Freethinking secular humanists are prejudiced?

Impossible!

Cardinal Dolan writes:

          Here I simply want to welcome the grey, full-page ad, and thank the anonymous militiamen at FFRF for giving me yet another handout for my students when I give my next talk on “Anti-Catholic Bigotry in the United States.”

        When I used to teach a course on American Catholic history to university students, or, when I give a conference on the topic now, there will always be an early question, “We know there used to be hatred of the Catholic Church in America, but didn’t all that end in 1960 when John F. Kennedy was elected?”

        No! In fact, historians now posit that Kennedy’s election was yet further proof of the abiding, deep suspicion of the Church found in American history—remember Arthur Schlesinger’s observation that, “Bias against the Catholic Church is the most enduring prejudice in American history”—not only because Kennedy’s victory would have been much bigger had his Catholic faith not been maligned during the campaign, but because the candidate himself felt compelled to pass the very “religious test” prohibited by the Constitution, assuring voters that his faith would never have any influence at all on his executive decisions—a statement hardly considered necessary from Baptist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, or Quaker candidates.//

Progressive study learns that people who have a responsible attitude to responsible sex don't think that contraception is such an important thing that employers should be required to provide contraception over their moral objections....

....whereas "irresponsible nympos" think they need "free stuff."

Quelle surprise!

Except that's not the way they phrase it.

//After surveying Americans about their attitudes toward promiscuity — asking them whether they agreed with statements like “It is fine for a woman to have sex with a man she has just met, if they both want to” — the researchers also asked them whether they believed women tend to rely on income from their male partner. They found that the people who believe that casual sex is wrong also tend to believe that women need a partner to support them financially. Within that worldview, sex outside of a serious monogamous relationship is simply too risky. If women don’t have “paternity certainty,” then how will they know who they need to rely on to support them and their future child?

The researchers conclude that this outdated attitude toward women’s pregnancy risks and financial needs hasn’t totally gone away, despite the fact that modern contraception, legal abortion rights, and greater workplace equality have created an entirely different society//

Everyone get the irony there?

Outdated belief - women need men for support.

Progressive belief - women need government for support.

Get your head on straight, citizens!

Women are a powerful and independent force for progress, who just happen to be totally dependent on government hand-outs of contraceptives!

No contradictions there.

For the National Organization for Women, liberal ideology comes before, you know, actual women.

NOW outs Little Sisters of the Poor for being "too Catholic/insufficiently liberal."

The National Organization of Women (NOW) has compiled a list of what they're calling the "Dirty 100" — organizations who have filed suit against the HHS Contraception Mandate. One of the "Dirty 100" organizations that NOW claims is simply "using religion" to discriminate against women, is, in fact, a group of Catholic religious sisters called the Little Sisters of the Poor.

The Little Sisters of the Poor take vows to tend to the needs of the elderly poor. They are opposed to providing contraception to their employees as contraception violates the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. The Little Sisters of the Poor are not considered to be a "religious employer" and exempt from the mandate as they employ and care for people of all faith backgrounds.

It's weird how all those Nancy Pelosi cronies who got waivers from the mandate are not on the list....because, you know, liberals can sacrifice women to liberalism.

Since I've recently immersed myself in a history of the Nazi persecution of Christianity, let me observe that Justice Ginsburg's position is identical to that of the Nazi Party.

Ross Douthat writes:

Historically, support for religious liberty in the United States has rested on pragmatic as well as philosophical foundations. From de Tocqueville’s America to Eisenhower’s, there has been a sense — not universal but widespread — that religious pluralism has broad social benefits, and that the wider society has a practical interest, within reason, in allowing religious communities to pursue moral ends as they see fit.

But in the past, tensions over pluralism’s proper scope usually occurred when a specific faith — Catholicism and Mormonism, notably — unsettled or challenged the mostly Protestant majority. Today, the potential tensions are much broader, because the goals of postsexual revolution liberalism are at odds with the official beliefs of almost every traditional religious body, be it Mormon or Muslim, Eastern Orthodox or Orthodox Jewish, Calvinist or Catholic.

If liberals so desire, this division could lead to constant conflict, in which just about every project conservative believers undertake is gradually threatened with regulation enforcing liberal norms. The health coverage offered by religious employers; the activity of religious groups on college campuses; the treatments offered by religious hospitals; the subject matter taught in religious schools ... the battlegrounds are legion.

And liberals seem to be preparing the ground for this kind of expansive conflict — by making sharp distinctions (as the White House’s mandate exemptions did) between the liberties of congregations and the liberties of other religious organizations, by implying that religion’s “free exercise” is confined to liturgy and prayer, and by suggesting (as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg did in her Hobby Lobby dissent) that religious groups serve only their co-believers, not the common good.

 My exhaustive review for those who like that kind of thing - The Nazi Persecution of the Christian Churches by J.S. Conway.

And their moral outrage is dependent on whether or not the employer is a Democrat crony


Must read

 //If you recall, Congressman Stupak headed a group of representatives who said they could not support ObamaCare unless it clearly forbade the use of federal funds to support abortion. The president promised to issue an executive order that banned public funding for abortions in ObamaCare. Most observers thought Stupak had traded his and his groups’ votes for a meaningless promise.

In any event, like most of the breezy, ill-considered language in this 2000-page law, great discretion was given to the unelected secretary of HHS and Sebelius quickly acted to make sure the pro-abortion crowd, increasingly unpopular with voters, had the upper hand. She appointed a 15-member committee, eleven of whom  “demonstrate a more than casual commitment to the furthering of the abortion lobby” and unsurprisingly, the group issued a report  that “not only favored contraception, but indicated that surgical abortion coverage would have been a viable candidate, had federal law not stood in  their way.” 

It was this committee’s report -- not a Congressional decision -- which HHS used in mandating that employers provide coverage for 20 kinds of birth control for women, including 4 which are abortifacients, devices which lead to the destruction of fertilized eggs.

Some 204 outfits favored by Democrats were granted waivers by the president from ObamaCare, which means their employees do not have the right to employer provided birth control. These include upscale restaurant, nightclubs, and hotels in then-Speaker Pelosi’s district; labor union chapters; large corporations, financial firms, and local governments.

Women did not march through the streets to complain on behalf of their downtrodden sisters at Boboquivari in San Francisco which sells porterhouse steaks at $59 a pop and such. Apparently they are up with laws written on Etch-a-Sketch boards which the president can rewrite at whim. And their moral outrage is dependent on whether or not the employer is a Democrat crony.//

An Evangelical Business Owner Prevails...

....but atheist group decides that's no reason not to engage in some Catholic-baiting.

Because if there isn't one thing that is going to get all the right-thinking kind of people freedom from religion loving people united it is uniting to condemn a Catholic majority on the Supreme Court.

Apparently, "Freedom From Religion" means having a religious-test for the Supreme Court.

And you have to note that "tolerance" and "freedom of conscience" have passed their "best used by" date when "progressive" "liberals" warn that "liberty can be endangered by the abuse of liberty."

It may be true, but it is not an argument we heard a few weeks ago when the same Supreme Court, including Catholics, struck down the Defense of Marriage Act.