Wednesday, Feb. 8, 2012: USPS, corporate voting and Paul Violette

Let’s see, the Know Nothings wanted to exclude and even deport Catholics, tarred and feathered a priest, John Bapst, in Ellsworth, and burned a Catholic church in Bath.  
  The healthcare bill would require a religiously affiliated institution that provides services that are traditionally secular,  like St. Joseph Hospital, to offer an insurance policy that covers birth control prescriptions at no additional costs to the employees, most of whom are non-Catholic.   98% of American Catholic women have used birth control at some point in their lives, despite the Bishops’ protests.  
  No such insurance requirement would be imposed on a Catholic seminary or on the Church itself for its priests or nuns.  
  Do I sense a false analogy, Cheesecake?  

You are woefully misinformed and shamefully spreading false information, again.  The health care bill doesn’t infringe on anyone’s religious rights in the least.

Please cite where I wrote that.

I doubt it.

And Cheesecake, who is it who drew the comparison between the virulent anti-Catholicism of the Know Nothings and the alleged virulent anti-Catholicism of the healthcare bill?      
  Asking a church-run hospital to buy a certain type of insurance policy is no different than asking that same hospital to pay into the unemployment system, the social security system, or the Medicare system.  The decision of whether to use birth control is left to the individual employee.  A religion should rely on moral suasion to convince its parishioners not to use birth control.  
  Being called blind by you is akin to being accused of marital infidelity  by Newt Gingrich.

Abolition of polygamy was a precondition to Utah’s admission to the Union.  The government has always been able to regulate conduct, but cannot regulate belief.    Learn your history.

Do not set up a strawman.    The US Supreme Court has consistently said that facially neutral statutes that affect the conduct of all Americans are generally permissible under the First Amendment.  Statutes that compel belief or punish belief are not. 
  In the 1940s West Virginia tried to compel students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.  Ultimately, the Court held that statute to be unconstitutional when a Jehovah’s Witness father challenged it.    It amounted to compelled belief.  The Jehovah’s Witnesses also challenged an Ohio law that barred door-to-door solicitation.  The Court held that time restrictions were permissible but an outright ban was not.  
  The government cannot compel someone to take contraceptives, but making health insurance policies provide a basic set of benefits would survive any legal challenge unless it were applied to a wholly religious entity, such as a seminary.  This is basic law that even Scalia would not contest.   

Some religions embrace the use of marijuana, yet the government outlaws its use.  The choice to access free contraceptive coverage is made by the employee of the Catholic hospital, who, more often than not, is not even a Catholic.  A few old men want to tell their employees they can’t access contraception and you support that right.  Get real.  

Catholic-run hospitals are told by the government that they must spend their money on unemployment insurance, the employer contributions to Medicare and Social Security, etc.  This distinction has been drawn for more than 50 years between the activities of a church and a church-related entity that performs services that are seen as secular.  St. Joseph Hospital is the functional equivalent of EMMC.  
  Here, not a penny more is spent, as an insurance policy that covers dollar one of contraceptive coverage costs less in the long run than one which doesn’t (100 women taking the pill costs less than one woman going through an unexpected  full-term delivery). 
  We are saving the Hospital money, decreasing the risk of unwanted pregnancies, empowering women to make a personal choice without the burden of one choice (contraception) being funded and the other (pregnancy), not.  
  We are upsetting some Troglodyte Bishops who want to discourage even the Hospital’s non-Catholic employees from having a cost-neutral choice about family planning.
  Nothing in the regulations would require the health care plan that covers the Bishops, priests, nuns, or seminary instructors to include contraception costs.
  Let’s say I start a new religion called Cheesecakism in which Bishop Cheesecake buys burqas for all his female parishioners.  Bishop Cheesecake goes down to the burqa store and is told that he must pay a 5% sales tax on the burqas.  He protests that the government cannot tell the Cheesecake Church how to spend its money.  In making such a claim, Bishop Cheesecake would be full of something other than cheesecake.
  

Bishop Cheesecake, your cries of “irrelevancy” are seen by our readers as an admission that you have lost the argument.  Nothing about expanding a St. Joseph Hospital employee’s choice in any way forces these Troglodyte Bishops to think or speak any differently.  They simply lose the ability to financially burden an employee’s unfettered choice.

A percentage of your party exhibits opinions that harken back to the Know Nothing days: (i) the insistence for several years by a majority of Republicans that Obama was born in Kenya reflected the same nativist sentiment as the Know Nothings; (ii) the desire by many in your party to deport all 11 million undocumented immigrants and the booing of Rick Perry for his qualified support of a Dream Act analog in Texas smacks of Know Nothing nativism; (iii) Gingrich’s characterization of President Obama as the “Food Stamp President” seeks to rouse the racist echoes of the Know Nothings (George W. Bush actually had more people enroll for food stamps during his presidency and food stamp rolls are now declining as the economy recovers); and (iv) the celebration of Herman Cain for saying he would not have a Muslim serve in his cabinet reflects a religious bigotry among too many Republicans.
  Bill Buckley said a good conservative should criticize the crazed element of his party and Buckley surely condemned the Birchers.  I see no Republican doing the same today.  As your party plunges ever rightward, I am sitting back wondering when, lemming-like, it will go off the cliff.  In fairness to lemmings, they are not actually cliff-divers, but I am not sure when your party’s rightward plunge will end.  I hope someone is standing at the bottom of the cliff to pick up the pieces.    

I do not see the political spectrum as linear or even circular, but three dimensional.  However, the narrow choice of parties we have in this country is roughly linear.   
   Government action to  expand the right to vote or to provide a basic safety net is not government control.  Expanding the right to vote diminishes control by the former elite and establishing the safety net frees people from the fear of want.  Ultimately, the question between the right and the left in America is whether the traditional holders of power, Wall Street elites, must be more responsive to the popular will.  The Republicans have sided with Wall Street without reservation.  The Democrats have tried to temper Wall Street’s excesses.   

The banks were bailed out under Bush with not a single restriction on future bank behavior.  President Obama bailed out the auto companies with a host of restrictions that have worked to make the industry thrive.  Solyndra was first funded under Bush.  The GOP is a wholly owned subsidiary of Wall Street.  Some  Democrats are leased by Wall Street.  

You point out not a single inaccuracy.