Splinters, Logs and Papal Fantasies

For reasons which are not entirely clear, some Catholics have chosen to make Mahatma Ghandi a surrogate for the new Pope, on the off-chance that said Pope is from the third world. The argument is both simple and simplistic: everyone likes the idea of Gandhi, but no one actually listens to what he said. Specifically, those darned liberals never actually listen to what Gandhi said about contraception. He was against it, you see, and those shameless Gandhi-promoters are for it, which demonstrates their shameless philosophical eclecticism.

Eclecticism is bad because it means you take just the pieces of a philosophy that you like and you leave behind the nasty bits that you don't like. Eclecticism, or "cafeteria philosophy" describes a large range of logical incoherence, including cafeteria Catholicism. And you know how logically solid the latter is.

Now, from what I can tell, we are supposed to get up in arms about this ignorance concerning Gandhi's anti-contraception attitudes. Why? Well, because his attack on contraception proves Gandhi was the Great Non-Christian Pro-Lifer, the man we Christians point to when we want to show off natural law. Gandhi, you see, is the Christian poster boy for how everyone who is open to natural law rejects contraception.

The message seems to be, "How dare those nasty MSM-types try to steal our poster boy!"

Yes.
Well.

Before we jump up and down, trying to extract the splinter from the eye of the MSM, let's take a look at the log in our own eye, shall we?

To put it bluntly, both liberals and Christians should avoid Mahatma Gandhi like the plague he is. Gandhi was a war-mongering ignoramus, and anyone who knows his story can tear apart the "Gandhi was right on contraception!" parade as easily as Joe Biden's wife takes out little fishies with her shotgun.

You see, Gandhi didn't just oppose contraception. He also opposed the use of penicillin. Yes, you read that correctly. When his own wife lay dying of an eminently treatable pneumonia, he refused to allow her to receive penicillin, despite the pleadings of his own son:

In August 1942, Gandhi and his wife, Kasturba, among others, were imprisoned by the British in Aga Khan Palace, near Poona. Kasturba had poor circulation and she’d weathered several heart attacks. While detained in the palace, she developed bronchial pneumonia. One of her four sons, Devadas, wanted her to take penicillin. Gandhi refused. He was okay with her receiving traditional remedies, such as water from the Ganges, but he refused her any medicines, including this newfangled antibiotic, saying that the Almighty would have to heal her.

“The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi” quotes him on February 19, 1944; “If God wills it, He will pull her through.” “Gandhi: A Life” adds this wisdom from the Mahatma: “You cannot cure your mother now, no matter what wonder drugs you may muster. She is in God’s hands now.” Three days later, Devadas was still pushing for the penicillin, but Gandhi shot back: “Why don’t you trust God?” Kasturba died that day. 

The next night, Gandhi cried out: “But how God tested my faith!” He told one of Kasturba’s doctors that the antibiotic wouldn’t have saved her and that allowing her to have it “would have meant the bankruptcy of my faith.”

But Gandhi’s faith wasn’t much of an obstacle a short time later when it was his ass on the line. A mere six weeks after Kasturba died, Gandhi was flattened by malaria. He stuck to an all-liquid diet as his doctors tried to convince him to take quinine. But Gandhi completely refused and died of the disease, right? No, actually, after three weeks of deterioration, he took the diabolical drug and quickly recovered. The stuff about trusting God’s will and testing faith only applied when his wife’s life hung in the balance.

Elsewhere he wrote, "the will to live proved stronger than the devotion to truth." He was fine with the Nazis killing Jews in the ghettoes. He hated blacks, supported apartheid, went on a hunger strike to prevent the British from treating the Untouchables as human beings with equal human rights, and encouraged Hindus to kill Muslims after the British left India.

It has been reported that Gandhi “half-welcomed” the civil war that broke out in the last days. Even a fratricidal “bloodbath” (Gandhi’s word) would be preferable to the British.

And suddenly Gandhi began endorsing violence left, right, and center. During the fearsome rioting in Calcutta he gave his approval to men “using violence in a moral cause.” How could he tell them that violence was wrong, he asked, “unless I demonstrate that nonviolence is more effective?” He blessed the Nawab of Maler Kotla when he gave orders to shoot ten Muslims for every Hindu killed in his state...it is not widely realized (nor will this film tell you) how much violence was associated with Gandhi’s so-called “nonviolent” movement from the very beginning. 

He adored the British soldier, was a sergeant-major in the British army, led troops into combat, won a military combat medal from the British for his valor in the Boer wars, and petitioned the Queen of England to be allowed to raise regiments of all-volunteer Indian soldiers to fight alongside the British in WW I.

We won't discuss at length his predilection for both giving and receiving enemas, the delight he took in sleeping with young, naked Indian girls or his encouragement of young boys and girls to bathe and sleep together, but even in mentioning these things, I hope you begin to see the problems inherent for any Westerner who wants to use Gandhi for any kind of moral model.

Yet when it comes to the teaching on contraception, Christians, especially Catholics, love to trot this man out as some kind of non-Christian guru, deeply in touch with the natural law.

Now I've taken hundreds of words to explain something that could have been summarized very easily. Both liberals and conservatives, Christians and atheists, like to name-drop people who will support their points. We leave out the unhappy facts that swirl around and obscure the blessed narrative we try to construct.

The liberal MSM has their Gandhi fantasies, we Christians have our Gandhi fantasies, and both sides will use their own fantasies to "illuminate" the deep-seated fantasy we each carry about the future pope. But none of it - none of it - is real.

I am no fan of the liberal establishment media. But it isn't entirely fair to beat the press up for doing exactly what we do. So let us all simply allow Gandhi to molder in his grave and get on with the business of life without him, shall we?

The GOP Cassandra

“It seems to me, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare,” Mr. Akin said of pregnancies from rape. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something: I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child.”

What does Akin mean by "a legitimate rape"? Well, according to this news story, FBI and US DOJ studies over the course of years have demonstrated that about one in four rape allegations are fabricated. False. Made up. Created out of whole cloth. 

And we already know that rapists impregnate women at a lower rate than is normally expected. That is, we already know that Mr. Akin is correct.

Fact: An unfertilized human egg lasts 24 hours in the reproductive tract.
Fact: A woman can't get pregnant unless she ovulates.
Fact: Stress delays ovulation.
Fact: Rape is stressful.
Conclusion: Therefore, rape is likely to cause delayed ovulation and result in no pregnancy than a normal act of consensual intercourse.

These facts are individually uncontested
It's only when you put the facts together and draw the conclusion that the liberals begin frothing at the mouth.

Why?

Well, they are heavily invested in abortion.
As the internet has grown, the information surrounding how the abortion industry actually works is slowly revealing itself. No one likes that. It is bad for business. 

All the abortion crowd has left to defend abortion is rape, incest and fetal deformity.
If the truth were to get out - rape actually results in lower than expected pregnancy - one of their three remaining bullets would be lost. Worse, by using the phrase "legitimate rape", Akin actually  alluded to the fact that 25% of rape allegations are faked. One in four "raped" women are liars, actively trying to destroy some innocent man's life. Possibly, their "rape-pregnancy" is likewise a lie.

None of these facts can be borne. 

So, Akin has to be slimed even though the facts are virtually self-evident, even if the facts ALL favor Akin. 

Especially since the facts all favor Akin. 

And notice how the Republican hoi polloi have supported him.
Cough. 

Men in power, whether Democrat or Republican, want legal abortion.
So do women in power.

For as long as blood banks have been in business, we have known that nearly 30% of women have lied to their husbands about the paternity of "their" children.

Powerful men want to keep screwing women. Powerful women want to be screwed by powerful men. Neither group wants anyone else to know. Pregnancy and children are hard to keep secret. Well, they're hard to keep secret if the children are alive. If the pregnancy is aborted and the children are dead, there's no problem.

Have you ever noticed that one-in-three children are the result of cuckolding and one-in-three children are aborted? Funny how those statistics mesh so well.

As I said, Akin is completely correct, but no one can afford for that to get out.

Cassandra, call your office. 


UPDATE:
This doctor says Akin is correct.
Dr. Hilgers also agrees with Akin.


UPDATE: II
Easily obtained DNA testing will certainly have an impact on the discussion.

UPDATE III:
For those who don't trust my analysis, read this.
Seems Karl Rove "joked" that Todd Akin should be murdered for having spoken the truth.
Powerful Republican men are identical to powerful Democrats - they both want one thing, and they want legal abortion so they can keep doing that one thing.

Of Pregnancy and Rape

Republican Todd Akins is in trouble for saying that a woman is less likely to get pregnant as a result of rape then she is at other times of her life.

Everyone is jumping on Akins because he said something wrong. Nobody has really demonstrated exactly what his error is. Either what he said is true or it is not. That is, either raped women get pregnant at lower rates than the general population of sexually active women or they do not.

If he is wrong, then he should apologize.
If he is not, there is no need.

I've heard lots of pro-lifers say the kind of thing Akin just said, but I've never seen the studies that backed it up. So, I thought I would take a look around.

Here's an abstract of a study by the NIMH that indicates "The national rape-related pregnancy rate is 5.0% per rape among victims of reproductive age (aged 12 to 45); among adult women an estimated 32,101 pregnancies result from rape each year. Among 34 cases of rape-related pregnancy, the majority occurred among adolescents and resulted from assault by a known, often related perpetrator."

(Remember that bit about adolescents, pregnancy and rape. It will be important later.)

So, according to the NIMH, rape has about a 5% chance of causing a pregnancy. OK. Well, how often would a woman typically get pregnant from one act of unprotected sex with someone she wanted to have sex with? According to this study, there is no difference - rape and consensual sex have the same pregnancy rates. But, according to a second study, if you add up all the numbers on the second study's graph in the most generous way over the 28  days of a typical menstrual cycle, you get a figure of about 3.5%.

So, it would appear that rape may actually increase the chance of pregnancy.
Hmmm... before we have poor Mr. Akin apologize, let's think about this a bit.

According to yet another study, the woman's choice to have sexual activity tends to cluster around her most fertile days. In fact, the study hypothesizes that intercourse can stimulate ovulation. Whether or not that hypothesis is true, we know the six days before ovulation are the woman's most fertile days. Having sex on a fertile day vastly increases the probability of pregnancy.

"Yes", I hear you say, "but we're talking about rape, you idiot, which - by definition - the woman doesn't choose."

Well, true. The woman doesn't choose to be raped.
But the man does choose whom to rape.
And we haven't taken that into account.

For instance, according to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network statistics on rape victims show:

• 29% are age 12-17.
• 44% are under age 18.
• 80% are under age 30.
• ages 12-34 are the highest risk years.
• Girls ages 16-19 are 4 times more likely than the general population to be victims of rape, attempted rape, or sexual assault.

Now, we already know from the previous studies that a woman's fertility begins dropping starting at age 30, and drops like a rock at 35. So does rape. In fact, rapists disproportionately pick fertile females. And we already know that men can tell when a woman is fertile.

So, can rapists tell when a woman is fertile? Do rapists preferentially rape fertile women? Because, if they do, then the rate of pregnancy should be much higher among rape victims than among the general population. And if the pregnancy rate is not appreciably higher, then Mr. Akins is, in fact, correct. That is, if consensual intercourse can stimulate ovulation then it is not unreasonable to assume that rape might reduce ovulation. If rapists chose fertile targets but had a lower-than-expected pregnancy outcome, that might be evidence that rape can inhibit ovulation.

In passing, it should be noted that schools of evolutionary psychology generally support the hypothesis that rapists seek out fertile females.

Now, let's recall the NIMH study above. Most of the pregnancies were (a) in adolescents and (b) by a known perpetrator, that is, someone who might know the adolescent well enough to (un)knowingly recognize the tell-tale signsof fertility.

And, with all that in mind, it looks like the experts being brought in to lambaste Akins are actually inadvertently providing support for what he said. 

Consider Politico's piece. The experts Politico quotes indicate that rape creates about twice the pregnancies of normal intercourse. The experts do admit that this is because rapists target fertile young women. But if rapists were actually targeting fertile young women during their fertile periods - as we know is possible - then the rate of pregnancy should be around 15%, not around 5% or 6%.

Hmmmm....

To my knowledge, no one has done a study to determine if rapists target fertile women during their most fertile periods, so I can't tell if Akins is wrong, but no one else seems able to prove he's wrong either. And we don't know if women on hormonal contraception (which might well mask pheromone signals) are raped at a different rate than women not taking hormonal contraception. 

So why the brouhaha? 

Obviously, the MSM and the Democrats want to keep pro-life senate hopefuls out of office. So, they start a tempest about Akins because it will score political points. Akins can't clearly back up what he says, and the pro-aborts know it, so all they have to do is keep the focus off the fact that he might actually be right. This is easy enough to do.

The Republicans will go along with it because Mitt doesn't want something this stupid to derail his bid for the Presidency. As Ronald Reagan said, "if you're explaining, you're not winning." Finding out whether Akins is right is not worth the time.

Akins is being thrown under the bus because it's an election year. I suspect that he will end up like Dan Quayle - vindicated far too late for it to do any good. 

UPDATE
Looks like I'm not alone in this estimation.
This article is a nice discussion of the pregnancy problem from a hormonal point of view.
The author points out that high stress is a known cause of infertility - referenced constantly by fertility experts.

So, if the liberals are to be believed, rape is NOT a stressful event in a woman's life.
At least, that would be a fair summary of their argument, given the science.

Overall, it looks like the entire brouhaha has been ginned up by lying liberals in order to make Todd Akin look bad... and the Republican party is willing to go along with it because it would be too difficult to correct the record.

Update II
Some readers are questioning if rapists really target fertile women.
It seems they do,
Oh, and 7% of women are subject to pre-eclampsia... forgot about that.
This doctor says Akin is correct.
Dr. Hilgers also agrees with Akin.

UPDATE III
Further evidence that rapists may know when women ovulate, and may therefore seek them out preferentially...
  

I Confess

When Christians see the Alfred Hitchcock thriller, "I Confess", they generally have one of two reactions: either they nod in agreement or they leave the film in absolute horror. Depending on how one understands one's own Christianity, the action the priest takes in the last five minutes of the movie is either (a) beautifully  perfect or (b) disorienting and perverse.

For Christians, there is no middle ground.

I won't spoil the ending by describing it, but as an RCIA director, I enjoy recommending that movie to new Catholics precisely because their reaction to the movie's ending will give them, and me, a feel for how Catholic their worldview is.

Similarly, "The Scarlet and the Black" is an historically accurate movie whose ending discombobulates
Christian audiences. The last five minutes are, again, shocking. Some Christians walk out disgusted, muttering under their breath about the perversity of the Catholic Church in general and Catholic priests in particular. But others walk out strengthened in their Christian convictions by the movie's resolution.

And so we come to Cardinal Dolan's Al Smith Dinner and the invitation of Barack Obama. Indeed, we might treat on the way the Al Smith Dinner organizers treat pro-abort groups versus pro-life groups in general.

Is Dolan acting as a stooge or a Christian?

Is it scandal to give Obama a platform, or is this Dolan's brilliant scheme to give Barack the opportunity to either publicly make up or make a fool of himself?

Mary Ann Kreitzer opines that Dolan's invitation shows disrespect for the unborn. Dolan would presumably never entertain the idea of inviting Barack to dinner if our fine President were in the habit of "stabbing a bishop in the head and sucking out his brains." And she brings forward numerous Scriptural examples of precisely this refusal. I confess an enormous amount of sympathy for Mrs. Kreitzer's position.

But, as I listened to this morning's sermon on the parable of the Good Samaritan, I realized there was historical precedent of a sort. We have the example of the Church in and after World War II.

Even though the Nazis were responsible for slaughtering thousands of religious, priests and bishops in death camps across Eastern Europe, the Pope approved of smuggling these same Nazis - including Adolf Eichmann - out from under the nose of Allied troops who wanted Nazi leaders arrested, tried and hanged.

Now, the comparison is not exact. The Vatican ratlines were run in secret, those smuggled out were not being given a public forum. Still, there is no indication that the men being smuggled out were penitent - as in Eichmann's case, we can be pretty sure that at least some of them were not.

So, what are we to think about Cardinal Dolan inviting our modern-day Eichmann to a public dinner, in which the participants 'roast' one another? Does it signal some tacit approval of Barack Obama?

Well, again, we have precedent. For instance, we know Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII, signed a concordat with Hitler on behalf of the Church, even though Pacelli was under no illusions about the integrity of the man with whom he treated:

“This man is completely obsessed,” he said. “All that is not of use to him, he destroys; all that he says and writes carries the mark of his egocentricity; this man is capable of trampling on corpses and eliminating all that obstructs him." [editor's note: does this sound familiar?]

Pacelli said "I had to choose between an agreement on their lines and the virtual elimination of the Catholic Church in the Reich"...Pinchas Lapide notes that whilst negotiations for Concordat were taking place, pressure had been put on the Vatican by the arrest of ninety-two priests, the searching of Catholic youth club premises, and the closing down of nine Catholic publications. 

Concluding a concordat with a madman is certainly a lot more binding then simply inviting him to dinner. Even so, the Church has chosen to treat with madmen many, many times in her history. We have not yet had to descend to the level of concluding a treaty with Barack Hussein Obama, although the pressure he places on Catholic institutions in this country have not gone unnoticed by Rome.

November has not yet come. Neither Cardinal Dolan nor we know for certain who will win the election, or what this particular madman will do if he does win a second term. Many, including myself, hold honest concerns that an Obama victory would spell the end of the remnants of free elections in the United States.

So, is Cardinal Dolan's invitation scandalous or wise?
Is it an exercise in Christian charity or participation in evil?

I honestly don't know.
I pray that Cardinal Dolan does.

We Have Met The Enemy

A lot of Catholic parents detest dating. According to these parents, dating encourages the participants to get used to frequent breakups, emotional roller coasters and psychologically prepares them for divorce.

Perhaps it does all of those things.
But the problem isn't with the dating.
The problem is with the Catholic parents.

Is Kellmeyer Crazy?

As I've pointed out in other posts, parents in post-industrial societies like our own infantilize their children. In pre-industrial society, 12-18 year olds were treated as adults. For centuries, canon law allowed 12-year old women and 14-year old men to marry (today, canon law has raised the age... to 14 and 16, respectively). Pagan Rome, where the average age of marriage for women was 14, had allowed the same thing, ages before Christ founded the Church. In fact, nearly every pre-industrial society on the face of the earth allowed what the Church allowed. Indeed, a recent survey of hunter-gatherer societies show the average age of marriage was 14 for girls and 21 for boys.  

Twelve-year old men were apprenticed and learned a trade - they were expected to be masters at their craft and able to support a family by age 18. For centuries, that's exactly what at least half the population did - women were married by age 16, men were married by age 18. 

Now, I know your first rebuttal, and it is wrong. Medievals weren't all mostly dead by the age of thirty.  Early marriage was not permitted because everyone died at age 30. Everyone thinks nobody made it to fifty because no one understands what "median age" means.

Any medieval who made it to age 10 was likely to live to be 50. The median age of death was in the low 20s and 30s for medievals because a lot of medieval children died in their first few years. This high early childhood death rate dragged the median death age artificially down.

In point of fact, if a person was able to survive the nutrition and health problems of medieval childhood, s/he was as likely to make it to 50 then as anyone born in modern-day Russia is today.

What changed?

Well, with industrialization, we decided to use a different kind of educational system. We pretty much scrapped apprenticeships and went for mass public schools. This new method warehouses children through age 18, keeps them out of the workforce and out of job competition with older adults. It also infantilizes them.

But it didn't used to be that way. In colonial Mexico, for instance, "More than half the Indias are married by the time they turn 16....using Nahua censuses for some Morelos villages around 1540, McCaa has built a strong case for child marriage. There were girls married before ten; mean age could stand between 12 and 14.(9) In all likelihood, the introduction of Christian marriage, with its threshold of 12 years for wedding girls, brought about a small rise in mean age at marriage for Indias.... At the age when half the girls (16) and the boys (18) were already married, both parents were alive in three cases out of four.(12) Adult mortality did not explain precocity of marriage." A Nahua source with very complete lineage and demographic information concludes, "Here, we find no unmarried individuals above fifteen years of age."

St. Rita married at age 12. The Blessed Virgin is assumed to have been about 12 to 14 when she got pregnant with Jesus. Edward Longshanks married at 15 to his 13-year old second cousin, Eleanor of Castile. They had 14 children. St. Elizabeth of Hungary married at age 13 and had her first child at age 15. Chrysostom said young men should marry as soon as possible (before they turn 20), to keep them out of the whore houses and theaters.

Why were saints marrying and having children at what we would consider a very young age? As I point out in my book:

[Did not St. John Chrystosom say] “What greater work is there than training the mind and forming the habits of the young?” Indeed he did. But the Latin reads “Ouid maius quam animis moderari, quam adolescentulorum fi ngere mores?” (emphasis added). That is, Chrysostom was referring to the education of teenagers. This is quite clear from the context of the homily in which the sentence appears, a homily in which the saint is at pains to point out:

The fathers are to blame. They require their horse-breakers to discipline their horses, they do not permit the colt to remain untamed. Instead, they put a rein and all the rest upon it from the beginnings. But their children? These they overlook. They allow their children to go about for a long season unbridled, and without temperance, disgracing themselves by fornications and gamings and attending the wicked theaters. Before the fornication began, they should have given their son to a wife, to a wife chaste, and highly endowed with wisdom. Such a wife will bring her husband away from this disorderly course of life, and will be instead a rein to the colt…. Do you not know that you can do no greater kindness to a youth than to keep him pure from whorish uncleanness? (Homily #59 on Matthew 18).

Chrysostom knew something we have forgotten.

We all remember that marriage is meant for the procreation of children and the unity of the couple. But we rarely recall - because no one ever teaches it - that marriage also serves a third and critically important purpose. Holy Marriage is the salve for concupiscence, the remedy for our tendency towards the sin of lust.

Why do you think our society is so steeped in sexuality? It is due in part to the fact that our society does not allow teenagers to get married. Teens want what they are made for - marriage and the procreation of children - but they can't have it. So society tantalizes them with what they can't have: a stable family, a good sex life, with themselves as the heads of that family, loving their spouses.

Conclusion
You see, when your 12 or 14-year old dates, they really do expect that they are finding a mate. If society, including their Catholic parents, left them alone, and didn't push post-industrial expectations of higher education, better jobs, etc., upon them, these teens really would get married at 14 or 15, as men and women that age have for thousands of years.

They would get married as the Church permitted them to for thousands of years.
They would get married as St. John Chrysostom recommended they should over 1500 years ago.

But as a modern, responsible Catholic parent, you won't allow them to marry at age 12, 14 or 16. They cannot imitate St. Rita of Cascia, or St. Elizabeth or the Blessed Virgin. You won't allow it.

If they start getting "too serious", you will actively step in and forbid them seeing that young man or woman so often, or perhaps, even forbid them meeting at all. You will break them up. It doesn't matter if they have a true vocation to marriage to that person. You will make sure it is delayed or destroyed. Catholic parents don't want early marriage and dozens of grandchildren from their only daughter or only son. Rather than allow the marriage, or encourage the couple to stay together to get married at age 14 or 15, the parents will either provide no support or actively encourage the couple to breakup.

And so the young men and women will be emotionally overwrought, they will go through innumerable breakups, they will spend the next ten or twenty years preparing themselves for the divorce that comes from marrying the wrong person. This will not result because of dating, but precisely because we will not allow them to marry.

Now, I'm not saying that you necessarily should allow your children to marry at age 14. I'm just pointing out that the problem with dating is not dating - it is the parents. Parents don't have the same expectations for their children they had prior to the industrial revolution.

So don't go blaming the culture for corrupting our children.

If anything, we are the ones who actively contribute to our children's corruption, because we go along with society's expectations for our children. We helped set up today's currently highly sexualized culture, we keep our children from marrying young so that they have to endure the tantalization for years, even decades, and we expect them to live as celibates without a community to support them or a vow of celibacy to give backbone to their lifestyle.

Yeah, the people corrupting our children?
That would be us.

PS
An excellent article, recommended in the comments, and worth reading.

Additional references:
Treating Teens like Toddlers
Does Society Infantilize Teens
Driving Teens Crazy
The Case Against Adolescence

PPS.

Interesting stats here. According to this article, the divorce rate among teen couples has dropped to match that of adults. It's almost as if the Internet and smart phones makes teens mature faster.

2021 divorce rate for 15-25 was 19.7

2021 divorce rate for 25-34 was 19.4 

2021 divorce rate for 35-44 was 18.1

Women are now LESS LIKELY to get divorced between 15 and 24 then they are between 25 and 44.

The divorce rate for teenagers is now indistinguishable from that between 30-year olds. Either teenagers are maturing faster, are adults are becoming less mature.

Given that divorce rates dropped, it seems that smart phones and the Internet might be making teens MORE MATURE FASTER. 

That is counter-intuitive.

 

Why the HHS Mandate Will Stand

After John Roberts had to violate the Law of Non-Contradiction (ObamaCare is now both a tax and not a tax at the same time and in the same manner), I don't see any particular reason the HHS Mandate would be struck down.

ObamaCare stands because the government CANNOT use the commerce clause, but CAN use its taxing authority. So, ObamaCare is NOT a tax when we vote for it or pay it, but it IS a tax when it is considered as to its constitutionality.

The HHS Mandate can absolutely work the same way.

The Mandate would, in this scenario, just be part of Congressional taxing authority. When a church is using an insurance company, Congress can tax the insurance company. And when the church is acting as its own insurance company, it is, for purposes of the mandate, an insurance company first, not a church.

So, while Congress cannot tax a church, it CAN tax an insurance agency, even if it turns out that the insurance agency is a church (that is, the church is insuring itself). The HHS Mandate would be legal to enforce upon churches because the Congress is taxing an insurance company, not a church.

See how easy that was?

Now that Roberts has demonstrated that he's stark, raving mad, there is no "constitutional" reason to think the HHS Mandate will not stand.

Where to Find NFP Women

According to the map at the bottom of this page, women who oppose contraception are most strongly concentrated in East Texas and Louisiana.

Which is rather interesting....

Paying for Prostitutes

Rush is again right.
But there's a bit more to it than he has so far pointed out.

Our pretty little woman, Miss Fluke, wants to be paid by the government for the expenses she incurs when she has sex. That is, she wants to turn her sexual activity into a government-funded subsidy.

Now, by itself, this isn't that unusual.

France, Sweden, Russia: many countries are giving their citizens money if they only succeed in having sex and having children.

We, however, are trying to give money to employees to prevent them having children.

Why the difference?

Well, children keep employees, students, etc., from dedicating their lives to the state.

If you want to set the state up as God, you can't have your citizens doting over their children.
If you want to set the the environment up as God, you can't have citizens having children.

Kathleen Sebelius put the point with beautiful concision. If you believe, as she does, that people are essentially cost items on your balance sheet, then reducing the number of children reduces social costs.  Of course, the unspoken flip-side is equally true: reducing the number of Baby Boomers reduces social costs.

And this is the second part of the equation.

Look at this from the bureaucrats' point of view.

The worker to retiree ratio available to pay for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. is dropping.
We are running out of workers.
It takes 20 years to raise up a new worker, assuming that new worker is born today.

Every worker that has children will be one more worker who isn't able to contribute their full salary to paying for retiree benefits.

The politician who is in office right now can't afford to have the dwindling number of national employees go on child leave. And face it, that's what taxpayers are. Every taxpayer is employed by two companies - the one you nominally work for (your place(s) of employment), and the one you actually work for (the government).

Your place of employment gets your valuable time and pays you money for it.
Your government gets your valuable money and pays you... well... hmmmm.... it gets your valuable money, anyway.

Just as your employer doesn't like it when you take sick leave, so your government doesn't like it when you decide - without getting clearance from them first - to divert your resources to your children. Anything which trains you up in the idea that children are to be avoided is a net plus from the politician's perspective.

Sure, it may harm the nation in the long run, but the wave of retirees will get their benefits.

Retirees vote.
Parents vote.
Single people tend not to vote.

So, you keep people single, which is best accomplished by keeping them in sterile relationships, and they won't vote you out of office because they don't vote. By keeping them sterile, you keep them from becoming voting parents.

You pay the retirees off with the money the single people earn. Old people vote, and they'll reward you by voting to keep you in office.


Really, it's a win-win all the way around.

That's really what Sebelius means when she says contraception reduces social costs.
Sure, contraception increases pregnancy and abortion rates, but it reduces family cohesion and voting rates.
Which means the politicians get to keep more money, keep more power, and live in the style to which they have become accustomed.

And all that is needed to maintain this status quo is a little government-mandated subsidy for contraceptives.

On what grounds could anyone possibly object?

Let Them Eat Carcinogens

Barack Obama has apparently opened a full scale war against the Catholic Church. He fomented quite a bit of division in May 2009 with the controversy over accepting Notre Dame's honorary law degree.
But, as anyone following the news knows by now, he has definitely upped the stakes.

Barack Obama now wants all women in the nation to receive contraception and abortion free of charge through their employee insurance. To that end, he is attempting to compel the Catholic Church and any organization that thinks like her to pay for these things.

I have no new thoughts on how heinous this is, but I will attempt to summarize some of the problems involved.

Ancient History
The Catholic Church has always been opposed to both contraception and abortion. Indeed, this is one of the teachings which differentiated the Church from the surrounding pagan culture. Even Reformation Christians agreed with the Catholic stance. Indeed, until 1930, it is impossible to find any Christian leader - Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant - who supported either contraception or abortion.

However, due to the rise of eugenics theory in the late 19th century, contraception and abortion was seen by secular authorities as a necessary tool in keeping the "unfit" from breeding. Between 1930 and 1960, most Christian churches eventually came to accept the use of contraception. The Catholic Church never did.

The Pill
The invention of the hormonal contraceptive was thought to be a ground-breaking technology that might allow a change in the teaching. However, in the closely-reasoned encyclical Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI demonstrated why hormonal contraceptives would do more harm than good. As even Business Insider today admits, the Pope was correct.

The four results Pope Paul VI prophesied have come to pass:

1. General lowering of moral standards
2. A rise in infidelity, and illegitimacy
3. The reduction of women to objects used to satisfy men. 
4. Government coercion in reproductive matters. 

Changing Definitions
Now, ever since the human egg was discovered in 1826, pregnancy has been defined as beginning at conception. However, with the advent of in vitro fertilization in 1978,that definition was no longer convenient. If conception happens in a Petri dish, in what sense is the woman pregnant?

So, many IVF and OB/GYN specialists (though not embryologists, interestingly enough) have been trying to change the definition of pregnancy to begin at "implantation." Unfortunately, at least six days generally passes between fertilization and implantation - by the time implantation occurs, a human embryo exists.

Every hormonal contraceptive acts in a number of ways. One way is to prevent ovulation. This doesn't always work. Another is to thin the lining of the uterus so that a developing embryo cannot implant.

Thus, when the hormonal contraceptive makes the lining of the uterus inhospitable to that human embryo, the embryo aborts, the woman miscarries. Like IUDs, hormonal contraceptives cause abortion.

Worse, the hormonal contraceptive has been judged a Class I Carcinogen by the World Health Organization.

Life Issues
The Catholic Church sees the immense loss of human life via contraception and abortion as a modern-day Holocaust. You can no more demand the Church pay for these death-dealing services than you can demand that Jews pay for the suite of services provided at Auschwitz. It is not just a matter of religious liberty, it's a matter of life and death. 

Catholics will not pay for a woman to be shot full of Class I carcinogens that will harm her and kill her child. Again, it's like compelling non-smokers to pay for their employee's cigarettes.

Just as bad, it treats correctly functioning human fertility as a disease. 

Obama's latest attempt to foist this off on the insurance company rather than directly onto the employer is wrong.

While reports indicate that Catholic institutions will not have to directly pay for this coverage, most Catholic institutions get their insurance through a Catholic insurance provider. If the "adjusted"  mandate were enforced, the Catholic insurance provider would still be just as thoroughly violated as the original Catholic employer.

Now, Catholic hospitals make up 25% of the hospitals in the nation and treat roughly one-sixth of the population. None of these hospitals will fully implement ObamaCare because many tenets of ObamaCare are antithetical to Catholic principles. 


Interestingly, Catholic organizations are unusual in not offering contraceptives in their health insurance plans, so this mandate is meant to strike directly at Catholics. Likewise, it is meant to humiliate them, since the zero co-pay is also unique among "medications" - no other medication is guaranteed a zero co-pay.


Catholic hospitals also provide more free health care to the poor than any other set of institutions in the nation. Obama's insistence on submitting to his commands or paying millions of dollars in fines is an excellent way to destroy Catholic health care and strip the poor of the last health care providers in their neighborhoods. 

Legal Issues

But even if the Catholic Church were gung-ho to provide give women these carcinogens, they couldn't.

It's against the law.

You see, as National Review points out, the Hyde Amendment - which Obama just re-authorized December 11 - says that government funds cannot be used to provide abortion.  So, the HHS requirement violates the very Hyde Amendment which Obama just authorized.

And even if it didn't violate the Hyde Amendment, we have to ask a Constitutional question. 

Where did Barack Hussein Obama get the power to mandate what products a private company will or will not offer?

Obama has unilaterally taken over banks and auto companies, he's unilaterally favored at least a dozen failed "green energy" companies, to the tune of billions, and now he seems intent on taking over the medical and insurance industries.

In the last century, only Mussolini has attempted so much. 

As Steve Chapman has pointed out:

...just because the government gives you money doesn't mean it can force you to give up a constitutional right. If it did, the government could forbid students getting Pell grants from criticizing the president. It could outlaw gun ownership by anyone working for a company that gets federal contracts...

 The government already spends tax revenue to provide contraceptives to Medicaid recipients -- and the Catholic Church does not ask for an exemption.

A more accurate analogy is how we treat religious pacifists in wartime. Defending the nation is important, but when we had a draft, Quakers and Mennonites were allowed to avoid military service as conscientious objectors. The rights of conscience prevailed. 

I suspect many people support the mandate because they strongly disagree with the Church's opposition to birth control -  or just despise the Church, period.  But the First Amendment isn't there just to protect beliefs and practices we all like. It's there to protect even things we hate 

There is nothing in Barack Obama's HHS mandate except a naked grab for extra-constitutional power and a naked attempt to destroy whatever may remain of the Catholic influence in this nation. If he succeeds, he will have unilaterally overturned the Bill of Rights. Think on that. 




Errata:
Doug Kmiec, Obama's own Catholic Ambassador to Malta, jumped out of Obama's ship.

The Orthodox bishops of the United States agree with the USCCB take on this.

Protestants and Jews have already declared their support for the USCCB against Barack.

Even Cardinal Mahoney and Father Jenkins, president of Notre Dame and the man responsible for Barack's ONLY honorary degree, agree with the USCCB that this HHS mandate is unconscionable:

“It would compel Notre Dame to either pay for contraception and sterilization in violation of the Church’s moral teaching, or to discontinue our employee and student health care plans in violation of the church’s social teaching,” Fr. John I. Jenkins, president of the University of Notre Dame said in a letter to HHS according to the Catholic News Agency.

Democrat Lawmaker agrees with the USCCB. 

Here's the USCCB's original response. Over 80% of US bishops have already spoken out publicly.

And the USCCB response to Obama's revision.

Sister Carol Keehan and Planned Parenthood support the revision.

Barack is interested in saving insurance companies' money.