The Obamacare scandal

I suspect that most folks who would read this are aware of the current furor over self-identified Catholic Kathleen Sebelius’ announcement that Catholic institutions will have to fund free sterilization, birth control, and abortifacients in their employees’ insurance as part of Obamacare. At last count, 115 bishops have stood up against the requirement that the Church must enable sin.

A somewhat contrarian Catholic voice to this has been provided by Karl Denninger, who points out that the Church (or loud factions thereof) has never strongly opposed tax funding of contraception. I think that he ignores what opposition there has been on that score, but he is in essence correct that leftist Catholics have had no issue with Catholic money funding sin, as long as they aren’t the ones collecting the money. If they made  exceptions to the socialist program on the basis of certain sins, they would need to admit all sins… and the modern welfare state has encouraged sloth, envy, and gluttony, and is funded by theft. He’s absolutely right that the lines should have been drawn long before. Part of the problem is that Catholic social teaching doesn’t have the same clarity as Catholic teaching on sexual issues. It’s a lot more like their stand on capital punishment…if it weren’t for the capital punishment of Jesus, we’d still be damned, and there’s a certain embarrassing history of “turning over to the secular arm”, but it’s pretty obviously state murder, so the message comes out that “we’re not going to say it’s a sin, but we’re against it in almost all circumstances”. Likewise, the social teaching of the Church begins with “What would Jesus do?”, but gets tangled in how to apply that to industrial and post-industrial society, with non-concepts such as “social justice” (Is society a moral actor? ) leading to turning charity over “to the secular arm”. To an extent, the HHS mandate is liberal Catholicism’s chickens coming home to roost.

In spite of this valid point, there IS a difference between permitting individual Catholic consciences to be raped by the State, and having to pay as an institution for the rape of conscience, because it is the Church collecting the money, even if the State is waving the guns around. Denninger has similar fuzzy thinking when he suggests that the Church could simply provide the insurance, and that no sin would be committed because Catholics do not use “reproductive services.” This is laughable. First, Catholic social services sometimes hire non-Catholics, who would not feel themselves bound by church teaching on this, but contraception is a sin whether practiced by Catholics, Protestants, or heathens, and the Church would be enabling it. Second, Catholics themselves use such things, especially when they’re free. As Denninger said, they could be excommunicated, but how are you going to prove the case? And the Church is hard up enough for membership that they won’t even deal with egregious scandalous cases like Nancy Pelosi; nobody is going to send in the Inquisition to find out why you only have one child…not when you could say that you’re really good with NFP. Also, past sins have no relation with the present. Just because American Catholicism has screwed up tax-funded matters for the better part of a century, it doesn’t mean that they have to get this wrong too, just to be consistently wrong. Repentance is always a possibility.

Vox Day attaboys Denninger, but adds in an issue of his own:

I think it is great that the Roman Catholic Church is finally being leashed and brought to heel. Perhaps now it will finally understand that a government that possesses the power to dictate to others in accordance with your wishes is a government with the power to dictate to you in accordance with the wishes of others. The Church has always been at its best when it is standing in opposition to the governments of the world, and at its worst when it is working in collaboration with them.

It is never good for an institution to be brought under the heel of the government. A violation of rights is wrong even if you think the recipient is richly deserving of the educatiuon. And it’s not the place of the Church to be for or against governments; its Kingdom is not of this world , and it has done best when ignoring the secular arm. The Church has always had a delicate balancing act with regard to the State, which fears any competing center of power. It opposes the state only on religious matters. Sometimes the State has made the religious into the political, as in the refusal to honor the Roman state deities. The Church will not burn incense to the secular Moloch of abortion, sacramental as it may seem to some, and that will again put it on a collision course with government power. The martyrs may be white rather than red, but martyrs there will be, and the same winner as always.

UPDATE 2/1: Denninger has another post on this, with some new logic lapses. First he gripes that Catholics have had to pay for treatment of STDs that are contracted by violating the sexual rules of the Church. Does he really think that being able to treat the clap creates a moral hazard and an incitement to sin? Or is it in fact cleaning up the mess left by sin…which arguably is the Church’s core mission?  Likewise,  type-2 diabetes is contracted through gluttony; was it hypocritical for the Church not to object to that? Then he deals with the issue of the Catholic “faithful” and birth control, and how they can’t be excommunicated. That’s true…but it’s a problem of catechesis.  Priests are reluctant to take on ANY sin, especially birth control, and if they won’t do the easiest thing, they won’t do the hardest. So 98% of PiPs are using unnatural family planning? 98% of Catholics eat too much, 98% take the Lord’s name in vain, cheat on their taxes, gossip, or commit any other sin you might care to name. But the Church doesn’t pay for those sins. OK, this is a wedge issue to get the PiPs to  take birth control seriously…again, what is wrong with that?

Pretty normal, for a Master’s degree

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Piss on ‘em!

There’s been a fair bit of outrage from the usual nancy-boys about Marines urinating on Taliban corpses.

Piss on’em, I say… at least the nancy-boys.

Pissing on a corpse is to corpse desecration as waterboarding is to torture: it leaves no physical damage, and it gets the point across. As far as I know, being doused with bodily fluids does not impact a Muslim’s chances of getting to Paradise, as would dumping a Neti pot full of lard into his nostrils. So the corpse wouldn’t care, being dead and all. As for the corpse’s kin, it’s argued that marking the metaphorical yellow streak down the corpse’s back with a literal yellow streak will cause them to hate us. Given their kind and thoughtful gifts of RPGs (not role-playing games) and IEDs, that’s certainly to be avoided at all costs. If it hurts their poor widdle feelings, piss on ‘em.

Vanderbeogh offers some perspective. Radical I-slammers have been known to desecrate American corpses while they were still alive. And there were a number of pictures taken during WW II of creative uses for used heads that Japanese no longer had a use for. And mind you, this was an enemy more worthy of honor, who showed more courage and who didn’t have to be bribed with a post-mortal harem in order to fight. Where was the outrage? Why didn’t we cede Hawaii to the Japanese to expiate our shame at our horrible actions? Might it have been because the Japs were whappin’ heads too? In the present conflicts, we haven’t been leaving heads around, or taking scalps or scrotums. That the lowest we’ve gone is urination shows that we’ve come a long way by historical standards. We even gave their late boss a Muslim burial at sea, instead of turning him into a sideshow exhibit. Consider it a step towards nation-buiding, the Marines symbolically saying “Ur-a-nation”.

My wife points out that just about every pickemup truck has a window decal of a little boy pissing on something or other. Why aren’t the folks who think this is My Lai agitating for a law to ban such an influence on impressionable youth?

OK, I know what the Church teaches about the dignity of all humans, that this may tactically have been a bad move, that allowing the scene to be captured visually is an act of stupidity. Yeah, OK, it shouldn’t have happened. But in a world where folks are more excited about warm urine than hot lead, I’m going to save my outrage for something worthwhile.

UPDATE: Says the faithful if intermperate Ann Barnhardt:

I have little sympathy for men who live their lives wiping their anuses with their bare hands after bowel movements, and who view as the pinnacle of human pleasure inserting their genitals and depositing their semen into the feces-laden rectums of boys and other men, who suddenly get squeamish about dead bodies being sprinkled with a bit of urine – which is sterile by the way. Those dead Taliban were probably the cleanest they had ever been in their adult lives after being showered with the righteous tinkles of those Marines.

Stupid manufactured outrages

We have Obama’s Infamous Halloween Party, which the dextrosphere is so outraged about that they’ve suddenly discovered class warfare. And when called on that, they backtrack and say, “It’s not the party, it’s the cover-up”, even though their previous statements made the cover-up perfectly understandable. Look, the White House throws parties; always has, always will, and they are always lavish by 99%-er standards. We don’t know how much or if Johnny Depp et al charged to be there, but most of the rest is penny-ante stuff. (Punch in blood vials…what a cool idea, and not that spendy.) When they start throwing parties that involve showering in the blood of virgins, I’ll get excited. (Not that that would ever happen; if a Democrat ever actually found a virgin, she’d be deflowered before she got to the White House.) Yes, the cover-up was a bad idea, but this is the President that considers his school records to be a state secret; it’s not exactly new behavior. The only people to really look bad in all this are the White House press corps, who are revealed to be total lapdogs and should resign en masse.

In the sinistrosphere, we have Pat Cunningham of the Rockford Register Star claiming that Kansas House speaker Mike O’Neal “prays for Obama’s death”. Well, not that, exactly. There’s this email that’s been going around for awhile, I received it several months ago. Here’s the text as I received it:

—– Psalm 109:8
My wife and I were in slow-moving traffic the other day and
we were stopped behind a car that had an unusual Obama bumper sticker on it.
It read: “Pray for Obama. Psalm 109:8″.

When we got home my wife got out the Bible and opened it up to the scripture.
She started laughing & laughing. Then she read it to me.
I couldn’t believe what it said. I had a good laugh, too.
Psalm 109:8 ~ “Let his days be few and brief; and let others step forward
to replace him.”
At last — I can honestly voice a Biblical prayer for our president!
Look it up — it is word for word! Let us all bow our heads and pray.
Brothers and Sisters, can I get an AMEN?

Here’s the version which was passed on by Speaker O’Neal, per Cunningham:

In another of O’Neal’s emails, he referenced Psalm 109 from the Old Testament, which reads in part:

May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow.
May his children be wandering beggars; may they be driven from their ruined homes.
May a creditor seize all he has; may strangers plunder the fruits of his labor.
May no one extend kindness to him or take pity on his fatherless children.

O’Neal wrote: “At last — I can honestly voice a Biblical prayer for our president! Look it up — it is word for word! Let us all bow our heads and pray. Brothers and Sisters, can I get an AMEN? AMEN!!!!!!”

Now, I suspect “referenced” mean about what my version says. And you’ll notice that “O’Neal wrote”, miraculously, exactly the text which I received…which he probably received too. Now, “O’Neal wrote” this in the sense that he forwarded it to others, which DOES make him responsible for the content. But his crime here is stupidly and thoughtlessly forwarding emails…a crime that I suspect Pat Cunningham is not immune from. And if forwarding an email is “praying” for anything, well, I’m going to start saying the e-rosary: email the Hail Mary to 10 of my friends, the Our Father to another, and the Fatima tag to another. Of course, soon I’ll be blacklisted by all my friends, but that doesn’t matter; I can still “pray” electronically, even if it bounced back.

Now, why are we worried about trivia like parties and an itchy trigger finger on the “send” button when the nation is collapsing?

Second verse, same as the first

In the wake of the revelations about that miserable little twink Jamie Kirchick’s hatchet job against Ron Paul, I found myself reading blog posts from the last Presidential election cycle, in search of links from back then. I remember being pissed at cur-CHICK at the time, but there wasn’t a lot on the blog, unless it was all slightly earlier and on the Case blog. The WordPress search functions are virtually nonexistent. During the worst of it all, I was abandoning the anti-Paul blogs and reading a lot more at lewrockwell.com.  I don’t so much now; Lew’s crew can get into a sort of kneejerk libertarian negativity. But that concentration of Catholic libertarians were certainly instrumental in my own conversion. And in reading back, the current froth-at-the -mouth about Ron Paul seems very old hat. I have to wonder if Ace of Spades might actually be James Kirchick’s beard. All those busty cheerleaders and talk of hobo-hunting…the man doth protest too much, methinks.

Sheeps is skeered of wookies

“I don’t agree with Pauls extreme position on libertarianism either.” (comment here)

Effin’ ay, you think that a sitting US representative who earmarks has an ‘extreme position on libertarianism’?? Sir, you don’t know what the term means (as is proven by the rest of your comment.)

Breitbart isn’t taking his trash out

Memo to Republicans: Where’s ObamaCare’s Replacement?
by Dr. Susan Berry

Dr. Susan Berry is a practicing clinical psychologist. Susan uses her skills to help people learn how to empower themselves.

Listen, shrink: if you want us to be empowered, leave us the fuck alone, OK?  We need to replace Obamacare like we need to replace cancer with heart disease.

The obligations of business

I got into way too much trouble on Facebook just before Christmas. But the one bit I’m going to discuss here concerns a friend who was highly offended at Hallmark because she was looking for a Christmas card for her son and his partner, and the only gay Christmas card they had was lame. I expressed the opinion that “[identity group] Christmas cards” were a silly idea, and she got offended, and all of her girlfriends with her, and I decided it was best to bow out. But I really need to finish the issue somewhere where I don’t feel I’m trampling somebody’s feelings.

First: she found one gay Christmas card. Would we have seen such a thing in the small town we grew up in, in the ’70s? You’ve come a long way, baby.

Second: what constitutes a gay Christmas card?  A card with a picture of two guys on it, or two women? Do the cards that say “To the both of you” have specifically heterosexual imagery? Most of the ones I’ve seen are pretty lame. Do they say “Horny holidays to you and your partner?” For that matter, where are the heterosexual Christmas cards, and what do they say? Yeah, they’re out there, where they keep all the edgy cards. And they’re generally borderline offensive. And I suspect I’ve seen gay cards with them…but not by Hallmark. Indeed, a Web search confirms that there are a bunch of people doing gay cards.

She was looking for something special, and they had cards for all these other relationships, so why not this one? Well, everyone has parents, and more often than not alive. Most people have children, grandchildren, inlaws and bosses (though fewer of all of them, these days). Indeed, this was for an adult child and his mate. But only about 3% of the population is gay. And how many people would get a member of that 3% a card that celebrates or even acknowledges their gayness?  While yes, families are important at Christmas, what we’re celebrating is the birth of Jesus, not somebody’s sexual orientation.

Let’s look at this from the point of view of Hallmark. The gay market is a niche market. Now, yes, there’s money there. But the bigger the company, the more conservatively they’d have to play. What they could make from the gay market could be dwarfed by a concerted protest against gay cards. And a lot of stores wouldn’t stock them. I’m cool with the idea of buyers having cards that look like them, or the people they’re sending to. Hallmark has the Mahogany collection, but that’s a much bigger market. A search at the Hallmark site under “homosexual, Christmas” got 859 hits, but I wouldn’t call any of them “a gay Christmas card”. (I did several similar searches, with “gay” and “holiday”, with similar results).

What bothers me about this discussion was the implication that a company was somehow obligated to serve a particular market, because members of that market thought it was the right thing to do.  Hallmark is obligated to do nothing except make its stockholders happy, no more than I am obligated to send my gay friends gay Christmas cards…because, you know, they are so much more to me than a positive-ground DNA interface.

Why am I here?

WordPress shuts down controversial anti-Islamic site.