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To Make A Long Story Short

It’s an idea worth keeping in mind, according to Ben Yagoda:

It’s not that books should never be long. Who would demand cuts in War and Peace, Moby-Dick, Ulysses, or Shakespeare, even though Ben Jonson wrote that “whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line”? Beyond the great books, it’s clear that in some fiction genres, fans demand thickness. People seem to want to get immersed in a story, and length adds to the feeling.

In nonfiction, certain subjects are important enough to call for comprehensiveness. Part One of Mark Lewisohn’s history of the Beatles, Tune In, is 932 pages long, and when it’s over the lads haven’t yet set foot in America. (Lewisohn pared for the U.S. market; at Amazon’s U.K. site, you can buy the “Extended Special Edition,” which is 1,728 pages.) But it’s OK. It’s the Beatles. Robert Caro’s multivolume biography of Lyndon Johnson, which is actually nearing completion, gets a pass for the same reason.

But those are, or should be, exceptions. The Great Gatsby is 48,000 words, for criminy’s sake! So many door-stopping novels would find their best form as novellas, so many nonfiction extravaganzas … as long New Yorker articles. They do not, for two main reasons. The first is that authors generally like to hear themselves talk, and editors, with so much on their minds, especially these days, aren’t sufficiently ready and willing to pare the extraneous. Also, since the market, as it’s been defined for a pretty long time, doesn’t have a place for novellas and 25,000-word nonfiction works, ideas that would work best at such length get artificially bulked up, like an offensive lineman on steroids.

The Small Print On Health Insurance

Many Americans have difficulty understanding it:

This year, many people appear to have signed up for narrow plans unwittingly. A survey from the health research group the Commonwealth Fund found that about 25 percent of people with new exchange plans didn’t even know whether they’d bought a narrow network plan. So far, overall satisfaction seems relatively high, though most people are still fairly new to their plans. There are consumers in some states who are suing over their inability to get the care they need.

Stories like those recently chronicled by my colleague Elizabeth Rosenthal, of patients surprised to learn after the fact that they had been treated by out-of-network doctors, seem likely to proliferate if poor transparency about networks prevails.

Jordan Weissmann covered unexpected medical bills last week:

Surprise medical bills are an old issue, yet the Affordable Care Act mostly ignored them. Just a fraction of states have passed laws to protect patients in these circumstances, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, and some of those statutes are extremely narrow in scope.

The problem, according to [professor Jack] Hoadley, is that it’s incredibly difficult to make insurers and health providers reach a compromise on how much out-of-network doctors should be paid. Some patient advocates hope that a new law that will soon go into effect in New York state could serve as a national model for how to strike the right balance. But just like most obviously outrageous problems in the U.S. health care system that make you pine for a life in Canada, surprise medical bills don’t have a simple solution.

This problem is particularly nasty with regard to ER visits. Nicholas Bagley explains:

How can it possibly be legal for your doctor to charge you out-of-network rates when you show at up an in-network emergency room? And how can we change the law to get at the problem? … Briefly: when you show up at an ER, you’re given an incomprehensible contract to sign. Among the terms you don’t read, you agree to pay the on-call ER physician for her services, whether or not the physician happens to be in-network. Given this “agreement,” the out-of-network physician can name her price.

He proceeds to suggest a few potential solutions.

When Does Spanking Become Abuse? Ctd

A reader is furious:

Yesterday I read your readers’ tale of abuse and wept at my desk. I endured the same torture. I had the bruises and the welts to prove it. It has caused me great mental havoc over the years. And then to read the stories trying to justify the readers’ own abuse? I wept again.

To those readers, guess what: Corporal punishment is not ok – it’s never been ok – and your parents were wrong, just like past generations have been horribly wrong about a lot of things. So stop fucking hitting your kids. And stop justifying abuse of defenseless human beings. Battery, as a crime, has been on the books for a very, very long time. See Cal. Penal Code 242: “A battery is any willful and unlawful use of force or violence upon the person of another.” If a non-parent hit a kid the same way your parents hit you, not only would they be charged with battery but you would have a civil case against them. Parenting should not impart special immunity from the law.

So yes, your parents should have gone to jail or, the most likely result, paid a fine. And they should have had the discipline to think of better ways to teach their kids. Hitting is lazy and stupid. And yes I’m parent, and I have NEVER EVER hit my kids. And guess what: they are incredibly well behaved and lovely human beings and will not bringing the emotional scars of abuse into adulthood. Imagine that!

Several readers, on the other hand, illustrate the cycle of abuse:

I grew up in the 1960-70s. My two younger brothers and I were physically and emotionally abused as a children by a parent in ways similar to some of your readers descriptions – belts, fly swatters, wire hangers, wooden spoons. My mother was an angry, depressed, sometimes alcoholic and suicidal woman. Her moods were unpredictable and subject to sudden change. She was not only abusive to us, she was sometimes abusive to my father, who literally was a victim of domestic violence and displayed all the traditional features of that role you might see in women.

Yes, sometimes, during the better times, she could be a very good mother, who cared for our physical needs like cooking healthy food and decent clothing, and giving us opportunities to learn piano, baseball, or swimming. Ao no, she was not all bad all the time. It’s the only reason I have any love or compassion for her now, as she enters her 80s.

I knew from my earliest memories the stories of my mother struggling with her own abusive childhood and it’s terrible results. She grew up with a father who was a very heavy-handed, dominant figure in their rural, Southern household in the 1930s-50s. On one hand, he was a traditional, middle-class “good provider” in his community, but in their home he abused her, her four brothers and sisters, and their very sweet and timid mother. His rationale was always that they didn’t do their expected chores or follow his commands to the letter, or embarrassed him or questioned his authority.

To this day, the “mind fuck” for me is to hear how her father was such a terrible man for doing the EXACT same things to her and her family that she did to ours. It’s as if she still sees herself as a victim who fought back, and that anything she did in our childhoods was something we or our father simply “deserved”. She never, ever has apologized or acknowledged she hurt any one of us to this day, which at one point in my younger life would have been helpful in healing our relationship.

I get so frustrated and sad when I hear or read other people’s descriptions of their childhood abuse in which they have “swallowed the Kool Aid” on the rationalization for that abuse. Just the other night I sat across the dinner table from a young man who was justifying what Adrian Peterson did to that little boy because he himself had been a “really bad kid, and if they hadn’t beat the shit out of me I would be in jail right now”. When I countered with the idea that a parent should never leave marks on a child and my own history of rarely physically punishing even the most difficult one of my kids, responded “Well, what kind of person is he today?” as if my kid had to be in prison because I never beat him with a belt.

I know these people from the inside. I know they did what they had to do: that they survived by internalizing their parent’s view of them as bad, deserving of pain, deserving of punishment for every little thing that made them angry, reasonable or not. When one of your writers described how terrible it would have been for her parents to have been held accountable by legal or social services means, it’s not because it would have been terrible; it’s because the writer has never moved passed that helpless, childlike stage of development she was in when she was abused.

I strongly suspect that had she truly healed, she and several other of your readers who wrote you would no longer defend the very people who harmed them the most. It’s why abuse is so cyclical in nature, being handed down from generation to generation, and it’s sad. But it’s also the biggest reason we need to intervene from outside the dysfunction of families and make hitting children a big, fat no-no.

Another reader broke the cycle:

This thread has been terrible to read. I am the mother of a five-year-old girl. I have never laid a hand on her and I believe I never will. In my family there is line of understanding that corporal punishment does something terrible to the relationship between parent and child. My mother got the belt, the switch, the paddle and good old-fashioned spanking from her parents. She loved them, but they had problems and she swore that she would raise her children differently.

So when she had me – no belt, no switch, no paddle, but spankings – oh yes, spankings are fine, they are an appropriate punishment. So was screaming “You pig, you pig!” because she was so angry. When I was 12 she hit me hard across the face and my father had to intervene to prevent further escalation. My mother loves me and I her, but we have had serious problems relating to each other because of this.

I have never hit my daughter, but I have lost my temper and yelled at her. I told her she was a stupid and callous little cow. Then I sent her to her room. Then I cried. Then I apologised to her and said that although she had been wrong, I was also wrong. Just because I was angry I didn’t have the right to belittle her. I hope that by being aware I will minimise the damage that I do to her.

My mother came to realise that she was inflicting her damage onto me and has long since apologised, I know she approves of the way I am raising my daughter. Even though Philip Larkin tells us that we fuck our children up, I hope that, in my family, it is less and less.

Another is still struggling:

I’m a recovering depressive. As I’ve received the care that I’ve needed for years, it’s kind of like an alcoholic coming off of a long period of dependency. I’m realizing to my horror that not only has my professional and personal life been stunted, but I’ve been guilty of abuse towards my son. Some might poo-pooh the half-dozen times that I’ve slapped him in the face, because in every case he was being insolent or nasty. But he’s a sensitive kid, and frankly I’ll never know how much permanent damage I caused.

I was never physically abused by my parents, but I’m still pretty emotionally handicapped due to their emotional abuse. As a caring parent, I want to do better than has been done to me. But in one aspect I clearly haven’t, and it will always be my shame. Physically hurting someone weaker than yourself is low, weak, and mean. If there’s anything good that can come out of the NFL abuse stories and your readers’ stories, hopefully a few more people like myself will wake to their own misconduct.

Another reader’s story:

I grew up in a violent family. My dad hit my mom, and she hit me, and I hit my younger brother. Shit rolls downhill.

My mother hit us with her hands, and later with the handle of a wooden spoon. Mostly I was punished for defiance – for questioning her directives, or arguing. I still remember her slapping me hard in the face when I was 13 because I had objected to something and me hitting her back and running like hell. Thank God my aunt was there to talk to her, or I think she may have really hurt me. I don’t know what my aunt said to her, but after that, the hitting stopped. From then on she started treating me like an adult, so I went from not being able to make any kind of independent decision to doing pretty much what I wanted. As a teenager, I had tremendous freedom and that didn’t go so well.

As an adult, I simply shut down when there is any kind of conflict. I can’t negotiate with people very well. I can’t manage objections, because I’m so frozen. My parents sent me into the world with two tools for managing interpersonal conflict: freezing or lashing out. It’s taken me 40 years and countless hours of therapy to learn some tools, but it’s not instinctive. I have to really work on the normal give and take at work and at home.

The reason we discipline kids isn’t to stop a specific behavior; it is to teach them how to manage themselves, teach them how to ask for what they want or need and accept “no” for an answer. Eventually that child, on his or her own, will have to do something they don’t want to do, or stop themselves from doing what they want to do. If the way you got your kids to behave is with a physical or verbal threat, then you risk raising an adult who will not have the discipline to manage their own life successfully.

Another is also trying to manage:

I am another adult living with the lifelong fallout of an abusive childhood. But it’s not all bad. You cannot go through these types of experiences without being transformed and I have earned some incredible life skills – skills that those of you who haven’t been beaten with a metal pole or dragged out of bed in the middle of the night and beaten on the floor of your room or beaten with a horse whip or beaten with whatever the hell was nearby… well you may not be able to do:

I can see into the future. Usually only about 5-10 seconds but one of the biggest “gifts” I received from the constant and unpredictable childhood abuse was hyper vigilance. While this is often associated with PTSD it’s also common in abused children and is expressed as extreme sensory sensitivity focused on detecting environmental threats. I’m the guy at the party standing in a place where I can see everyone else, as well as all entrances and exits. I may be talking to you, and even listening to what you’re saying, but I’m also tracking every other conversation in the room. When something is about to go down I’m either already gone or have stepped in to redirect – often before the participants realize they are about to cross a line.

I am also tough. I can take a beating. I have fallen off a cliff, been hit by a speeding truck, had viral meningitis, scarlet fever, seven concussions. You can hit me, cut me, burn me and beat me, but you can’t ever touch me. People say that I am intense – they have no idea, unless they touch me on the shoulder when I don’t see them coming. Then, for just a split second, they catch a glimpse. But that almost never happens.

My abuse started when I was five and lasted for about five years. Then I grew big enough that I wasn’t such an easy target and it stopped. Unfortunately the damage was already done – hard wired into my brain and unchangeable. I am, quite literally, broken. But I don’t feel like a victim and I don’t want, or need, anyone’s pity or help. My mother was also abused as a child and was not able to overcome the behavior that was modeled to her. I will never forgive her but I understand.

Now I am a father. I remember one night, shortly after my son turned five, standing in his room watching him sleep. And a wave of anger, dangerous and intense, washed over me as my knees went weak and I backed out of the room. Because I realized in that moment that my mother had stood in much the same way over a child that looked just like mine, sweet and innocent and beautiful. And then, screaming, she had grabbed me by the hair, yanked me from the bed and beat me with her fists on the floor of my room. I just couldn’t understand how that was possible. I still don’t.

And yet we debate it as if there were pros and cons. As if beating our children is not only justified and necessary, but a societal good, so long as we beat within reason. But how to measure what is reasonable? What locations are acceptable? What implements correct? How much swelling is permissible? What amount of blood is appropriate? Should we vary based on weight, gender, offense? Ask these questions about another adult and see what happens.

So when I read the two reader’s impassioned defense of their own abuse, and by extension their endorsement of this abuse for other kids who need to be “toughened up” and “learn some discipline” I cried for the first time in years. Not for myself, but for all those innocent children out there for whom there is still time. Still hope. Still a chance for happiness. Because even though I have found value in my hard earned skill set, and used it effectively to better my life, I would trade it all for a shot at feeling happy.

Thanks from a longtime reader and subscriber.

Follow the ongoing thread here.

Marriage Equality’s Red State Test

YouGov maps public opinion on marriage equality state-by-state:

After this week’s SCOTUS news, Dale Carpenter takes note that “gay couples will be able to wed for the first time on an ongoing basis, and have their marriages officially recognized, in politically red states.” He uses Oklahoma as an example:

Fifty-three percent of Oklahomans are evangelical Christians, 16% are mainline Protestants, and 13% are Catholics. Oklahoma is the 11th most church-going state, although it’s still behind new gay-marriage jurisdictions like Utah (5th), North Carolina (tied for 7th), and South Carolina (tied for 1st). A recent poll showed that two-thirds of Oklahomans strongly oppose (58%) or somewhat oppose (8%) gay marriage. The state’s gay-marriage ban passed with 76% of the vote ten years ago, which suggests that change is coming very slowly in some parts of the country.

Among others, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins predicts a watershed moment of resistance ahead, followed by an erosion of support for same-sex marriage itself …

Dale doesn’t buy it – and neither do I. Many opponents of marriage equality have responded with civility:

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which six years ago played an important role in supporting California’s voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage known as Proposition 8, said that the new legal landscape in Utah did not affect its belief that “only a marriage between a man and a woman is acceptable to God.” “Nevertheless, respectful coexistence is possible with those with differing values,” the church said in a statement. “As far as the civil law is concerned, the courts have spoken.”

Nonetheless, the arrival of marriage equality in deeply red states is a new thing, and will for a while revive some of the culture war polarization of the 2000s. Already, you have Mike Huckabee going off the deep end in response to the court’s inactivism:

It is shocking that many elected officials, attorneys and judges think that a court ruling is the ‘final word,’. It most certainly is not. The courts are one branch of government, and equal to the other two, but not superior to either and certainly not to both. Even if the other two branches agree with the ruling, the people’s representatives have to pass enabling legislation to authorize same sex marriage, and the President (or Governor in the case of the state) has to sign it. Otherwise, it remains the court’s opinion. It is NOT the ‘law of the land’ as is often heralded.

Er, yes it is. But the impulse to become George Wallace didn’t come from nowhere. Ted Cruz knows this, which is why he may well ride the winning issue of 2004 in the GOP primaries. I think what we have to emphasize in this social transition is support for religious liberty, toleration of each other, and a focus on the actual reality that will now unfold: the simple fact that a tiny minority is now granted equality in a core human right long since denied them, and that, so far as everyone else is concerned, virtually nothing will change.

In response to paranoia, reason; in the face of hatred, calm; at the prospect of victory, magnanimity; and in the moment of our liberation, joy.

Aural Sex, Ctd

Joe Kloc explores the enduring appeal of painter Bob Ross and finds that he is especially loved by those who believe in “autonomous sensory meridian response”:

For those who experience it, ASMR is most frequently described as “the tingles” in the head and back that one gets when hearing certain sounds, particularly in the context of some mundane task like being fitted for a suit or learning to paint trees. (But, as just about anyone in the ASMR community will tell you, it is almost impossible to describe to someone who, through bad luck or cosmic misalignment, does not experience the sensation.)

ASMR stands for “autonomous sensory meridian response.” It was coined by Jenn Allen, the founder of asmr-research.org, who hoped that legitimizing the phenomenon with a scientific-sounding name would spur research into the subject. But it is, for lack of a better description, completely unscientific: Allen once commented to Vice that she chose meridian because it was a more “polite” synonym for orgasm.

So far, there is no science to support ASMR. But the phenomenon, which boomed on YouTube beginning in 2010, has gotten large enough to warrant coverage by The New York Times, The Atlantic, Dr. Oz and Oprah Winfrey. A Kickstarter fund-raising campaign for a documentary on ASMR has received more than $15,000 in pledges. If ASMR isn’t real, its online community, which numbers in the millions, certainly is.

And among the dozen or so creators and consumers of ASMR that Newsweek spoke to, one thing about it is almost universally agreed upon: The lasting, unlikely, appeal of Bob Ross is, at bottom, due to his uncanny ability to induce the ASMR response with every breath and stroke of his brush. As Ilse Blansert, the creator of the calculator video, put it, “If you have one thing in common, 9 out of 10 times it’s Bob Ross.” Ross, she adds, is often referred to as the “king of ASMR.” As a commenter wrote beneath a video of Ross painting a mountain, “Bob Ross [was] the creator of ASMR…without even trying…dayum.” The video has more than 6 million views.

Seen above. Previous Dish on ASMR here.

Manmade Man Parts

Lab-grown vaginas? Already a thing. Lab-grown penises? Science is working on it:

In their trials, researchers make “scaffolds” of rabbit penises by washing donor organs in detergent to kill all the living cells. This process leaves a collagen frame that can be seeded with penile cells from the recipient rabbit. The lab-grown penis is specifically rich with cultivated muscle and endothelial cells, which are essential for erectile function. The cell cultivation and scaffold creation takes weeks, but in the end, the rabbits who had new penises grafted onto their bodies gained sexual and reproductive ability. Indeed, when 12 of the newly-phallused males were put into cages with females, they mated within a minute, resulting in four pregnancies.

“The rabbit studies were very encouraging,” said [Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine] director Anthony Atala in an interview with the Guardian. Atala is an emerging icon of biomedical futurism, especially after his 2011 Ted Talk about 3D printing kidneys. He’s optimistic that lab-grown penises will be available to men in five years, but acknowledges that there are a lot of hurdles to clear before then.

If ever there was a fortune to be made … but no word yet on whether the researchers will “grow a pair” as well.

How Scared Should We Be?

David Willman relays concerns from some Ebola experts about our knowledge of how the disease spreads, some of whom “question the official assertion that Ebola cannot be transmitted through the air”:

In late 1989, virus researcher Charles L. Bailey supervised the government’s response to an outbreak of Ebola among several dozen rhesus monkeys housed for research in Reston, Va., a suburb of Washington. What Bailey learned from the episode informs his suspicion that the current strain of Ebola afflicting humans might be spread through tiny liquid droplets propelled into the air by coughing or sneezing. “We know for a fact that the virus occurs in sputum and no one has ever done a study [disproving that] coughing or sneezing is a viable means of transmitting,” he said. Unqualified assurances that Ebola is not spread through the air, Bailey said, are “misleading.”

[Dr. C.J.] Peters, whose CDC team studied cases from 27 households that emerged during a 1995 Ebola outbreak in Democratic Republic of Congo, said that while most could be attributed to contact with infected late-stage patients or their bodily fluids, “some” infections may have occurred via “aerosol transmission.”

Jonathan Ball dismisses fears of airborne Ebola:

While respiratory transmission has been shown in the laboratory, this was using a highly artificial animal model system, and most scientists concur that the virus is not spread through the respiratory route.

Similarly, in the only study of its kind, a report in the Journal of Infectious Diseases showed that the risk of contracting Ebola virus from fomites – particles loitering in the environment – was also very small. So all of the evidence suggests that if you avoid transferring virus from an infected individual or contaminated cadaver then the risk of infection is very low indeed.

But Allahpundit sees reason to worry about Ebola mutating into a more contagious virus:

The virus simply hasn’t had much of a chance to evolve while passing from person to person. It does now, with an outcome that’s yet to be determined. Just today, the World Health Organization walked back the conventional wisdom that the virus incubates in an infected person for no more than 21 days. Turns out that a man who’s gotten the disease and survived it can still pass it through his semen for up to 70 days afterward and possibly more than 90 days. Ebola could thus continue to thrive in Africa a la HIV as a killer STD.

Neo-Neocon notes something interesting too, per the bit in the excerpt about what it means to be “symptomatic”: Both Thomas Duncan, the Dallas Ebola patient, and the nurse in Spain had “slight fevers” when they first presented themselves to doctors. Fevers associated with Ebola typically run 101.5 or more. Could it be that victims with “slight fevers” are sufficiently symptomatic to pass the disease on?

Responding to those fears, Peter Barlow makes the point that just because a virus has an opportunity to mutate doesn’t mean it will:

While this certainly seems to be a real possibility, it is worth looking at what has happened with H5N1 avian influenza (“bird flu”). This highly contagious virus is relatively common in birds in Asia. But despite numerous human infections over the past 15-20 years, it has never mutated to spread through the air.

Alex Park has more on the WHO’s statement:

The sample sizes for these studies are extremely small, and it’s unclear just how great a risk the semen of surviving men poses in the weeks following their illness. Still, officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have recommended that they use condoms. And Doctors Without Borders—which has been on the front lines of the current outbreak since its early stages—is distributing condoms to survivors, according to a spokesperson for the group. …

Semen may not be the only bodily fluid through which a patient recovering from Ebola could pass on the disease. In 2000, researchers tested the fluids of a female Ebola survivor whose blood was already clear of the virus. Fifteen days after first falling ill, Ebola was still found in the woman’s breast milk. Her child eventually died of Ebola, though the researchers could not be certain the child got sick from feeding.

Meanwhile, Scott McConnell can’t believe we haven’t issued a travel ban yet:

In defense of the current, not very rigorous, regime, President Obama argues that “in recent months we’ve had thousands of travelers arriving from West Africa and so far only one case of Ebola.” But this was in the early stages of the epidemic, before the breakout of Ebola in West Africa’s cities. Does Obama really want thousands more West Africans flying here once Ebola cases number more than a million?

The answer appears to be yes. Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies has pointed out that 13,000 visas for travel to America have been handed out in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea—which means that so long as such travelers don’t have a fever observed by the West African screeners when boarding and can get a ticket, they’re coming to the U.S.

Some issues are complicated, but this one seems simple. So long as the epidemic is raging, why should even a single traveler come here from the Ebola-infected countries?

Karen Weintraub outlines the case against such a policy:

Many public health experts who oppose the travel ban argue that it’s simply not practical. That includes Columbia University’s [Stephen] Morse, who describes himself as a “fence-sitter” on the issue but doesn’t support a travel ban right now because people with financial means can travel to an intermediate country before entering the United States. West Africa’s many porous borders make such travel even easier, he said.

It wouldn’t make sense to ban people who fly out of Senegal—where, like the United States, there has been only one case of Ebola, Morse said. But if one person with Ebola made it there, others could, too. A ban could also encourage people to lie about where they have been, Morse said: “One of the real concerns is that if you outlaw [travel], it will discourage people from coming forth with the truth.”

Mary Katherine Ham is characteristically skeptical of the government’s actions thus far:

It’s true that the administration has some kind of process in place to deal with the possibility of infected people getting to the U.S., albeit so bare and reactive a response that even senators don’t know anything about it. It’s also true the administration constantly uses incompetence as an excuse for its own failures, which it routinely does not find out about until they are reported in the media. It’s true that the CDC has done good and competent things in the past for public health. It’s also true that government health organizations have grossly mishandled anthrax, bird flu, and smallpox in the last year.

(Photo: In this handout from the Center for Disease Control, a colorized transmission electron micrograph of an Ebola virus virion is seen. By CDC via Getty Images)

Rand Paul Stands Up For Emergency Contraception

Olivia Nuzzi has details:

While on a college tour in South Carolina [last] week, a red-headed woman in a baseball cap asked Paul if drugs that prevent conception, like Plan B, should be legal. Paul, leaning gracelessly on the side of the podium, stated matter-of-factly: “I’m not opposed to birth control.” He paused and shrugged. “That’s basically what Plan B is. Plan B is taking two birth control pills in the morning and two in the evening. I’m not opposed to that, or don’t think there should be any laws opposing that.”

As reported by The Daily Beast, Paul’s statement resulted in the prominent social conservative Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, attacking him on Twitter — which left Team Paul “fuming.”

Suderman puts Paul’s remarks in context:

The GOP probably won’t come out as the party of gay rights and the pill in time for the 2016 election, but those issues won’t be front and center. If anything, judging by the Summit, most Republican politicians are likely to try to avoid talking about gay marriage whenever possible. And when it comes to contraception, many will emphasize support for greater access by making it available over-the-counter.

The causes behind the Republican party’s shift are complex—changing social norms, the shifting demographics of the electorate, and the decline of religiosity in American life are all factors. But rather than trace the reasons for the transformation, I think it’s worth dwelling briefly on how rapid and drastic the shift on these issues, especially gay marriage, has been, and what that shift suggests about the stability of internal power dynamics in political parties.

But Ryan Lizza has a hard time squaring Paul’s comments with his support of the Life at Conception Act:

In my recent Profile of Senator Rand Paul, Dr. John Downing, the Senator’s friend and former medical partner, expressed his worries about Paul’s sponsorship of the Life at Conception Act, also known as the personhood law. The bill would ban abortion and grant the unborn all the legal protections of the Fourteenth Amendment, beginning at “the moment of fertilization.” To Downing, who is an ardent Paul supporter, this seemed like political madness. Downing said that he believed Paul’s personhood law would make some common forms of birth control illegal, and thus doom Paul’s Presidential hopes. “He’s going to lose half or more of women immediately once they find out what that would do to birth control,” Downing told me. …

As with so many other issues—the Middle East, civil rights—Paul has placed himself in a political vise on the question of when life begins. His views on personhood will be savaged by Democrats if he runs for President; and his casual endorsement of Plan B has antagonized leading social conservatives who were already highly skeptical of his pro-life bona fides.

The Politics Of Fear And Hysteria

Republicans are rolling out a new line of attack for the midterms, conflating the issues of immigration and national security to make Democrats look like surrender monkeys on both. Zeke Miller flags the above ad from the National Republican Congressional Committee, which claims that ISIS militants are coming to America “through Arizona’s backyard” – with help from Dem Congresswoman Ann Kirkpatrick, of course:

[T]he ad relies on a Sept. 10 writeup of a congressional hearing by the conservative Washington Free Beacon in which a Department of Homeland Security official was understood as telling lawmakers that ISIS “supporters are known to be plotting ways to infiltrate the United States through the border.” But a review of the testimony by DHS Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis Francis Taylor tells another story. Instead, he said, “there have been Twitter, social media exchanges among [ISIS] adherents across the globe speaking about that as a possibility.” But that is a far cry from a direct threat, and light years away from a direct plot against the homeland.

Greg Sargent looks at a similar claim from Arkansas Senate candidate Tom Cotton:

Congressman Cotton’s version seems to go a step further, envisioning an active, ongoing collaborative effort between the Islamic State, and Mexican drug cartels who are looking to diversify by branching out into terrorism, whose end goal is to kill Americans on U.S. soil.

New York Times columnist Charles Blow has performed an anatomy of this developing story on the right. Blow concluded that it originated on a conservative website, which suggested that ISIS may be “working to infiltrate the U.S. with the aid of transnational drug cartels.” A Republican Congressman from Texas similarly said ISIS and Mexican drug cartels have been “talking to each other.” And from there, it was onward to Fox News. Some of the sources Blow found overlap with the Cotton campaign’s back-up materials from conservative media.

GOP politicians aren’t the only people wilding exaggerating the ISIS threat. As Zack Beauchamp notes, the jihadists themselves are only too happy to do the same. Zack offers up “a by-no-means complete list of some of the crazier threats”:

• Take over the White House. Abu Mosa, an ISIS spokesman, told Vice that “we will raise the flag of Allah in the White House.”

• Conquer most of Syria, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, Kuwait, and Iraq. An ISIS map shows the group controlling an implausibly large chunk of the Middle East.

• Ally with Russia to get Iranian nuclear secrets. A plan allegedly written by Abdullah Ahmed al-Meshedani, an ISIS leader with responsibility for foreign fighters, involves ISIS giving Russia access to Syrian natural gas to persuade Moscow to turn against Iran and Syria, as well as to help ISIS get nuclear weapons.

• Conquer Rome and then the world. In an address, ISIS chief Omar al-Baghdadi told his followers that “you will conquer Rome and own the world.” Rome.

• Destroy Iran using cheap Afghan carpets to undercut the Persian market. Also from the Meshedani document, this plan involves waging economic war on Iran by lowering prices in the rug market. The document also lays out designs on the Iranian caviar industry.

The Power Of Francis’ Glasnost

Both John Paul II and Benedict XVI understood the power of open dialogue, which is why they did all they could to shut it down within the Catholic church. The sensus fidelium, the insight that ordinary Catholics may have into the Christian life, was all but banished in favor of top-down control and increasingly fastidious theological certitudes. And perhaps the most striking thing so far about the Synod now going on in Rome is simply that: a venting of reality in that airless context, that, while not in opposition to church teaching, is nonetheless frank about its challenges in the modern world.

And language matters. Ed Morrissey notes:

The most intriguing part of that discussion, at least as noted in the briefing, was a call to change the language associated with those teachings [on marriage and sexuality] and find more inclusive and welcoming language instead. The specific terms that some bishops wish to stop using are “living in sin,” “intrinsically disordered,” and “contraceptive mentality.”

Each of these terms is designed to define human beings in ways that can only wound and alienate. A couple co-habiting before marriage cannot be reduced to “sin” without obliterating everything else that may be wonderful about their relationship – and that may well lead to a successful marriage that is perfectly orthodox. Suggesting that all couples who use contraception can be reduced to endorsing a “culture of death” is equally likely to push flawed human beings away from Jesus rather than toward him. And, as for “intrinsically disordered”, Ratzinger’s prissy prose was impossible for a gay Catholic to read without feeling punched in the gut. The key to a renewal of Christianity in our age will be a shift in language, a reintroduction of the core truths of the faith with words that are not designed to wound, hurt or alienate, and that can convey truth in a positive manner for a new generation.

Then there is the remarkable testimony of an Australian married couple – about the central role that sex plays in supporting their marriage vows:

The couple explained that “gradually we came to see that the only feature that distinguishes our sacramental relationship from that of any other good Christ-centred relationship is sexual intimacy and that marriage is a sexual sacrament with its fullest expression in sexual intercourse.” “We believe,” they added, “that until married couples come to reverence sexual union as an essential part of their spirituality it is extremely hard to appreciate the beauty of teachings such as those of Humanae Vitae. We need new ways and relatable language to touch peoples’ hearts.”

Well: good for them. And wouldn’t Catholic marriages be better if more were able to tell their sexual story in ways currently repressed? There is, after all, an obvious and almost painful limitation on the clerisy’s ability to understand sexual intimacy, because they have all taken vows of celibacy. (Another gigantic obstacle, of course, is that of the nearly 200 voting participants in the Synod, only one is a woman. Of the 253 total participants, only 25 are women.) But the Australians had another point to make on the question of homosexuality:

“The domestic church” represented by the family, “has much to offer the wider Church in its evangelizing role,” the couple continued. “For example, the Church constantly faces the tension of upholding the truth while expressing compassion and mercy. Families face this tension all the time.” The couple went on to illustrate this with an example relating to homosexuality. “Friends of ours were planning their Christmas family gathering when their gay son said he wanted to bring his partner home too. They fully believed in the Church’s teachings and they knew their grandchildren would see them welcome the son and his partner into the family. Their response could be summed up in three words, ‘He is our son’.”

This, Ron and Marvis explained, “is a model of evangelization for parishes as they respond to similar situations in their neighbourhood!” “The Church’s teaching role and its main mission is to let the world know of God’s love.”

This is what so many Catholics are already doing – because Christianity is about, among many things, a defense of human dignity and a love of the family. The hierarchy – which again has no such direct experience of actually navigating the challenges of parenting, and which seems incapable of seeing gay people as “first-class citizens” – has lost sight of this. They are still bound by fear – fear of actual gay people, of our happiness and self-worth, of our living example of the complexity of human love and sexuality. They cling to arid doctrine with little appreciation of how anyone can actually live it and not, in the heterosexual world, be cruel or dismissive or discriminatory or callous, or in the homosexual world, be uniquely alone, isolated, and without the sexual intimacy that the Australian couple celebrated as integral to their relationship.

What were seeing, I think, is how the mere fact of open discussion can shift the very direction of such discussion. We saw this in Vatican II, when new currents in the world and church transformed the meeting in ways no one quite expected. And Francis’ leadership in this contrasts so powerfully with his predecessor’s. He is not telling the church what it should do or how it should change. He has simply made it impossible for the lived reality of most Catholics to be ignored or dismissed any longer.

Some things cannot be unsaid. Some testimony from actual, broken but struggling Christians can never be forgotten. Dialogue shifts minds and hearts from the bottom up, not the top down.

“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

(Photo: Pope Francis leaves the Synod Hall at the end of a session of the Synod on the themes of family on October 7, 2014 in Vatican City, Vatican. By Franco Origlia/Getty Images)