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Perspective, Please

Below, I reflect on the astonishing success of the marriage equality movement in the last two decades. On an issue that became a must-win for the Christianist right, the American people have delivered a resounding rebuff. Think also of other profound shifts in social policy during the Obama administration: universal health insurance, to take an epic example; the shift in drug policy away from mere law enforcement; the speed with which marijuana legalization marches forward; the rise and rise of women in the economy and the academy and politics. Then consider the broad demographic shifts – the sharp increase in the religiously unaffiliated, the super-liberal Millennial generation, the majority-minority generation being born now, and a bi-racial president possibly followed by a woman president. When I see the panic and near-hysteria among some liberals in response to the Hobby Lobby ruling, I have to wonder what America they think they’re living in.

Damon Linker notes how over the long run, the religious right is still losing big – and this is the proper context to understand a ruling like Hobby Lobby:

Where once the religious right sought to inject a unified ideology of traditionalist Judeo-Christianity into the nation’s politics, now it seeks merely to protect itself against a newly aggressive form of secular social liberalism. Sometimes that liberalism takes the relatively benign and amorphous form of an irreverent, sex-obsessed popular culture and public opinion that is unsympathetic to claims of religious truth. But at other times, it comes backed up by the coercive powers of government.

That’s how the Hobby Lobby case needs to be understood: as a defensive response to the government attempting to regulate areas of life that it never previously sought to control … From advancing an ideological project to transform America into an explicitly Catholic-Christian nation to asking that a business run by devout Christians be given a partial exemption from a government regulation that would force it to violate its beliefs — that’s what the religious right has been reduced to in just 10 years.

And this is where I part company with some of my fellow supporters of universal healthcare and marriage equality. Although I disagree with Hobby Lobby’s position on contraception (I think widespread contraception is the best bulwark in modernity against the much graver problem of abortion and that sex need not be about procreation at all), I still live in the same country that they do. And in cases where values collide, I favor some sort of accommodation. Call me a squish; but I want to live in a civil polity, not a battlefield of absolutes. (As for marriage equality, I feel the same way. I just do not believe anyone’s religious freedoms are in any way curtailed by civil marriage licenses for gay people; and that no devout person’s marriage is affected either.)

Or look at it this way: with the ACA, for the first time ever, all insurance covers a wide array of contraception options.

That’s a huge step forward for social liberalism, and it was allowed by the Roberts court. A few organizations and closely-held companies want to be exempted from that coverage for religious reasons. They just got it. The administration can still respond by crafting a compromise along the lines of that given to purely religious groups, or by other methods. Yes, there’s a precedent here that could be expanded. But, as Ross notes today, Kennedy’s concurrence suggests not by much. And overall, this battle has been decisively won by secular liberals and their allies (who include many religious people as well). What’s really being done here is negotiating the terms of surrender. And in general, I think victories are more durable if they are allied with a certain degree of magnanimity.

You can read countless screeds against this decision, for example, that nowhere even mention that for some devout people, the mandate might actually be a genuine problem of conscience. Is liberalism indifferent to the conscientious dissent of minorities? The truth is: I don’t think so. But many cannot yet see that the religious right is no longer a majority, fast becoming a small minority, unable to win at the ballot box, and needing some accommodation with respect to majoritarian rule.

That used to be a liberal value. And I hope, before too long, it will again.

(Photo: Supporters of employer-paid birth control rally in front of the Supreme Court before the decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores was announced June 30, 2014 in Washington, DC. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.)

The Intensifying Immigration Wars

Waldman analyzes the president’s Rose Garden speech from Monday, calling it “a pretty blatant thumb in the opposition’s eye”:

Obama is basically accurate in his characterization of Republican arguments, even if he portrays them in an uncomplimentary way. They do indeed argue that they won’t pass an immigration bill because they don’t trust the president to enforce it properly. Which is just an invitation for him to take executive action, making them more angry, to which he can respond, I’m only doing this because you won’t pass a bill. And since Democrats have worked just as hard to convince the public that Republicans are insanely obstructionist as Republicans have to convince the public that Obama is a tyrant, the president’s response isn’t hard to explain to people; they understand by now that Republicans are opposed to passing immigration reform. So the places where Republicans have been the most recalcitrant are those where Obama is most likely to be emboldened to move aggressively.

Vinik outlines some ways the president could tackle immigration without Congress. But rather than making an end run around the House GOP, Connor Simpson suggests Obama might actually be trying to force their hand:

Earlier Monday, the President sent a surprise request to Congress asking for roughly $2 billion to deal with the influx of children attempting to cross the border illegally from South America. While children from Mexico can be deported fairly easily, immigrants who travel from as far as Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are much more difficult and expensive. The move will likely cause chaos on Capitol Hill, but could potentially force the House to finally deal with immigration reform.

It’s a catch-22 for politicians:

vote to deport a bunch of children and solve a very real problem, or vote to deport a bunch of children and look heartless in the eyes of your constituents. Hard line immigration reform opponents will love it regardless.

Chait calls the House failure to act on immigration reform “a fascinating case study of a party unable to act on its recognized political self-interest”:

The GOP’s worst problem is that Obama’s unilateral relaxation of immigration enforcement will add a newer and more potent dimension to the immigration issue. No longer will Republicans merely have to promise to oppose reform legislation. They will have to promise to undo what Obama has done. …

And so Republicans may well find themselves in the position of watching their nominee pledging to prosecute or deport immigrant families or children pardoned or left alone by Obama. The only way their friends, neighbors, or relatives who happen to be legal citizens can spare them will be to vote for Clinton. It may have seemed that the Republicans’ standing with immigrant communities had sunk to a new low in 2012, but in 2016, things could actually get worse.

Jonathan Bernstein, on the other hand, argues that the stakes are not so dire for the Republicans in 2016 – or so they seem to believe, at least:

In the long run, the electoral danger of keeping immigration reform high on the agenda is that it could keep Hispanics in the Democratic camp for generations, in part by encouraging them to use ethnicity as their primary political identification. And if that happens, Republicans will risk turning into a long-term minority party. But the electoral effects are much murkier in 2016. That makes it even more difficult for pro-reform Republicans to make the case, particularly as politicians generally aren’t known for their long-term electoral thinking.

Now, on the policy merits, Chait (and Obama) have it right: the possibility of White House action has always made a compromise the best choice for Republicans if what they care about is policy substance. But this set of House Republicans, and the party they represent, isn’t known for putting policy substance over symbolism.

But Francis Wilkinson notes that this could all blow up in Obama’s face:

Obama is in a bind, and he won’t be escaping it soon. He promised that if the House didn’t act on immigration, he would. But if he eases deportations while thousands of alien kids are entering U.S. custody, he may well inspire a ferocity from House Republicans that we haven’t seen since the days of the debt-ceiling fiasco. Only this time, Republicans will point to Obama’s tardy response to a genuine crisis, rather than their own ideological make-believe, as the proximate cause. … By setting himself up as the alternative when and if legislation failed, Obama made himself a target of immigrant desires that he is almost certainly incapable of satisfying. He now faces a backlash from foes and friends alike.

Yglesias declares immigration reform no longer a “special” issue meriting bipartisan action. Now, he believes, “like other liberal priorities it’ll happen if Democrats win a sweep election but not otherwise”:

The more interesting question is what happens to Republicans. Will they simply cede the faction of the business community that’s hungry for immigrant labor to the Democratic coalition? Or will they push harder for a new formula — something like the SKILLS Act that would allow in more highly-skilled workers in exchange for slamming the door on family reunification for less-skilled (mostly Latin American) migrants even tighter — that would try to split up the existing interest group coalition for reform.

But whatever happens, it won’t be special. We’ll see continued trench warfare through executive action and judicial decisions as long as the legislative branches are divided. And then when one party or the other gains a breakthrough, some kind of reform will pass largely on a party-line vote.

Which is a bit odd, given the growing public consensus around liberalizing immigration policy. Although a Gallup poll last week found anti-immigration sentiment on the rise, Aaron Blake examines the long-term trends to find that this increase “looks more like a blip on the screen than a significant and lasting shift.” Two data points:

1) A May poll from the New York Times showed 46 percent of Americans thought all immigrants should be welcomed to the United States. That’s up from 33 percent in 2010, 24 percent in 2007 (the last time immigration reform failed) and around 20 percent in the mid-1990s. The percentage who say there should be no immigration has also dropped to 19 percent.

2) The same poll showed the percentage of Americans who say immigrants contribute to this country has risen significantly over the past three decades. While Americans in the 1980s and 1990s said immigrants were more likely to cause problems than contribute, it’s now 66-21 in favor of contributing. And the numbers continue to rise to this day.

KY Lubricates The Case

I’ve been waiting a long time to write that headline. But seriously, folks, the ruling in Kentucky by a GHW Bush appointee is not just a victory for marriage equality; it’s the equivalent of a knock-out. It effectively says that there is no need to worry at all about the level of judicial protection applied to the gay minority – rational basis? heightened scrutiny? strict scrutiny? – because the case for banning gay marriage is so devoid of any logic it should merely be laughed out of court. Money quote:

These arguments are not those of serious people. Though it seems almost unnecessary to explain, here are the reasons why. Even assuming the state has a legitimate interest in promoting procreation, the Court fails to see, and Defendant never explains, how the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage has any effect whatsoever on procreation among heterosexual spouses.

Excluding same-sex couples from marriage does not change the number of heterosexual couples who choose to get married, the number who choose to have children, or the number of children they have … The state’s attempts to connect the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage to its interest in economic stability and in “ensuring humanity’s continued existence” are at best illogical and even bewildering.

That, of course, was also the damning conclusion of the Prop 8 trial. If you actually put the logical arguments for banning marriage equality to a rational test, they don’t actually exist. There are no apparent costs to this reform at all:

Those opposed by and large simply believe that the state has the right to adopt a particular religious or traditional view of marriage regardless of how it may affect gay and lesbian persons. But, as this Court has respectfully explained, in America even sincere and long-held religious views do not trump the constitutional rights of those who happen to have been out-voted …

Lyle Deniston notes:

In February, in an earlier phase of the judge’s review of the Kentucky ban, he ruled in February that it was unconstitutional for the state to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages of Kentuckians that were performed in other states. That ruling is now under review by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

So this is not over in Kentucky. But the fact that every single marriage ban challenged since Windsor has been struck down is telling. Allahpundit continues to make the following flawed point:

We’ve gone from this issue being a fringe preoccupation of the left 20 years ago to the federal bench slam-dunking it today, thanks in large part to Kennedy and Windsor.

Marriage equality was absolutely not a “fringe preoccupation of the left” 20 years ago. It was a fringe preoccupation of the gay right and a handful of gay liberals – and largely opposed by the gay left. It was then and is today a centrist reform that any sane and reasonable conservative would support – as many have in America and around the world. Which is why it gives me particular pleasure to note that this particular judge was nominated by none other than Mitch McConnell. It is a victory for conservatism and reason – two things the current GOP has sadly a rather loose grip on.

Why Not Just Provide The Pill Over The Counter?

Jonathan H. Adler considers the question:

A final step the administration could take would be to enhance access to contraception by making all forms of oral contraception available over-the-counter without a prescription (and not just “Plan B”). While this would not make contraception “free” it would reduce the cost, and help alleviate some of the non-monetary obstacles women face. As Adrianna McIntyre notes, cost is hardly the only (or even the largest) obstacle working women face when it comes to obtaining contraception. Making oral contraception available OTC might not help the 3-4 percent of women who use IUDs, but it would nonetheless expand access to contraception as a practical matter, particularly for the working poor. It also has the support of some prominent conservatives and would largely eliminate the cultural conflict engendered by the mandate.

One such conservative is Philip Klein:

Philosophically, it’s consistent with limited government principles. It removes unnecessary government regulations and increases choice. It doesn’t impose new burdens on businesses or religious institutions, nor does it require an increase in government health care spending.

And politically, it would also be beneficial to Republicans. It would make it a lot more difficult for Democrats to portray the GOP as being only interested in obstructing Democrats rather than supporting their own ideas, and harder to accuse Republicans of being broadly against access to birth control. Instead, it would allow Republicans to go on offense, and show that Democrats are the ones who want to play politics with birth control.

Ben Domenech, another conservative, runs through the counterarguments:

There are a number of objections to [OTC birth control], but I find them to largely amount to unconvincing paternalism.

The chief argument advanced is that standard oral contraceptives mess with hormones and have all sorts of side effects. This is, of course, true! But: dangerous side effects are rampant within all sorts of other over the counter drugs. Women can think for themselves and make decisions with their doctor and pharmacist about what drugs they want to take – and the evidence shows they are good at self-screening. In fact, it would actually increase the ability to mitigate and respond to unanticipated side effects, since changing tracks will no longer require a doctor’s visit and getting a new prescription. Assuming that women won’t or can’t take responsibility for themselves to consult with a doctor unless required to by arbitrary government policy is absurd.

Allahpundit spotlights one of the idea’s most vocal supporters:

Bobby Jindal, who’s wooing religious conservatives ahead of 2016, has been pushing [the OTC pill] since 2012. … Congress could, as Jindal suggests, even adjust Health Savings Accounts so that they include OTC medicines, which would further reduce the financial burden. And politically, it would complicate the Democrats’ dopey “war on women” messaging by decoupling the contraception debate from the debate over abortion. How do you push a “Republicans don’t believe in reproductive freedom” message if GOPers like Jindal want to make the pill OTC?

But the best endorsement comes from the OCOG:

In the United States, the proposal to sell oral contraceptives over the counter has been endorsed by the premier body of relevant experts, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Ultimately, though, the decision will be made by the FDA.

So why the holdup? Elizabeth Nolan Brown has a must-read:

“Doctors regularly hold women’s birth control prescriptions hostage, forcing them to come in for exams,” wrote Stephanie Mencimer in a Mother Jones piece about her own doctor doing so. Dr. [Jeffrey] Singer described as it doctors extorting pay for a “permission slip” to get the same medication over and over again. Feminist blogger Amanda Marcotte says doctors use “the pill as bait” to make sure women come in once a year. Both doctors and public health officials publicly worry that women won’t receive annual cervical cancer and sexually transmitted infection (STI) screenings without such coercion. How much of this concern is motivated by profit, how much by paternalism, is hard to say. …

It’s not just some doctors and medical groups who want to keep things status quo. Pharmaceutical companies also gain from it. OTC sales “would drive down the prices substantially,” says Singer. Drugmakers can get higher prices from insurance companies than they could in a competitive contraceptive market. … Yet the pharmaceutical industry is the only entity with standing to challenge the prescription status of current birth control pills. In order to initiate the switch from prescription to nonprescription, a drug maker must approach the FDA.

Going With Your Gut

Psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer defends the practice, arguing that we “need statistical thinking for a world where we can calculate the risk, but in a world of uncertainty, we need more.” How ignoring the importance of instincts and gut feelings hurts business practices:

Gut feelings are tools for an uncertain world. They’re not caprice. They are not a sixth sense or God’s voice. They are based on lots of experience, an unconscious form of intelligence.

I’ve worked with large companies and asked decision makers how often they base an important professional decision on that gut feeling. In the companies I’ve worked with, which are large international companies, about 50% of all decisions are at the end a gut decision. But the same managers would never admit this in public. There’s fear of being made responsible if something goes wrong, so they have developed a few strategies to deal with this fear. One is to find reasons after the fact. A top manager may have a gut feeling, but then he asks an employee to find facts the next two weeks, and thereafter the decision is presented as a fact-based, big-data-based decision. That’s a waste of time, intelligence, and money.

The more expensive version is to hire a consulting company, which will provide a 200-page document to justify the gut feeling. And then there is the most expensive version, namely defensive decision making. Here, a manager feels he should go with option A, but if something goes wrong, he can’t explain it, so that’s not good. So he recommends option B, something of a secondary or third-class choice. Defensive decision-making hurts the company and protects the decision maker. In the studies I’ve done with large companies, it happens in about a third to half of all important decisions. You can imagine how much these companies lose.

Much More Than Still Life

In a review of The Barnes Foundation’s exhibit The World Is an Apple: The Still Lifes of Paul Cézanne, Morgan Meis considers why the painter’s still lifes provoked outrage in the late 19th century and why they endure as “so peculiar, so specifically Cézanne-ish” today:

Cézanne liked his painting surfaces rough with paint. He generally did not varnish or glaze his paintings. He also didn’t care much for “correct” perspective. Look, for instance, at The Kitchen Table (1888-90). The left corner of the table doesn’t even match up with the right corner. And the floor of the kitchen doesn’t recede properly into space. Cézanne didn’t care. He wanted the painting to look this way. He wanted you to feel – when looking at the painting – slightly off-kilter, like the canvas can’t quite hold what is inside it and the kitchen might spill forward out of its frame.

Cézanne also liked to blur lines and boundaries within his paintings.

In Apples and Cakes (1873-77), there is a green object, probably an apple, at the back of a white dish of fruit. The apple is the exact color as the wall behind the table. So, it looks as if the wall, in the background, has simply bled into and become part of the bowl of fruit in the middle ground. In Still Life with Seven Apples and a Tube of Paint (1878-9), Cézanne has scraped at the apples with some sort of knife, mixing the colors and boundaries of the middle apple into the apples next to it. In Still Life with Carafe, Milk Can, Bowl, and Orange (1879-80), the carafe barely exists, since it merges into the colors and shapes of the wall behind it and the other objects nearby. Many things seem to be merging in Cézanne’s paintings. Objects merge with one another. Background and foreground merge. Space itself seems to tighten and overlap.

It is as if Cézanne painted still lifes to show that individual objects sitting on a table are not individual objects at all. Sure, an apple is just an apple. But in Cézanne’s still lifes, an apple isn’t just an apple. It is also all the other apples. And it is the table and jug and the pitcher and the wall behind the table. Every object is implicated in every other object. To look at one object you have to look at all the others. To confront one individual thing, you have to confront a whole world.

(Image: The Kitchen Table by Cézanne, 1888-90, via Wikimedia Commons)

Robot Journalists

Nick Diakopoulos checks ’em out:

Every robot journalist first needs to ingest a bunch of data. Data rich domains like weather were some of the first to have practical natural language generation systems. Now we’re seeing a lot of robot journalism applied to sports and finance — domains where the data can be standardized and made fairly clean. The development of sensor journalism may provide entirely new troves of data for producing automated stories. …

After data is read in by the algorithm the next step is to compute interesting or newsworthy features from the data. Basically the algorithm is trying to figure out the most critical aspects of an event, like a sports game. It has newsworthiness criteria built into its statistics. So for example, it looks for surprising statistical deviations like minimums, maximums, or outliers, big swings and changes in a value, violations of an expectation, a threshold being crossed, or a substantial change in a predictive model.

Joe Pinsker isn’t too worried about robot-written stories corroding journalism:

These automated write-ups are for now filling micro-niches, such as Little League games or fantasy football drafts, that are outside the scope of information covered by journalists working now.

As Automated Insights’ CEO Robbie Allen told Poynter, “We’re creating content where it didn’t exist before.” The AP’s move has a similar underlying goal: It said that Automated Insights’ algorithms will allow them to produce nearly 15 times as many earnings reports per quarter than when they filed them manually.

While, yes, it’s true that algorithms can cram stories about vastly different subjects into the same uncanny monotone—they can cover Little League like Major League Baseball, and World of Warcraft raids like firefights in Iraq—they’re really just another handy attempt at sifting through an onslaught of data. Automated Insights’ success goes hand-in-hand with the rise of Big Data, and it makes sense that the company’s algorithms currently do best when dealing in number-based topics like sports and stocks.

On top of that, the earnings report as a journalistic form, which is what one might worry is endangered by the introduction of newsroom algorithms, is already robotically formulaic. The way the AP has been writing these reports up until now demands that human writers act like computer programs, copy-pasting the day’s numbers into their predetermined slots.

Justin Ellis spots another service employing robo-journos:

What if you could rescue your favorite saved reads by putting them into print, with one click? That’s the idea behind PaperLater, a new service that lets users create a personalized newspaper from their favorite must-reads from around the web. It’s the latest creation from the Newspaper Club, the U.K.-based company we last wrote about then it created a “robot” newspaper for The Guardian. PaperLater is a continuation of that work; the same algorithms that automatically laid out Guardian stories will now let anyone easily throw together an edition of the web’s best reads. What’s new, and what makes the service slightly more approachable to a wider audience, is a browser button for saving stories to PaperLater — and the individualized nature of single-issue printing.

Is Uber Only For The Able-Bodied?

Ted Trautman worries that cutting-edge taxis like Uber and Lyft will leave the handicapped behind:

[T]hough wheelchair-accessible vehicles are rare both in the traditional taxi system and through rideshare services, traditional taxi companies are required in many cities to make some of their vehicles wheelchair-accessible. Companies like Uber and Lyft have no such obligation. … These startups, which are mostly unregulated, are recruiting drivers aggressively and luring experienced cabbies who hope to earn more working for Uber or Lyft than they do in a yellow taxi. As the few taxi drivers with wheelchair-accessible vehicles abandon the medallion-based taxi system (which, as I’ve mentioned, in many cities has a mandate to field a certain number of wheelchair-accessible vehicles) to join the less-regulated startup world using their own, non-accessible vehicles, it will become increasingly difficult to find the drivers to keep accessible cabs on the road. In San Francisco, a quarter of the city’s 100 wheelchair-accessible taxis already sit idle for lack of drivers.

Recent Dish on Uber here.

An Archbishop Heightens The Contradictions

Archbishop Nienstedt was Pope Benedict XVI’s kind of cleric. When he was Bishop of New Ulm,

he condemned some of the theological views of the man who had held the post before him for 25 years, Bishop Raymond Lucker, a noted progressive clergyman who died in 2001. Denouncing his predecessor’s views was an “extraordinary step,” the National Catholic Reporter noted in an article on the incident. As bishop in New Ulm, Nienstedt prohibited cohabitating couples from being married in Catholic churches. He barred female pastoral administrators from leading prayers at a semiannual leadership event. He once disciplined a priest for holding joint ecumenical services with a Lutheran congregation after the Catholic church had been destroyed by a tornado.

He also had a particular beef with homosexuals, of course. He favored barring them from speaking at Catholic institutions, and opposed even the sentiments of “Always Our Children”, a pastoral attempt to make sure that gay family members are cared for in the church. And he made no bones about it, writing in 2007:

Those who actively encourage or promote homosexual acts or such activity within a homosexual lifestyle formally cooperate in a grave evil and, if they do so knowingly and willingly, are guilty of mortal sin. They have broken communion with the church and are prohibited from receiving Holy Communion until they have had a conversion of heart, expressed sorrow for their action and received sacramental absolution from a priest.

He cautioned Catholics not to watch Brokeback Mountain:

The story is about two lonely cowboys herding sheep up on a mountain range. One night after a drinking binge, one man makes a pass at the other and within seconds the latter mounts the former in an act of wanton anal sex. This sets off a lustful passion in both men that “grabs hold of them” and which they find impossible to control. Rather than a sad symphony to a beautiful love that our homophobic society will not allow to show itself, this is a human tragedy in which their lust leads to the neglect of their work (i.e. sheep ravaged by wolves during the pair’s frolicking), infidelity against their wives (i.e. divorce, anger and grief) and the psychological harm inflicted on their children (i.e. sadness, alienation and grief).

And became quite an activist:

Before the 2010 midterm elections, Nienstedt turned his attention to the burgeoning gay-marriage movement. He recorded an introduction on a DVD opposing gay marriage, which was sent to four hundred thousand Minnesota Catholics. The same year a Catholic mother wrote to him pleading for acceptance for her gay son. He recommended she consult the Catechism. “Your eternal salvation may well depend upon a conversation of heart on this topic,” he replied. And in 2012, Nienstedt led a coalition of religious leaders pushing for an amendment to the state constitution defining marriage as between one man and one woman. Reportedly, Nienstedt committed $650,000 to those efforts.

Speaking of his vocation, Archbishop Nienstedt once declared: “When I was yet a boy, I fell in love with a beautiful woman who was the bride of Christ.”

So I guess you kinda know what’s coming next.

Commonweal has a good round-up of the story. The gist from Grant Gallicho:

Archbishop John Nienstedt of St. Paul and Minneapolis is being investigated for “multiple allegations” of inappropriate sexual conduct with seminarians, priests, and other men, according to the archbishop’s former top canon lawyer, Jennifer Haselberger. The investigation is being conducted by a law firm hired by the archdiocese. Nienstedt denies the allegations…

“Based on my interview with Greene Espel—as well as conversations with other interviewees—I believe that the investigators have received about ten sworn statements alleging sexual impropriety on the part of the archbishop dating from his time as a priest in the Archdiocese of Detroit, as Bishop of New Ulm, and while coadjutor and archbishop of St. Paul and Minneapolis,” Jennifer Haselberger, [the archbishop’s top canon lawyer who resigned in protest in 2013] told me. What’s more, “he also stands accused of retaliating against those who refused his advances or otherwise questioned his conduct.” …

“I have never engaged in sexual misconduct and certainly have not made any sexual advances toward anyone,” Nienstedt told me. “The allegations are a decade old or more, prior to my service as archbishop of St. Paul and Minneapolis,” he continued, emphasizing that “none of the allegations involve minors or illegal or criminal behavior.”

Another case of a truly fucked up gay man who over-compensated by becoming a priest and insisting on Catholic doctrine to the letter?

Or another persecuted theo-conservative who is innocent on all counts?

And the beat goes on …

Hobby Lobby: Your Thoughts, Ctd

A reader quotes me:

I hope at least some liberals grasp that being required to finance something you believe to be murder is a legitimate area of conscientious objection.

Alito’s opinion said that the alternative was to let the government pay for this coverage. What’s to stop Hobby Lobby from embracing your argument and saying “Hey wait a minute! What’s the difference between us paying for this directly through the health insurance that we had been forced to buy, and now having to pay for it indirectly through taxes?” Yes, Alito said that was an exception, but how soon will it be before that is overturned? We’re talking nuclear minefield!

No we’re not. The argument against Hobby Lobby would then be quite simple: you can no more object to your taxpayers’ money going to health insurance subsidies than pacifists can with their tax dollars going to the Pentagon (a point Alito explicitly made on page 47). And look: until the ACA, there was no government subsidy for contraception. Now there is – with a few religious exemptions. It’s had to see how the change over the last few years isn’t a big victory for liberals, with a small silver lining for religious conservatives. So take a deep breath and get some perspective. Another reader also finds my argument “specious”:

At what point does religious belief trump scientific fact and understanding? The science, with about the same level of agreement as on climate change, says that none of these forms of contraception cause fertilized eggs to fail to implant or prevents implantation. The belief that these types of contraception are also abortifacients is based on old hypotheses that have pretty much been disproved. Those hypotheses though lit a fire under the pro-life movement – a movement not known for really following, understanding or believing in science – and they have stuck with it. These are real women’s lives, real women’s healthcare and bodies we are talking about, being put aside over a debunked hypothesis that has been taken as gospel.

That’s a perfectly valid point, since much of the abortifacient debate centers on the precise definition of pregnancy:

The plaintiffs in Hobby Lobby define conception as the point when the sperm and egg come together to make a zygote, which is why they object to these birth control methods—they can interfere after an egg has already been fertilized. The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, on the other hand, defines conception as the moment when a fertilized egg implants in the uterus. The Supreme Court noted in its decision that federal regulations also define conception this way—“pregnancy encompasses the period of time from implantation to delivery,” one reads.

But not everyone agrees on this definition, and the court did not weigh in on the timing of conception or what kinds of birth control may or may not be abortifacients. “It is not for the Court to say that the religious beliefs of the plaintiffs are mistaken or unreasonable,” the decision reads.

If the federal regulations have the same definition, then we’re in murky territory. For my own part, I don’t think IUDs are abortifacients. In fact, the Dish has closely examined in the past whether Plan B could cause what some consider to be abortion: “Indeed, an overwhelming number of studies in the past decade back up the reader’s point that Plan B does not prevent implantation.” Aaron Caroll addresses similar concerns over the IUD:

Research does not support the idea that they prevent fertilized eggs to implant.

The journal Fertility and Sterility published a study in 1985 that followed three groups of women for 15 months. One group had an IUD, one group had their tubes tied, and one group was trying to get pregnant. They then measured hormone levels to see if fertilization occurred. It did so only in the group trying to get pregnant.

Another study found that a telltale sign of fertilization — a surge of the hormone human chorionic gonadotropin — occurred in only 1 percent of 100 cycles in women using IUDs. This would be consistent with the failure rate of IUDs in general. In other words, IUDs do not appear to work by aborting a fertilized egg.

So there is an extremely small area of gray. A reader adds:

The reason the FDA cannot say with 100% certainty that the drugs do not prevent implantation is there is no means of conducting an experiment to prove it. But logic says it is unlikely. My IUD would have to fail to prevent ovulation, at the same time it fails to prevent fertilization, within a window where there was sperm available. That’s statistically almost impossible. Also consider that fertilized eggs naturally fail to implant all the time, and many of those that do are incapable of cell replication and get, um, flushed out with the menstrual cycle.

Back to readers on the question of conscientious objection:

If you as a corporation want the tax break for providing insurance, provide the insurance. You don’t get to pick and choose what is in the package. If you as a corporation sincerely believe you can’t in conscious participate in providing insurance that includes medicine you consider to be morally wrong, then don’t. Don’t take the tax break for providing insurance. Pay the fine. Let your employees go onto the individual market and buy their own.

Sounds like a good idea in principle. But in practice, junking the whole thing because of an objection to four out of 20 contraception methods? Seems a little drastic to me. Another reader asks a “sincere question, not snark”:

If an employee of Hobby Lobby buys an IUD out of pocket or through a separate insurance policy she’s paid for herself, hasn’t Hobby Lobby actually paid for that anyway, since they’re the ones providing her with the money through her salary? Health insurance is just another form of compensation, so why can they put stipulations on that but not on her salary? No one’s suggesting that a company can make a potential employee sign a contract that stipulates they can’t use any part of their salary to fund what they consider abortion, but why isn’t that a logical conclusion of this decision?

Another notes:

I grant that this is a legitimate area of conscientious objection, but when Hobby Lobby’s 401(K) funds have invested in companies manufacturing some of these same devices, it seems more about exerting power than moral objections. (Can you say hypocrisy?) Or perhaps it’s about sticking it to Obama. Here’s an article in Forbes – which isn’t a liberal source – discussing this issue.

I agree that there appears to be a whiff of political posturing here as well.