the meme-ing was lazy, but the story was fair -- an example of the media using context to figure out code words and report out a pretty slippery statement.

But what made the "meme-ing"--from the same degradation of language which gives us "Chick-fil-A"--lazy? What th' hell else can "support for 'traditional' marriage" possibly mean? Do we really need to parse every sentence of Dan Cathy's statements to make sure we don't unfairly lump him with the rabid Bronze Age superstitionists he funds? Or just to make sure we don't make the Republican party sound too crackpotty an' all?

Santorum Campaign Reaches A Climax

VIA Wonkette we learn that Rick Santorum's law degree really doesn't disqualify him from criticizing people who seek higher education after all. At least not those who learn anything. From santorum.com :

For many decades, the American public has actively petitioned the United States Congress for laws prohibiting distribution of hard-core adult pornography.

Congress has responded. Current federal “obscenity” laws prohibit distribution of hardcore (obscene) pornography on the Internet, on cable/satellite TV, on hotel/motel TV, in retail shops and through the mail or by common carrier. Rick Santorum believes that federal obscenity laws should be vigorously enforced. “If elected President, I will appoint an Attorney General who will do so.”

The Obama Administration has turned a blind eye to those who wish to preserve our culture from the scourge of pornography and has refused to enforce obscenity laws. While the Obama Department of Justice seems to favor pornographers over children and families, that will change under a Santorum Administration.

I proudly support the efforts of the War on Illegal Pornography Coalition that has tirelessly fought to get federal obscenity laws enforced. That coalition is composed of 120 national, state, and local groups, including Morality in Media, Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, American Family Association, Cornerstone Family Council of New Hampshire, Pennsylvania Family Institute, Concerned Women for America, The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, and a host of other groups. Together we will prevail.

Maybe you should hire yourselves a good lawyer.

Like one who could explain the First Amendment to you.

And I don't mean "Hey, man, free speech." I mean an actual understanding of the First Amendment, which would encompass precedents on Church and State, and Obscenity. Because I'll be goddamned is there's anything more basic in American jurisprudence than understanding the protections and limitations of the First.

Hundreds of tax-avoiding organizations and many decades, and whaddya got? Every so often someone at Justice--politically motivated or just permanently a sexual juvenile--will go after some Mom&Pop porn store on the grounds that it doesn't have the resources to fight. Not because of "obscenity". Because of leverage. The only way you're ever going to get a real obscenity conviction is by amending the Constitution. The only way you and your support mob is going to get leverage over the entire country is to have Jesus come down and sign up.

Really, though, please do tell us how you're going to shut down internet porn. I guess because you people believe Al Gore invented the thing you think we run it, huh?

Oh, you'll appoint a wingnut AG? There's a news flash. You have some dim awareness that Ed Meese and John Ashcroft were already there? Maybe we should start covering statues now. And Chuck Keating's still available for Blue Ribbon Commission work.

Listen, Frothy: porn addiction doesn't seem to've had as deleterious a sexual effect on our young people as Catholic doctrine has. And no matter how porn-addled, few consumers of the stuff can match your own level of kink.

The Difference Between God And Democrats Is That God Makes Use Of Historians

Laura Vozzella and Anita Kumar, "Nitty-gritty knocked Va. abortion bill off the fast track". February 23

OKAY, so, far be it from me to fart in the crowded elevator of delirious triumphalism rising amidst a temporary 5% reduction in the level of anti-abortion insanity in this country, but someone really should point out how defenders of reproductive freedom lost this battle four decades ago, how they continue to lose it today, and that celebrating small victories only makes sense if you're a ragtag band of insurgents or a hapless sports franchise.

So when the measure came up for a vote in the Senate on Jan. 31, Barker and Northam raised the issue during the floor debate — but delicately. They used the words “transvaginal” and “internal.” But they didn’t use startling terms such as “vaginal penetration” and “state-sponsored rape,” which eventually came to dominate the debate.

Mindful of the teenage Senate pages sitting in the chamber, Barker said, they wanted to be sensitive with their language….

On the Senate floor, Howell had not been explicit about the intrusive nature of the ultrasound. “I thought I was being brave by saying ‘digital rectal,’ ” she said.

But Howell came to understand that some of her Senate colleagues failed to grasp how much the type of ultrasound in question was like the probing she’d proposed for men.

“I don’t think they understood what kind of ultrasound they were talking about,” she said. “I think they thought it was a mini-massage and not something approaching rape. People are squeamish about using words like ‘vagina,’ but in this case, it was necessary for people to understand how invasive this bill is.”

What's the forced medical-fetishist invasion of thousands of Virgina vaginas when the delicate ears of some teenaged pages are at stake?

Th' fuck? How many times did wingnut Congressmen read "What Homosexuals Do" into the public record? (I grant you that many of them were a lot better informed about the average teenaged page's sexual sensitivities than you folks seem to be.)

When have the anti-rights crusaders shown the slightest inclination to reticence? When has a concern for tender young feelings stopped them?

This began forty years ago; it began when the same side which had fought for the only reasonable solution to the question--that reproductive health is a matter for the individual to decide, not for the Law--became deferential to the "ethical" concerns of others, shrank from criticizing the Catholic hierarchy, and allowed monstrous assaults on the English language such as "Right to Life" and "unborn child" to be perpetrated without push-back. ("Choice", children, entered the game quite late.) We are suffering Fools these days because the line was not drawn clearly then, because the extremism of self-appointed spokesmen--emphasis on the "men"--for dead Bronze Age carpenters was never pointed out, because there was a complacency about Constitutional law trumping the screaming mania of licensed beggars and tax-free pederasts everywhere.

It didn't work, it doesn't work today, yet the side with right on its side remains defensive. Chaste depictions of a device the size of a souvenir ball bat about to be shoved into some terrified rape victim is, somehow, all it takes to get people to notice what's what? Horseshit. That proposed Virginia law was hardly the first of its kind. I hope it's more a (puzzling) medical unfamiliarity than a lexical squeamishness that's kept this objection out of the public eye before now. "Partial Birth Abortion" laws rape women as surely as some electric womb bat. Running every clinic out of the Dakotas is just another version of forced penetration. Foxing the Catholic Church on contraceptive health care is a lot less impressive to me than telling the Catholic Church to tend to its own flock and leave governance to the government would be. I'm less concerned about Komen being forced to apologize than I am about why it felt booting Planned Parenthood was a good PR move in the first place. There is no goddam sense for this argument to have devolved to Cute Baby Ducks and Adorable Puppies vs. Evil Moneymaking Abortionplexes and Commielesbian Planned Parenthood. There's no reason on earth why it took until 2012 for people to realize that that real anti-abortion agenda is the anti-sex, anti-contraceptive, anti-human stance of Rick Santorum, not the faux-reasonableness of Bill Saletan.

But what should be understood, now, is that the years when the defenders of reproductive rights felt inclined to do so with a face of public reluctance have given its opponents free rein. And that that needs to be corrected, not outmaneuvered, if they're ever to go back to lecturing the like-minded, not shoving things into every woman from menarche to menopause.

Pawn Takes Bishop

Amanda Marcotte, "Obama Punks the GOP on Contraception". February 10

James Vicini, "U.S. Catholic bishops oppose Obama birth-control plan". February 11

DEAR Amanda: I can't say I wish I shared your sunny outlook, because I don't; this President fighting his way out of a corner he painted himself into would be news, but only because he's rarely, if ever done so. Maybe if I had some rooting interest. Maybe if he'd given me much reason to root for him.

Rather than, of course, against his abhorrent opponents.

The fun part of this is that Obama just pulled a fast one on Republicans. He drew this out for two weeks, letting Republicans work themselves into a frenzy of anti-contraception rhetoric, all thinly disguised as concern for religious liberty, and then created a compromise that addressed their purported concerns but without actually reducing women's access to contraception, which is what this has always been about. (As Dana Goldstein reported in 2010, before the religious liberty gambit was brought up, the Catholic bishops were just demanding that women be denied access and told to abstain from sex instead.) With the fig leaf of religious liberty removed, Republicans are in a bad situation. They can either drop this and slink away knowing they've been punked, or they can double down. But in order to do so, they'll have to be more blatantly anti-contraception, a politically toxic move in a country where 99% of women have used contraception.

If rationality trumped irrationality in this country, Liberia and Burma would be the only two countries on earth that haven't adopted the metric system.

When this stops going double for people who insist they talk to dead carpenters, lemme know. Meanwhile, here's what the U.S. Conference of Bishops had to say:

…Obama's proposal "continues to involve needless government intrusion in the internal governance of religious institutions, and to threaten government coercion of religious people and groups to violate their most deeply held convictions."…

The bishops said the compromise failed to provide "clear protection" for many employers who might oppose birth control personally but not be classified as a religious institution, and thus ineligible to seek exemption from the federal mandate to provide free contraception as part of every insurance package.

So, forgive me if I'm not overwhelmed if all the intellectual and political willpower of the Obama administration/campaign managed to come up with a Plan B.

Because I've been hearing this since I had the audacity to vote for George McGovern in 1972, sending the Democratic party into a tailspin it's still apologizing for. That was less than a month after Roe was argued for the second time. In the intervening forty years public opinion has been significantly swayed by squishy, religious-based, religious-inspired, and religion-funded arguments, such that today we are at loggerheads, where then it was a matter of a mouthy minority pushing to enshrine its Bronze Age beliefs. One big reason for that drift is that the attitude was allowed to develop in a vacuum, because the Democratic party has run screaming from defending it ever since. (Ditto Acid and Amnesty.)

So, forgive me, but Scoring Rhetorical Points on the Republican Party may be great for Obama's reelection campaign, which may or may not be good news for the battle over the composition of the Court. Otherwise, maybe it's time to look at what defending the fucking Constitution might do for Democratic chances, not just in 2012, but into the future. The President of the United States finessed the showboating Bishops and the corrupt intellectual sluggards of the opposition party? Now they have to make a different defense of what is actually the indefensible? Whoopee.

Pigeons From Hell

Ross Douthat, "The Persistence of the Culture War". February 7

Kathleen Parker, "Obama runs roughshod over religious freedom". February 7

I LET Douthat in here, not to run up the rhetorical score, nor even to goad the ungoadable Grey Lady for the worst choice in Opinion columnists since the guy Douthat replaced, but because he represents the cutting edge of the Religio-Cultural argument in this country: thirty years out of date, friendless even in its own party, and theologically, uh, facile.

The Culture War is Back! pants young Ross, apparently forgetting that he's been covering the Republican Presidential race in his voluminous spare time.

Okay, so there was one other reason I brought him up:

Before he disappointed his many admirers by declining to seek the Republican nomination, Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana told the Weekly Standard’s Andrew Ferguson that the gravity of the economic and fiscal challenges facing America’s next president might require calling a temporary “truce on the so-called social issues.” On culture war controversies like abortion and same-sex marriage, he suggested, “we’re going to just have to agree to get along for a little while.”

The comments earned Daniels a round of criticism from social conservatives, and they probably would have haunted him on the primary trail. But in a sense his point was understandable — and given his own firm anti-abortion record, he probably thought he had the credibility to deliver it. To everything there is a political season, and in an era of high unemployment and record deficits a president who picked too many fights on non-economic issues would find himself an ex-president soon enough.

Isn't is abso-fucking-lutely remarkable how such a simple little gag as Daniels' flew over so many heads? Especially in our nation's typing class?

I mean, it's bad enough that this got treated at face value, coming as it did from one of the most disingenuous PR concoctions in all of American politics. Why is it treated as though President Daniels could have, or would have, called such a truce? It was patent nonsense then, and it was patent nonsense again when he used it in that State of the Union response. He used it at the Weekly Standard, in 2010, as a declaration that the Money Boys who run that national pea-shake game known as the Grand Old Party weren't going to follow Sarah Palin down the drain pipe, and he used it again two weeks ago in a risible attempt to assure rational Americans that the Republican party isn't held hostage by religious fanatics. It meant about as much, each time, as any other advertising slogan. Or as anything else Mitch "Indiana Doesn't Need A Right To Work Law" Daniels says when there's money on the line.

(Daniels own "firm" anti-abortion record consists, like most things about the man, of hot air and spittle. He kept the cranks in the Indiana Republican party from pulling any funny stuff until he'd been reelected--every Life Begins At Conception Act or Act of Conception Act, died in the organizational period before the General Assembly met. Then, having been convinced by his own Presidential bull of the need to get with the Republican times, namely the 1870s, he defunded Planned Parenthood last year, before his wife, the Lovely Cheri-with-an-I, told him he couldn't run.)

Let's get to some award-winning journalism:

Most Americans can hardly believe we’re having a national debate about birth control in the 21st century — more than 50 years after the Pill became available and decades after condoms became as commonplace as, well, balloons.

The reason for the incredulity is because we’re actually not having a debate about birth control. To repeat: The debate is about freedom of conscience. It ain’t about the Pill.

Does this mean most Americans have slept through the intervening forty years of conscience clauses, including the radical agitation of the Bush Comedy Administration, and are just now waking up?

This particular episode is significant because the Obama administration has provided the narrowest conscience protection in our nation’s history, according to legal experts who are challenging the administration’s rule.

Well, if legal experts who are challenging the administration agree…

We have a long tradition in this country of working around religious differences so that people are not forced to violate their faith to satisfy a secular mandate. This is the essence of the debate.

Sure, sure. Tell it to the Mormons. Tell it to people who think they should vaccinate their children with Jebus. Tell it to Catholic young men who might object to serving in the military in an unjust war. Set it to music and whistle it while you go try to join the Native American Church.

Tell a Quaker employer he doesn't have to withhold taxes that go to military spending. Tell a Christian Scientist employer he doesn't have to without Medicare contributions. Tell Bob Jones University it can still accept Federal monies but go back to hatin' the coloreds.

When the state insists that one’s religious beliefs be supplanted by another’s, in this case by secularism, then might one argue that the state is establishing a religion in contravention of the Constitution’s intent?

Sure one might. Just as one might tap dance with no legs, provided words were all that was needed.

Come to think of it, they're exactly the same.

And "secular religion", Kathy? Secular religion.? The Roman Catholic Church, with nearly two millennia of intellectual history behind it, is going to borrow arguments from backwoods Baptists?

The new health-care reform act’s mandate that Catholic institutions pay for insurance to cover birth control and even abortifacient drugs (a.k.a. “morning-after” pills) runs deeply contrary to fundamental Catholic teaching.

Yeah, fundamental for a hundred fifty of the last two thousand years. And it's "Catholic institutions" being mandated to pay only if you ignore the fact that Catholic religious institutions are exempt.

And, okay, look: some of y'all get a little emotional about this; lots of your fellow Catholics do not. I realize it can trigger the occasional exaggeration. The Catholic Church is not being "forced" to "pay for abortions"; the Catholic Church as any other employer in the US will be mandated to provide comprehensive medical insurance to the people it employs while seeking to make a profit. I'm sure you all are actually willing to be reasonable about this, and as respectful of other people's beliefs as you demand they be of your own.

These are tough, emotional issues, to be sure. But consider that we allow even Nazis to march because we believe so fervently in freedom of expression.

All righty, then.

Weekend Leftovers

OUR story so far: at the end of the 1970s, with the inherent contradictions, internal infirmities, and lunatic and nuclear-fueled grandiosity of its post-war self-congratulation period in tatters, after Vietnam and the unconscionably tardy recognition of Civil Rights, the predictable ebb of the economic hegemony we had enjoyed since the rest of the developed world had been reduced to rubble in the 40s, with gas lines reminding a small percentage of the populace that there really were repercussions for stopping the Marshall Plan West of Suez, and for finagling the creation of the State of Israel for a temporal domestic political advantage, without regard for the rights of anyone who happened to have lived in the region for the previous millennia or the history of the Great Game; with those same gas lines convincing the majority of auto-Americans that brown people needed to be taken down a peg by one of those irresistible military interventions, like the one that had worked so well for us in Indochina; with a Republican President having disgraced himself, his collection of stooges, flunkies, and brownshirts, his party, and his country by, well, being a Republican and acting on it, Good Old American Know-Who stepped to the fore, and a coalition of corporatepeople whose privilege depended on the US taxpayer paying to defend it, the few paranoid Nixonites who'd escaped prison, and disgruntled Americans who wholeheartedly supported civil rights for all Americans, but didn't want their children showering with Negroes in public school, found in Ronald Reagan the man who would restore to America its glorious fictional Morning, and to the wealthiest among us their Gilt-given right to exploit people, provided they didn't reference skin color while doing so. Any more. Or not obviously.

Strange as it may seem, thirty years of insisting that our problems weren't real has somehow have failed to solve them. So that in the first and possibly only quarter of the 21st century, USAmerica has a wrecked economy, a much bigger oil habit, the finest, most competent, and best equipped military machine ever to be thwarted by a nation of goatherders, and has pretty much finished shipping all its manufacturing jobs to Asia while putting everyone who used to fill those jobs in prison. And we achieved all this by the simple expedient of believing that the more you cut taxes the more revenue you raised, and that anything Liberals believed was designed to cut America to Her knees.

I'm not telling you anything you don't know. Nor is it a revelation that the one group which has actually benefitted from all this is the one which started out with all the money and power in the first place.

And one of the things they've done is see to it that their idiot progeny became Important Social Observers, the way their role models in the vibrant British aristocracy used to send their own mental defectives into the Church.

Which brings us to Megan-Jane McArdle-Galt, notable non-genius, Senior Fucking Editor at a once respectable publication, and former possessor of the world's least-imaginative nom de plume since the invention of cuneiform.

I don't read her, if that's what one calls it. I saw her once or twice in her guise as Ayn Rand's adoring and maybe-a-little-too-interested-in-the-terms-of-the-Will granddaughter, which left me astonished to find she'd gotten a real job writing, if that's what one calls it. And which led, eventually, to my shocked discovery--I've been blasted twice by household current and once by a faulty lawn mower sparkplug wire, and shocked is an accurate description--that she was, in fact, in early middle age, and not a fourteen-year-old whose wealthy and connected parents thought she was precocious.

So I was waiting for a couple days for the inevitable Susan G. Komen Says It's Sorry That You All Misunderstood, and…

And, wait, was this not the four thousandth recapitulation of Iraq War II? Did not everyone with any sense and a minimum of healthy skepticism know exactly what was going to happen here? And that the credulous majority, including Senior Fucking Editors at a once respectable publication, would immediately take the thing at face value? All that anyone needed to know was Komen's size, administrative pay structure, and its history of derisible litigiousness to know that a) the original story was the sort of diaphanous hubristic bullshit unique to Our American Colossi, b) it would be contradicted, and probably twice, within eighteen hours, before c) likely being denied altogether, with standard non-apology apology and standard non-active course of action. Knowing that Nancy Brinker once held the Shirley Temple Chair of Applied Protocolistics in the Bush II administration was just a little paint on the lily.

…and somehow I wound up clicking on Megan-Jane. This, specifically, which led me to go back--of my own volition!--for That and The Other.

All of which confirmed the age-old journalistic wisdom of not letting anyone with no writing talent exercise it more than twice a week.

Anyway, somehow I ran into the erstwhile Ms Galt's first mental pretzel, which requires exactly 60 words, not counting the long quote from the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, before we got:

Though I'm pro-choice, I...

Which of course meant that Megan-Jane was about to thoughtfully disprove her own claim so the rest of us didn't have to bother.

Though I'm pro-choice, I don't share the outrage that was roiling my Twitter feed this morning.

Okay. So I realize that catching Megan-Jane in a contradiction or a rhetorical inadequacy is like collecting Bushisms for Slate. And this would be a perfectly consistent position, provided that anyone out there had been arguing anything like the opposite.

But, one: as with the Republican party, absolving yourself from the requirement of knowing what you're talking about, rather than trying to sound how you feel, doesn't make you exempt. And, two: no one said you had to be roiled because you support, or "support", reproductive freedom. Just as no one said Komen had to support Planned Parenthood. Besides, Komen is wealthy, and poor women are poor, so we all knew which side your natural sympathies fell on.

What upset people--people who constitute a considerable portion of Komen's donor Rolodex--was the transparent excuse that Komen had changed its bylaws to exclude any organization under investigation, which a) meant Planned Parenthood, exclusively, and b) meant "any two-bit cracker Congressional headline seeker, or state or local Christofascist. could sever that link at any time." This was a political act by an arrogant behemoth designed to placate people who are actively trying to supress a Constitutional right. One which, by the way, you claim to support. It didn't have to roil you. But if that claim means anything at all it should have at least made you understand where people who objected loudly to the decision were coming from.

Let's say this again: whether you think it's justified or no, Komen has a board which gets wealthy from its donors; and if you do think that's none of the donors' business you might at least expect that it do something like this with a reasonable amount of intelligence. The fact that Komen has a "right" to do something doesn't make it above criticism; the fact that the people making that decision earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year yet are completely tone deaf being a prime example.

Planned Parenthood has been a brave, and often lonely, defender of legal rights, often for the most under-defended of our fellow citizens. Someone who is Pro-Choice But..., and has missed that fact, hasn't paid enough attention to the issue, or the politics of the issue, to have an opinion worth noting.

We later got this:

I'm tempted to credit shifting public opinion, but polling about abortion has been pretty stable over the last 15 years. It could be a shift in the donor base, or the board itself. Or perhaps it's a more subtle shift in opinion. While most people think that abortion should be legal, most people don't support the current state of abortion law; polling seems to suggest that the majority either wants abortion to be illegal in all cases, or legal only in the first trimester--and even then, possibly only in the case of rape, incest, and the life of the mother. A majority of people polled say that abortion is morally wrong. And pro-life identification runs neck-in-neck with pro choice.

which would sew the package up tidly; one cannot be "pro-choice" in this environment and simultaneously report that "the majority" wants abortion restricted to the first trimester without pointing out the absurdity of the idea, legally, ethically, and rhetorically. Else one is not pro-choice, merely unwilling publicly to oppose abortion in all cases. It's like being a Vegan for the duration of your stay at some hipster bar.)

And the thing was capped, less than two hours later, when her Randian sense that somewhere someone of Wealth was being dissed was fully awakened by the sun moving to the other side of the solarium. Megan noted:

But more broadly, the worry about charity overhead has gotten completely out of hand. I've heard from more than one frantic foundation fundraiser who can't raise a dime for overhead--everyone wants their money earmarked for programs.

Maybe someone should alert Komen. They could earmark the money they send to Planned Parenthood. Oh, sorry. That money's fungible.

To start with, Planned Parenthood spends about 16% of its annual budget on . . . overhead and fundraising. Now that they know, how many of the people who were angry about Komen's overhead are going to also withdraw their support from Planned Parenthood? I suspect the number is zero, but I could be wrong.

I'm guessing that the number of people Megan expected to click that link was also zero, since it took you not to the proof of her claim but the cover sheet for the report.

But seven or eight pages of diligence later one discovers what one already knew suspected all along: that the addition of "overhead" to fundraising costs was designed to get Planned Parenthood closer to Komen's numbers. And that Megan McArdle talks shit.

Komen's fundraising expenses are 7.5% of revenue. This is apparently considered acceptable by the sorts of persons who rate such things. Planned Parenthood's is 4%.

What Komen has been questioned about are its Administrative Expenses (especially the amount paid to its upper echelon), which run 11.8%. Planned Parenthood's "Management and General Support"--your guess is as good as Megan's as to whether the two are congruent--is 12%. But Planned Parenthood operates health care clinics across the country. Komen raises money.

Should a reasonable person expect their operating expenses to be so similar?

For that matter, should Megan?

While They Were At It, They Picked Denver To Beat The Spread Next Week

Jonathan Martin, "Social conservatives back Rick Santorum". January 14

MAYBE I'm moving too fast, here; maybe I should hold off until the Press gets around to naming all 150 "Conservative" "leaders" who took part in this pre-selection of the President of the Theocracy of South Carolina And Possibly Several Other States, Frequently Southern.

I do understand, though; when you've got James Dobson, Gary Bauer, and The Other Tony Perkins on the marquee, the sheer wattage is bound to make it tough to make out the rest of the cast.

Just for fun, somebody tell me what James Dobson has to do with national politics aside from hallucinating himself a place in it? Outside of Ronald Reagan--which is like backing the guy who looked the other way while you stole the neighbor's car--the only winner Dobson's picked in thirty years was George W. Bush. And looked how that turned out.

Haven't these fucks been wrong at every turn? Isn't that the point? If they had the power to influence the race Michele Bachmann would be leading it. If they had the sense God gave geese they wouldn't have jumped to Rick Perry, or believed anything Herman Cain said, aside from the glossolalia enthusiasts among them.

Southern Evangelical Christians met this weekend to decide which of two Mary Worshippers they were going to back, on the grounds that they have theological differences with Mitt Romney.

Seriously, if you don't like Romney, you're not nine months too late here, you're four years and nine months too late. Whadda you guys rake in in donations on the average month?

Look, guys, I have a Southern Baptist preacher in my extended family, and he, his wife, and all fourteen of their children I am not making up understand they are repellant to the ordinary, Satan-worshipping citizen (and knew how to exchange pleasantries with me, er, them). It might be different when you live in an enclave. Which means you need to stop being led by people who live in enclaves. The Republican party has convinced you, over the past three decades, that it was society which was wrong, not you. It's past time to unlearn that.

Epistemology Is The Last Refuge Of The Magical Thinker

Ross Douthat, "Just because Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry are utter loons (and you didn't hear that from me) is no reason to assume their religious manias are not reasonable, nuanced, and flexible. After all, look at me. Besides, religious people don't actually mean what they say. I mean, c'mon". August 29

TWO old friends meet here: our USENET-vintage observation that sooner or later every internet discussion--including those between Ross Douthat and the imaginary liberals he vanquishes once a week--devolves into an Epistemology lecture for incoming freshman, generally conducted by a third-year sophomore, and the recognition, so familiar to anyone who's had Dick Lugar as his Senator for the last two lifetimes, that the only principles "moderate" Republicans are willing to stand up for are those held by the right-wing crackpots they vote with. Although on reflection this does not really distinguish them from moderate Democrats.

[Speaking of epistemology, most Mondays I wonder, briefly, about the vestigial organ that is "moderate" Republicanism. Does Douthat deserve the term, just because (in print) the terms of his inexplicable employment trump his own theocratic tendencies? Douthat's personal objections to gay marriage are religious; he won't say so in print, because it makes him look like a Bronze Age bigot, rather than the Hahvahd man the Times hired. His moderation is the artificial reasonableness of the man who hopes above all that you don't discover that fifth ace in his sock. He's no more moderate than Bill Fuhbuckley was, just perhaps a little less congenitally well-off. You could figure that David Brooks would not be too confounded by a newly-legal gay couple buying the condo one flight up. The best you can say about Douthat, on the other hand, is that you'd be surprised to learn he was the one who dropped their Yorkie down the trash chute.]

Fuck it, let's roll:

During George W. Bush’s presidency, many liberal and secular Americans came to regard religious conservatives not merely as their political opponents, but as a kind of existential threat.

Once again, History begins when Douthat took notice of it, or once he figured out its partisan political significance.

Rather, it was an essentially illiberal force, bent on gradually replacing our secular republic with what Kevin Phillips’s 2006 best seller dubbed an “American Theocracy.”

I can't speak for liberal and secular America, but as I recall Phillips' point wasn't that this was something new; rather that under George W. this faction had considerably increased its influence in Republican politics.

And Phillips, of course, is something of a special case, since he was a Republican insider, so his estimation of when this "takeover" began might differ from mine, or secular America's. At any rate, some liberal and secular Americans might point to Carl McIntire, Billy James Hargis, or Charlie Coughlin--hell, even Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, to name a couple Douthat might have heard of and repressed--to suggest that the right-wing theocratic impulse isn't exactly new.

These anxieties dissipated once the Republican majority imploded. In the Obama era, debates over the economy and health care crowded out arguments about sex education and embryo destruction, and liberals found a new set of right-wing extremists to worry about: Tea Party activists, birth certificate obsessives, the Koch brothers.

The Reader is reminded here that this "Liberals do this, Liberals obsess over that" routine--all incognito beyond the title of a Kevin Phillips book--is at the service of Douthat's complaint that the Religious Right is unfairly treated as monolithic.

But with the rise of first Michele Bachmann and then Rick Perry in the presidential polls, and the belated liberal realization that many Tea Partiers are also evangelical Christians...

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: talking to yourself does not noticeably improve argumentation. It's the Teabaggers who pretended to not be religious, or to have jettisoned the religious trappings to concentrate on the all-out effort to end Socialism. I can't name a single leftblogger who bought the story. I can't name any who forgot that Sarah Palin existed as of January 2009. Maybe Amy Sullivan. Believing your own hype is bad enough, Ross. When it leads to snake handling, drinking unfiltered Mississippi River water, or searching for some rhetorical sense in which Paul Revere did warn the British, you need professional help.

Beginning with Ryan Lizza’s profile of Bachmann in The New Yorker, a spate of recent articles have linked the Republican presidential candidates to scary-sounding political theologies like “Dominionism” and “Christian Reconstructionism,” and used these links to suggest that Christian extremism is once more on the march.

Again the Reader is reminded that this critique comes from the direction of the American "Conservative" movement, whose political capital comes from having trademarked Pinko™ in the 1940s, plus residuals from an uncounted number of successful spin-offs since, including Criminal Coddlers, My Mother the Limousine Liberal, The Real Racists of Blue State America, and The Baby Killers.

Look, Ross: the reason there are "suddenly" Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry articles is that they are "suddenly" at the top of the Republican leader board. The reason some of those articles are unflattering to the point of questioning either's sanity is that sometimes the truth does get printed.

But here are four points that journalists should always keep in mind when they ask and then write about religious beliefs that they themselves don’t share.

First, conservative Christianity is a large and complicated world, and like other such worlds — the realm of the secular intelligentsia very much included — it has various centers and various fringes, which overlap in complicated ways.

One can say the same about Capitalism, Crime, and Cornflakes (or the Journalists Who Write About Religious Beliefs They Don't Share, for that matter). It doesn't mean all generalizations are equally worthless, nor that one may only seek to vivisect Bachmann's crank worldview, or Perry's show-off piety, once the scalpel is infinitely sharp.

Second, journalists should avoid double standards. If you roll your eyes when conservatives trumpet Barack Obama’s links to Chicago socialists and academic radicals, you probably shouldn’t leap to the conclusion that Bachmann’s more outré law school influences prove she’s a budding Torquemada.

It's easy to remember Kids: faux-fairness kicks in with the second incident, just as in professional sports, where the second guy to throw a punch is the one who usually gets ejected.

Although we should note that Douthat does not condone the corollary--or wouldn't, were it possible for him to be open on the Times pages, or honest about anything--that the solid week of teevee media time devoted to Jeremiah Wright means those who did preempt real stories in 2008 to run snippets of Wright's sermons are now honor bound to start nosing around Perry's theological connections or Bachmann's magical belief system.

Third, journalists should resist the temptation to apply the language of conspiracy to groups and causes that they find unfamiliar or extreme. Republican politicians are often accused of using religious “code words” and “dog whistles,” for instance, when all they’re doing is employing the everyday language of an America that’s more biblically literate than the national press corps.

There is No Fucking Way the national press corps is less biblically literate than America. The scale only goes to Zero.

Finally, journalists should remember that Republican politicians have usually been far more adept at mobilizing their religious constituents than those constituents have been at claiming any sort of political “dominion.”

I know it was before your time, Ross, but way back in the 80s--the 1980s--when the boom in cable television, following rapidly on the heels of the generalized acquisition of electricity in their neck of the woods, caused several backwoods preachers--the epithet refers to the origin of their garbled theology, not a presumed inability to Spot a Mark--to recognize just how much a low-watt station, satellite communications, and the good folks at the Federal Communications Commission could assist in spreading the Good News About Jesus. This just happened to occur almost simultaneously with the generalized move to the Republican party by former Yellow Dog Democrats, and the election of Ronald Wilson "Take All The Licenses You Need, Boys!" Reagan.

Yes, in the interim the Republican party harvested a ton of votes while hoping that Brother Pat and Cousin Jerry, et. al., proved more interested in short-term venality than Eternal growth, a supposition well-founded in the history of the breed, and mostly borne out: the Republican party has yet to seriously challenge reproductive rights, or amend the Constitution to permit school prayer and prohibit mosque construction. The Religious Right leadership has been fine with this for four decades. It accepted George H.M.S. Bush, then sat on its hands and clamped its jaws shut for Bob Dole. George W. was its accidental candidate; his Christianity dated to a need to excuse his drunken frat-boy past, then to cover up his incompetent Presidential present. Evangelicals loved him. This did not noticeably budge his competence factor.

In return, the FCC fined whatever network broadcast Janet Jackson's African breast armor, and the entire GOP establishment ran to DC on command to save Terri Schavo, which caused any number of Republicans suddenly to discover they were sharing a party with people who thought Adam, Eve, and John Wayne's great-great grandfather rode dinosaurs.

These people thought '08 was their year, but the Bush administration took the brand down with it, with the help of the usual number of sex and money scandals among the Elect. Sam Brownback went nowhere. Huckabee had a good run, but he was savvy enough to save the preachin' for the Flock, and, as it turned out, he had signed a bill that raised Arkansas' cigarette tax 2¢, and so was theologically suspect to begin with.

If the Religious Right has been less than omnipotent over the last three decades of public gridlock, it's not for lack of trying.

Perry knows how to stroke the egos of Texas preachers, but he was listening to pharmaceutical lobbyists, not religious conservatives, when he signed an executive order mandating S.T.D. vaccinations for Texas teenagers.

Which he now repudiates. Fer chrissakes, the fact that these morons sometimes listen to an even higher power--Mammon (that's a Biblical reference, so your colleagues won't get it)--proves nothing. Let me know when the "I'm Rick Perry, and I'm Slippery Enough to be Your Next President" Tour reaches the Bible Belt.

However, I would like to nominate "listening to pharmaceutical lobbyists", with its suggestion that Evil Profits drive the argument for HPV vaccinations, for a Pulitzer in the Respecting the Nuance of Opposing Arguments the Way He Was Demanding of His Opponents 250 Words Earlier category.

This last point suggests the crucial error that the religious right’s liberal critics tend to make. They look at Christian conservatism and see a host of legitimately problematic tendencies: Manichaean rhetoric, grandiose ambitions, apocalyptic enthusiasms. But they don’t recognize these tendencies for what they often are: not signs of religious conservatism’s growing strength and looming triumph, but evidence of its persistent disappointments and defeats.

And which, of course, the Religious Right--somehow it's now convenient for Douthat to treat it as a monolith--has internalized as indicative of our pluralistic society, and vows to approach reasonably and rationally from here on out.

Honest.