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Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters. - Albert Einstein
As you may know, Foster Friess, a generous financial supporter to Rick Santorum’s presidential campaign, appeared on Andrea Mitchell’s MSNBC show and made a widely-reported comment on birth control.
Here’s the exchange between Friess and Mitchell:
Mitchell: Do you have any concerns about some of his comments on social issues, contraception, about women in combat, and whether that would hurt his general election campaign would he be the nominee?
Friess: I get such a chuckle when these things come out. Here we have millions of our fellow Americans unemployed, we have jihadist camps being set up in Latin America, which Rick has been warning about, and people seem to be so preoccupied with sex. I think it says something about our culture. We maybe need a massive therapy session so we can concentrate on what the real issues are. And this contraceptive thing, my gosh, it's such inexpensive. Back in my day, they used Bayer aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn't that costly.
Mitchell: Excuse me, I'm just trying to catch my breath from that, Mr. Friess, frankly.
That’s all I could find. Perhaps there’s a longer transcript available somewhere; if so, I’d like to read it. But that’s the exchange that’s being reported: my link is to the Wall Street Journal; the Journal’s link is to TalkingPointsMemo.
This past Sunday, David Gregory brought this comment up on Meet The Press; Andrea Mitchell was one of the panelists on the show. Here’s Gregory’s description of what Friess said (emphasis mine):
MR. GREGORY: This aspirin business, Foster Friess, who's a Santorum supporter, said to you on your program that the best means of birth control is putting a Bayer aspirin between your legs, which is kind of an old joke.
Here’s Mitchell correcting Gregory’s mischaracterization:
MS. MITCHELL: Yes.
Just for the record.
*****
Reading:
Re: Re: Bad Jokes - Michael Potemra, writing at The Corner. I like this post partly because Potemra is very clear on the problems with what Friess said, which is refreshing coming from someone writing from the Right.
I like this post even more because Potemra sees Friess as a living, breathing person, with all the complexity that entails, all the potential for missteps, all the potential for opening mouth and inserting foot, all the potential for reconsideration and apology. I’m very tired of people attributing earth-shattering - and always horrifying - significance to every word uttered by those with whom they disagree. It’s confirmation bias on steroids. People aren’t just cherry-picking facts to fit their preconceptions; they’re hypervigilant for incidents they can use to prove how terrible their opponents are. If someone who disagrees with them politically says a thousand decent things and one questionable one, they seize on the latter to prove that those who disagree with them are monsters.
Robert F. Kennedy said:
What is dangerous about extremists is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents.
It seems to me that our country - at least the part of it that pontificates about politics - today contains very few people who aren’t extremists. This state of affairs is scary; bodes ill for the future of the nation; and raises serious questions about the viability of our form of government. It’s also incredibly tiresome.
I had pretty much already decided what I thought the Catholic church - and all other affected religions - should do in response to the HHS mandate that they provide their employees with insurance that covered contraception. However, I thought my preferred solution was awfully intemperate. Then I read Wendy Kaminer’s essay on the topic and I decided my preferred course of action wasn’t intemperate at all.
Kaminer believes that having ones employer provide insurance that covers contraception and abortion is a civil right that trumps any “moral” considerations regarding those services. (The idea that those “moral” considerations are themselves aspects of a “right” never occurs to her - much less the idea that the latter right is actually in the Constitution, unlike the former.) She compares the refusal of contraception and abortion to manifestations of slavery and racism (then says she is not doing so). The heart of her argument is:
Still, while the fate of American civilization doesn't depend on this debate about the obligations of church-affiliated institutions to abide by secular law, the stakes are relatively high. As government workers are laid off and government programs shrink, the public role of private, tax-exempt non-profits expands. The stronger their right to dispense public funds and deliver public services according to sectarian religious dictates, the weaker our rights to a non-sectarian public sphere. It's a zero-sum game.
I find her inability to envision a rich hodge-podge of private non-profits tiresome. Nonetheless, under the terms she has laid down - the only good non-profit is a secularized non-profit - she is correct about this being a zero-sum game. However, her solution - forcing “sectarian” non-profits to bend to secular law - is not the only solution, and I think she and all who think like her will prefer my proposal:
The Catholic Church - and any other religious organization which is subject to the HHS mandate and has principled objections to it - should simply shut down every hospital, college, adoption agency, charity, foundation, and other “public role” service it runs. Schools covering K through 12 could stay open but it seems unwise. Not only would they have to hire only Catholics and admit only Catholic children, they would also - if I understand the wording of the mandate correctly - have to spend a significant portion of their school day teaching religion, thus leaving less time for other subjects. The quality of the education they provide would suffer and so it seems wiser to close them as well.
Problem solved. No more having to allow “private, tax-exempt non-profits” to “dispense public funds and deliver public services”. Instead, all services will come from the government. Religious organizations can subside into their proper role: a place people visit once a week and pay lip service to when running for public office. At least until the emerging “coherent non-theist movement” is finally strong enough to make them completely unnecessary.
*****
Reading:
Should the Church Have To Dispense Birth Control? - Megan McArdle. Read the whole thing; here’s a sample
I've seen several versions of Kevin's complaint on the interwebs, and everyone makes it seems to assume that we're doing the Catholic Church a big old favor by allowing them to provide health care and other social services to a needy public. Why, we're really coddling them, and it's about time they started acting a little grateful for everything we've done for them!
These people seem to be living in an alternate universe that I don't have access to, where there's a positive glut of secular organizations who are just dying to provide top-notch care for the sick, the poor, and the dispossessed.
Let’s leave aside for a moment the First Amendment aspect of the HHS mandate that all employers provide their employees with insurance that covers contraception. I know that sounds weird but, frankly, I just find that entire topic awfully upsetting and have a couple of other, rather intemperate posts in the works about that.
Instead, let’s look at this from a slightly different angle. If I understand the law behind the HHS mandate, this is happening solely at the discretion of the Executive branch. That is, HHS was empowered by Obamacare to decide what services must be covered by any employer-provided insurance plan. So far as I know, that decision doesn’t get made once and set in stone. (I could be wrong about that but given the continuing development of new treatments, it would seem that HHS must have the ability to change what is required.) That would seem to mean that a different Administration could impose different requirements. So future Administrations could - depending on their political viewpoint - do any of the following:
Rescind the requirement that employer-provided insurance cover contraception.
Require employer-provided insurance to cover treatment to “cure” people of homosexuality, including psychiatric, drug, and religion-based approaches.
Require employer-provided insurance to cover children born to or adopted by married employees but not those born to or adopted by unmarried employees.
Not require employer-provided insurance to cover pre-natal testing designed to detect the sorts of birth defects that often lead to abortions.
Not require employer-provided insurance cover anything more than palliative care for children born with birth defects that could have been detected early enough for an abortion.
Not require employer-provided insurance cover whatever conditions a particular Administration considers preventable: sexually transmitted diseases; lung cancer in smokers; Type 2 diabetes or heart failure in the obese; pregnancy out of wedlock; accidentally self-inflicted gunshot wounds.
Employers could, of course, still choose to provide coverage that is not required but since (as I understand it) the Executive branch will have at least some say in how insurance companies are allowed to set their rates, an employer might find it difficult to locate an insurance company willing to provide a policy that an Administration would prefer not be written. And, of course, the more limited coverage will be cheaper so ...
It should be quite a ride.
I'll have very little access to a computer until around mid-February.
Comments are closed. I can be emailed:
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'Occupy' memo could discourage victims from reporting assaults
(Via Contentions) (emphasis mine):
Efforts by the Occupy Baltimore protest group to evolve into a self-contained, self-governing community have erupted into controversy with the distribution of a pamphlet that victim advocates and health workers fear discourages victims of sexual assaults from contacting police.
The pamphlet says that members of the protest group who believe they are victims or who suspect sexual abuse "are encouraged to immediately report the incident to the Security Committee," which will investigate and "supply the abuser with counseling resources."
Sounds like Little Miss Attila was right when she wrote:
... someone’s going to come along and ... say that this is not American Sharia law: after all, we only enforce our notions of sexual purity when it comes to Republican women, or women and girls related to Republican women. [snip]
This is American Sharia, assholes. The practitioners of Sharia in Muslim countries are at least consistent in their contempt for women and in their practice of gender apartheid: you, on the other hand, want sexual slavery for some women in this country; others, whose opinions you prefer, can live in relative peace and freedom. You will allow it.
If you are giving women and girls the “gift” of not being badgered for being female, and threatened with misogyny and sexual assault, they are not truly free—only living in a state of grace, contingent upon performing the right tricks, spouting leftist verbiage like seals at Sea World, balancing balls on their noses in the hopes of getting fish thrown into their mouths.
And any woman who doesn’t understand this fundamental truth about the misogynists living among them could be in for a rude awakening at any point, because that attitude will infect those who harbor it.
[This is the sixth of a series of posts on polygamy. The first - simply an intro - is here. The series is collected under the category “Grim Polygamy”.]
When I began thinking about how the fight over legalizing gay marriage would affect the fight over legalizing polygamy, I had a persistent sense that opposing gay marriage on logical grounds had been the wrong tactic for those who did not want to see it legalized. I eventually sort of, kind of short-handed that sense as the idea that institutions like marriage evolve organically, which is, of course, the argument Megan McArdle is making in her discussion of the unknowability of the possible repercussions of gay marriage. (You know, the really, really, really long post of hers I keep citing over and over.)
However, that didn’t really capture what my uneasiness was about. What I was really wondering was why it is invalid to simply say: I do not want to live in a society where gay marriage is legal. Or for me (since I am not worried about living in a society where gay marriage is legal): I do not want to live in a society where polygamy is legal.
I understand there are problems with this formulation since people can - and have - said: I do not want to live in a society where Blacks and whites live together on equal footing. Or, not so long ago: I do not want to live in a society where women can vote. And yet, still, I think there is validity to the majority of people in a society having a say in legal changes that will - even probably will - change the form of their society. Perhaps that is simply the definition of a conservative: someone who believes the status quo is the best way unless and until it becomes overwhelmingly clear to a majority of society that something has to change.
I was never sure quite how to write about this but I have now (via NRO Web Briefing) run across an essay at Public Discourse that discusses this in terms of pornography. I’m not sure I agree with the entirety of the article but this paragraph captures much of what I wanted to express but couldn’t quite manage (emphasis mine):
Even in defending what he believes is a moral right to pornography, Ronald Dworkin has identified the public nature of the interests damaged in communities in which pornography becomes freely available and widely circulates. Legal recognition of the right to pornography would, Dworkin concedes, “sharply limit the ability of individuals consciously and reflectively to influence the conditions of their own and their children’s development. It would limit their ability to bring about the cultural structure they think best, a structure in which sexual experience generally has dignity and beauty, without which their own and their families’ sexual experience are likely to have these qualities in less degree.”
The author is, as I said, speaking of pornography and, more generally, of vice; he is also speaking of an area he believes has “profound moral significance”. However, I think the same ideas apply to any major changes to the fabric of society: women voting; equal rights for Blacks; equal rights for women; gay marriage; polygamy; massive immigration; widespread use of languages other than English; legalizing abortion; and, now, re-criminalization of abortion. All of these changes have limited or probably would limit people’s “ability to bring about the cultural structure they think best”.
This does not mean there is never a reason to make such changes. It does mean, at least to me, that “I do not want to live in a society where” should be given weight in arguments over such matters and, so long as a substantial majority is making that statement, it should not be overridden lightly.
Now that I’ve written that down, it appears so obvious as to be trivial. Surely that’s what democracy is about: a majority deciding what their society should look like. And yet it seems to me that we have largely lost that conception of democracy when it comes to cultural issues. We have so totally accepted the idea that all such issues are analogous to what the article’s author describes as:
pitting the “rights of individuals,” on the one side, against some amorphous “majority’s dislike of smut,”on the other
that we ignore the underpinnings of that dislike: “[t]he public interest in a cultural structure”. Rather than accept that such an interest exists and is both “concrete” and valid, we now require that such an interest be justified - and we always begin with the idea that it is virtually impossible to do so against any invocation of the rights of individuals.
I believe I understand why that is the case: there were cases - like racial equality and women voting - where the public interest was on the wrong side morally. I imagine there are and will be other such cases. But our reaction to those cases has been to throw out the very idea that there is a “public interest in a cultural structure”. That has helped individuals who want legal sanction to do things most of us would rather they didn’t but it’s not clear it’s helped society as a whole. And without a healthy society, individuals - whatever their private predilections - don’t stand much of a chance.
[This is the fifth of a series of posts on polygamy. The first - simply an intro - is here. The series is collected under the category “Grim Polygamy”.]
There are a couple of posts up at Grim’s Hall on polygamy:
Politics and Principles - Posted October 8, 2011
Aquinas on Polygamy - Posted October 13, 2011
These have been up for a while - I’m late getting links up.
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