Miscellany

(Source)

In light of the whole Susan G. Komen/Planned Parenthood PR fiasco.

It's hard to say exactly what is going on here. News headlines boiled down to "Komen to defund Planned Parenthood" and "Komen reverses decision", but neither is strictly true, from what I can tell. As the founder of the Susan G. Komen foundation said in an interview, they never defunded PP, and PP still has several grants from them. Of course, the pro-choice crowd immediately launched in hysterics, claiming that the Komen foundation must hate women, hacking the SGK website, etc. etc. Not one of them appears to be at all interested in what or why SGK is doing what it's doing: they simply changed their grant policy to try and give money to direct providers of cancer screenings, rather than referrers. Since Planned Parenthood does not do mammograms, or really any cancer screening aside from what you can do at home by yourself, SGK simply decided there was better use of its money.

To put that in words that even liberals can understand, SGK "defunded" (for certain values of defunded) PP because PP is not very good at providing cancer screenings.

Komen's "reversal" appears to be a rephrasing of their original policy shift. At this point, it is unclear what exactly is going on, other than PP is trying to bully SGK in some sort of mafia shakedown ("Nice charity, you got there. Would be a shame of somethin' were to happen to it"). Canonist Ed Peters (how do I get a title like that? I mean, aside from studying Canon Law) summed up what was going on pretty well. Of course, they have the media to assist them on the shakedown, and Get Religion has an excellent piece on the atrocious reporting of the story.

Perhaps the most humorous example of the media folly was MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell who, in an interview with SGK founder Nancy Brinker asked how a bipartisan organization such as SGK could deign to hire a pro-life Republican. 

Umm.... (awkward silence). Apparently Mitchell thinks "bipartisan" means "no pro-lifers allowed".

Of course, there is the good news that donations to SGK went up 100% after the announcement that they changed their grant policy such that less money would be going to PP.

All in all, the whole thing keeps reinforcing my growing belief that pseudo-feminists don't actually care about women.

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In semi-related news (and it is related), with the whole HHS fiasco and Obama's very, very loose grip on the term "freedom of religion", at least the state would never deem to tell the church what she can preach from the pulpit, right? Right?

Well, today we have this story: the US Army (His Royal Highness, God-King Barack H. Obama I, commander-in-chief) Office of the Chief of Chaplains asked Catholic military chaplains not to read the USCCB letter of opposition to the HHS mandate at Masses held at Army bases. In all fairness, MPs weren't sent in to arrest offending priests. In unfairness, the Army did ask the Church to change the wording of the letter. So there's that.

And to end on a good note, so far 88 93 110 138 143 148 153 Catholic bishops (over 80% of dioceses in the US) have issued statements condemning the HHS mandate. This is remarkable. I don't think 80% of bishops could agree on how to tie a cincture. I don't think that, in 1968, 80% of bishops even agreed with Humanae Vitae. Maybe now, they can actually, y'know, go about teaching a good theology of the body to Catholics, so we don't have to read news this depressing.

Prior to the American Civil War (or the War of Northern Aggression, for those of you living sooth of the Mason-Dixon line), the US bishops, in dissent from Rome, taught that there maybe was a case that could be made that owning slaves might be morally allowable, to their eternal shame. To play devil's advocate, they did live in a country and a time where being Catholic was one step down from being an ape. In today's similar climate of hostility to the Church, thank God our shepherds of today are stronger.