I don’t know what point you are making with this post. However I don’t support forced sterilization, eugenics is not science, and Malthus while making predictions that were entirely reasonable in his time never saw the agricultural revolution coming and that revolution essentially invalidated his theories on population growth and its disastrous effects.
It’s statistical truth the most likely person to have an accidental pregnancy is a poor woman, and it is also the truth that a poor woman is more likely to have a dead beat father for her child, and more likely to have various other problems with raising the child when it comes–all things that make it much more likely her child will be poor for the entirety of its life. Further, having lots of children exacerbates the problems of being poor.
Not really relevant to the thread, but I see this a lot and its not true. Malthus lived in a time when agricultural innovations were making large gains in the productivity, he was aware of this and predicted it would continue in his writings. His argument was that eventually it would simply run up against intrinsic limits (we only get so many watts of sunlight a day, etc), something which is presumably still true. The agricultural revolution won’t continue forever, we can only get so many calories out of the Earth.
What he didn’t predict (or at least underestimated), was that technological innovations like the pill would limit the rate of population growth, something which appears to be happening. Assuming projections are correct, the world population should level off at something like 9 billion in 2050, without lack of food forcing the issue with mass famine and starvation.
Not quite true. They are not providing contreception. They are providing insurance, and the employee is chosing contreception from among the many services included in the insurance package. Kinda like they get to choose how to spend thier paychecks without approval from the church.
Shame on her for speaking out and taking a stand on something. She’s not asking anyone to pay her bills. She’s just saying that insurance shouldf cover contreception for more reasons than sex, and Catholic affiiliates shouldn’t get an exemption.
Even the “legitimate” point is a lie. There is no public funding. And the “religious freedom” framing is a lie. It’s not about religious freedom, because businesses are not people and do not have religious freedom and the employers have no right to impose their “values” on the private lives of their employees. Rush really did us all a favor by getting rid of all the distracting, deflecting rhetoric and getting to what was the real point all along, which was misogynistic to the core. I won’t say he was “honest” because he kept up the “we have to pay for it” lie, but at least he killed all the BS about religious freedom and put their cards down on the table. It was about hating women all along.
Except that the private religious-affiliated university in question already provides contraception coverage, at a level that conforms to the new standard, to its faculty and staff, just not its students. I’m not seeing where the institution’s moral objection is relevant.
What bothers me more is that when he gets himself in these jams he stays in his bunker rather than take his arguments to the main stream media. He could have been all over the Sunday shows if he wanted to … and no he would not have done more harm than good by addressing the issue in those forums.
Isn’t it amazing how we’ve gone from 1st A speech rights to 1st A free exercise rights without even a blink . . . or a law, or a SCotUS decision?
What a convenient coincidence that the religious beliefs of the business owner just happen to also be the religious beliefs of the business.
I can’t wait 'til businesses get 2nd A rights, just 'cause I really, really, want to see skyscrapers with massive gun belts and six-shooters!
I’m not seeing, given the contraception coverage they already provide, where the institution’s moral objection actually exists.
The cries of “my religious conscience is being violated” rings particularly hollow for me when the church must be aware of the fact that over 90% of their members, akready ignore this important article of faith.
The level of bullshit coming from the clergy on this is piled a little high for me.
Limbaugh’s infamous broadcast implied that women would pay a lot less for birth control if they would have sex less often, a gross misunderstanding of how birth control pills work. Women can’t just pop one fifteen minutes before getting laid; they have to take a regimen of three or four different types of pills over the course of a menstrual cycle and if they skip a day, they have to start the regimen over from scratch and wait a month for it to be effective. It ain’t like Viagra. How did Rush get to be his present age and not know this?
A true conservative would object to Ms. Fluke’s testimony on very different grounds. Instead of asking why no one will help these poor women pay for their badly-needed birth control pills, she should be asking why the pills cost so damned much. This line of inquiry might cause her to examine the cozy relationship between drug manufacturers, government regulators, insurance companies and the medical profession who collude to keep birth control pills and other medications insulated from market forces. Fifty years after their invention, they should be cheaper than Tylenol and uninsured women should be able to afford them easily.
The moralist prig in me isn’t outraged that people are out there having lots of consequence-free sex; the moralist prig in me is kind of glad that lots of otherwise-irresponsible people aren’t breeding. I’m not sure what Limbaugh’s problem is.
I’d say that’s a very conservative estimate. I’d estimate that 97% of the people criticizing her HERE haven’t read it (clearly the OP hasn’t), and in the wider world I’d put it at 99.8%. And that bugs me WAY more than anything Rush says.
Why is it that so few people can be bothered to take 120 second out of their life to keep from making an ass of themselves?
I don’t really care about anything Rush says and never has. I notice on these forums a lot of threads start about talking heads on the TV or radio personalities. In my whole life I’ve never once heard more than 2-3 minutes of a radio talk show, nor have I ever watched TV personalities like Hannity, O’Reilly, Beck etc.
As I said, government funded contraceptives are good public policy.
In this country healthcare is primarily employer based and changing that is not feasible, which is why Obama pursued healthcare reform in the way that he did. I think if there is a public policy goal of getting more use of contraception out there it is fine to do it by mandating health coverage offered by employers has it.
The reason I say that is it is not a true mandate. A mandate to me is something you do or you go to jail (like pay your taxes.) The healthcare issue here basically tells employers they do this, but they have options to not do it. If I run a large Catholic organization and I do not want healthcare that is funded by my organization’s dollars to pay for contraception, I have the option to opt out of offering healthcare to my employees, my employees will then be able to pursue healthcare with a state exchange. I will have to pay a $2,000/employee fine (per year), but if this is a true moral issue that shouldn’t be a big deal, right?
Edit: If the religious organization was given a genuine mandate (meaning real criminal penalties for non-compliance) and had no choice but to offer healthcare, and could not opt-out, then I might agree they shouldn’t be forced to provide money to a plan that does things to which they have a moral opposition.
I disagree. The employer has no business having moral opinions about what their employees do on their own time or with their own salary and benefits packages.
Let’s face it; if the birth control isn’t paid for out of insurance, it’ll be paid for out of their salary. But the idea that the employer is “paying for it,” is a Feudal lord opinion, like anything they give their employees is still somehow theirs and the employee is some kind of serf bound to live by their rules. They are not, and this should have been established early on.
Instead, grandstanding politicians invite priests in to give testimony and no labor rights lawyers to remind them that their employees are not serfs and are not bound by their moral laws, and if the Catholic church can’t abide by freedom they have every right to stop running businesses in the United States.
The way this thing is framed is a lie. You don’t have any right as a business to mandate how your staff lives, and the desire to do so is not “freedom of religion,” it is oppressive and patriarchal.
I’m a relative liberal and I find the talk radio/Fox news/Wall Street Journal-print media’s approach to marketing right-wing viewpoints insanely infuriating. The commonality seems to go beyond pitching and packaging ideas to the lowest common denominator. They have usurped valid (from a rational point of view) conservative positions and turned them into logic-defying circuses that make BookTV look like professional wrestling.
The skydive into the depths of incoherence and trenches of obfuscation has been driven more by selling (advertising, books, etc.) to a target market than by advancing political opinions and discourse. It has unnecessarily skewed discussion (see thread) and hidden an entire spectrum of valid ideas and arguments behind eggshell-thin rhetoric.
We have some excellent conservative voices here. Unfortunately, they are often drowned out by the crazy.