“For Me, Not For Thee”, jurassicpork, Brilliant at Breakfast, June 28, 2014
I guess free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment isn’t good enough. You have to be able to lay your hands on these women, scream in their faces what murderers they are and to strip them of their last vestige of dignity, safety and privacy (which is what Roe vs Wade was all about) and to even threaten their lives in their insane quest for the sanctity of life. Of course, they pushed before the court a sweet-looking grandmotherly type who bemoaned the fact that she couldn’t spread like milk and honey her message of love.
Sex, Gender, and the Familiar Fight Over Religious Exemptions, Katherine Franke, interviewed by Nina Martin, ProPublica, March 12, 2014
On the one hand, we have the free exercise of religion, which is largely based in an appeal to revelation, to the truths of religious texts and religious doctrine. And on the other hand we have rights of equality and liberty, which are based in rational arguments — what are people entitled to as a matter of their humanity because we should all be treated equally under law. It’s an incommensurable confrontation between revelation and rationality. What ends up happening is that religion ends up like a trump card — you throw it down, it’s a conversation stopper, and we don’t know how to get out of this impasse. Law is really ill equipped for adjudicating between the claims of revelation and the claims of rationality.
Will the Supreme Court Ignore the Evidence? Facts vs. Beliefs in the Hobby Lobby Case, Imani Gandy, RH Reality Check, June 19, 2014
In the religious and political fervor surrounding the Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties cases, which the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule on any day now, three simple statements of fact about women’s health and reproduction seem to have gotten lost: Contraceptives prevent pregnancy, abortifacients terminate a pregnancy, and a pregnancy begins at implantation. So contraceptives by definition are not abortifacients because they prevent a pregnancy; if they work, there is no pregnancy to be terminated.
These statements are not up for debate. They’re not subject to any “well actually” muddying of the waters. They are incontrovertible facts based in science.
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Reason, science, and medical evidence are dangerous to the anti-contraception agenda. Simple biological truisms—that pregnancy begins at implantation, for instance—become, according to the Charlotte Lozier Institute, “Orwellian new-speak” designed to obscure the “reality” that all hormonal contraceptives potentially are abortion pills. The fact that this “reality” is actually a fantasy doesn’t matter.
