“There are a number of people who have chosen to convert to the Catholic faith because they don”t like the liberal positions taken by their sectarian groups,” said Matthews, “that’s a fact, you can write that down. . . .I’m saying that some people who are bigoted against gay people have changed religions, yes.”

This is a guy who profoundly misunderstands his own faith and its teachings, which are all about saying “yes” not “no” but in ways that challenge us in our earthly brokenness and are just difficult, sometimes. Not only is he contributing to a fashionable new trend of anti-Catholicism (and for all I know, he’s doing it deliberately) but here he is being lazy — really, almost unforgivably lazy — in subscribing to the intellectually dishonest and cowardly idea that to have a different opinion than others, or to simply say “I love you but can’t go there” is “bigotry.” That’s what “progressives” have “progressed” to. If you disagree with Obama, you’re a “racist.” If you can’t get behind gay marriage, you’re a “bigot” and if you think employers should not be ordered to cover contraception (or ordered to cover anything) you’re a “sexist.”

They spit out the vituperative labels because it is frankly easier to muddy up the water with name-calling than actually try to swim the rougher currents, together. Call someone a name and pretend that you’re somehow more noble than the other person because you don’t even have to engage in thought or weigh a philosophy, and you may be a hero to some, but you’re ultimately a coward, hiding behind slander tossed as easily as a rock.

But as idiotic, nasty and gratuitously ignorant as Matthews is, here, it’s his audience that really turns my stomach; watch the video and listen to them howl.

Baboons. Mindless trained baboons, responding on cue.

But don’t get me wrong. I fully expect we’ll hear some trained baboons on the right at some point in tonight’s GOP debate, as well — probably hooting at precisely the wrong time, because if the left is horrid, the right is just hapless.

Still, it makes me sad to see Matthews like that. I used to watch his show every night and really enjoyed it. That was back when our kids were younger and would wander around the house parroting, “yer watchin’ Hardball!” It’s a shame that this is where we’re at. A society of grotesques.

Of course, one of the good things about Lent is I get to spend some time thinking about how I may have contributed to our shared baboonery, with this blog, so…there’s that.

I wonder if Matthews will also take time to wonder about that, this Lent.

Well, it’s Ash Wednesday, thanks, thanks be to God! We head into forty days of intentional slowing-down, of being more prayerful, more thoughtful, less reactive. I don’t know about you, but I totally need some Lenten silence, discipline and turning away from the world, especially the world of politics right now.

If you’re not sure what all the hubbaloo is about, Marys Aggies explains it all or, if you don’t feel like reading, here’s a great two-minute video!

What are you giving up for Lent? I am going to give up snacking and also commenting on Facebook. I’ll go there to link to something but I’m going to keep the piehole closed, and that’s going to be tough. But I need it tough. Lent needn’t be as difficult as this, but I do think Timothy P. O’Malley is correct, here. This is the perfect time to fast from suspicion, ideology and demonization. My soul, at least, needs it; I know that.

I meant to have my annual list of newly-published Lenten Reading suggestions for you, but have been very bad with my time; will have that up tomorrow, I promise! You know without my even saying, of course, that I am recommending this book and this one and this book but I have lots more, and even a course recommendation. For tomorrow. As we Benedictines are always encouraged to read something challenging in Lent, I have picked up a used copy of Principles of Catholic Theology by Joseph Ratzinger, aka our Holy Father.

I am also, at this very moment reading Robert Hugh Benson’s Lord of the World, which was free on Kindle!

And if you really need an idea today, Julie Davis (whose own book of Lenten Reflections has been published this year), has recommendations!

Did you get ashes today, even my non-Catholic friends? More and more Protestant churches around here seem to be offering them. If so, what does it mean to you, what do you think about it?

Last year I wrote about the Sermon I’d like to hear for Ash Wednesday:

“You remember the movie Moonstruck? It’s the story about an Italian family in Brooklyn, a mother named Rose, a father named Cosmo, and their daughter, Cher.

“There’s a part where the mother, Rose—who suspects her husband of cheating—says to the father, ‘Cosmo, I just want you to know that no matter what you do, you’re gonna die, just like everyone else!’

“And so is everyone in this church. You’re going to die. And no matter how well you think you’re doing, you’re screwing up, and I don’t need to tell you where you’re screwing up because you know where you’re screwing up.

“Later in the film, Rose warns her daughter . . . Cher . . . ‘your life’s goin’ down the toilet!’

“So is yours . . .

You can read it all here, but really, you’d probably do better with the homily Deacon Greg gave today:

These ashes say that we are works in progress.

They say: please be patient. God isn’t finished with me yet.

He isn’t finished with any of us.

That is the great wonder and consolation of Lent.

And the promised Lotsa Links: and if you need more Check out New Advent

Ten Things to Remember for Lent

What we can learn about fasting From our Orthodox and Muslim friends

Abbey-Roads with wise words and a clever photoshop!

What does Lent Teach us about Markets and Morals?

Pat Gohn’s Among Women Podcast has a roundtable of sorts, on Lenten practices and Devotions

Lent and the Corporal Works of Mercy

A reflection and prayer

Loving Lent. Weird as it may sound, lots of us really do love it. Forty days of mindfulness and meaning!

What does drinking wine have to do with needing God?

Bringing Lent Home With Mother Teresa

Desperate Irish Housewife: And they’re off!

Brandon is the author of the very well-received and widely read The Church and New Media, and a journalist who, like our Pat Gohn and Tony Rossi, has a knack for conducting great interviews (I do believe he knows every Catholic currently online!). He blogs at The Thin Veil and — along with partners Matthew Warner and Josh Simmons — he has founded the Digital Diocese Conference, a very exciting one-day presentation meant to help dioceses navigate the ‘net and boldly reach out to their flock in this new and most necessary medium.

And now he’s found time to interview Patheos’ own brilliant infant terrible, Marc Barnes of the Bad Catholic Blog, and as you might imagine, it’s a fun and fascinating read:

Q: Many people, me included, have likened your style to everyone from Chesterton to Tolkien, Flannery O’Conner to Walker Percy. Can you talk about how these and others have influenced your writing?

Such comparisons are well-intentioned insults to great writers. I do not know whether their influence comes across in my work—after all, it takes an onlooker to tell you that you have your mother’s eyes—but I do know they’ve moved my writing away from pretentious disaster. A more fitting way to say “Mr. Barnes sounds like Mr. Chesterton” would be “Mr. Chesterton prevents Mr. Barnes from sounding like crap.” But I’ll tell you what I’ve learned from each you’ve mentioned.

Walker Percy taught me that you just as easily prove God’s existence by showing those who fail to live up to his commands as showing those who don’t. He demands that I be comfortable living in the ruins (the world’s gone all to hell, but I will not be saddened) and he introduced me to the existentialism of Kierkegaard, for which I simultaneously hate and love him.

Ms. O’Connor taught me that sometimes putting it grotesquely is putting it best.

Chesterton taught me that if you’re not having a fantastic time arguing, debating, thinking and writing, you should be doing something else. And not to fear paradox. And he made me Catholic.

Tolkien taught me that being Catholic is a battle and a romance.

Aside from the fact that the conversation between these two young men made me feel slow, old and stupid, I enjoyed reading it very much; I think you will too.

But I can’t guarantee you won’t be humbled and thinking to yourselves, “young scrappers, get off my lawn! And pray for me!”

By the way, Tony Rossi interviewed Brandon Vogt a couple of months ago; you can listen in, here (scroll down). Or you can read my own interview with Brandon.

UPDATE I: Seems Marc Barnes, like Frank Weathers, is going to take some time off from blogging, for Lent. Stupid Christians and their stupid disciplines! Don’t they know we need constant input and updating?

UPDATE II: Lisa Mladinich has an interview with another young, very focused young Catholic!

My First Things column from today:

Through its mouthpieces, the administration has already begun to argue that “an institution does not have a conscience.” This is utter nonsense. The missions of the church are predicated on conscience, and conscience and mission feed and build upon one another. Conscience is what sent Catholic religious women to drag Civil War soldiers off the battlefields and into their hospitals, regardless of uniform; it is what put Catholic charities and hospitals and schools in place often before civil authorities thought to intervene; it is why the Vatican provides funding for adult stem cell research.

Institutional conscience is behind our government sending billions of dollars to Africa, to combat death by AIDS and malaria. Indeed, President Obama himself cannot deny the truth of it; he recently suggested that conscience is what animates his institutional policies.

Here is another truth: everything that rises must converge. Fractured ideology and theology are now rising and converging, and whether they raise our discourse or further divide will depend upon our ability to articulate and absorb sometimes subtle arguments without allowing our attention to be diverted from the central matter at hand: does the government have any business inserting itself into our religious conscience with the intention of commanding it? Should its reach extend into our theological musings as a means of effecting our eventual, and unsubtle marginalization?

You can read it all here

Meanwhile, Bookworm is firing off about the Transvaginal Ultra Sound as Rape narrative:

There’s a reason for Lithwick’s hyperbole, though, and it’s not because she’s upset about the Virginia law. Or at least, that’s only the smallest part. My sister, who is as uninterested in politics as can be, called me today outraged that Republicans generally, and Santorum specifically, are making contraception illegal. She was completely taken aback when I explained that Republicans are only trying to preserve a status quo that has been in place since 1965; namely, that contraceptives and abortifacients are freely available everywhere in the U.S., but that churches don’t have to pay for them.

The Democrats are not making contraceptives even more available than they’ve been before, which is an impossibility given their current unlimited availability. Instead, they are seeking to shift costs onto employers, including religious organizations and individuals who are doctrinally opposed to contraceptives and abortifacients.

My sister was receptive to the truth, and I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to explain to her the entire story. She got that she was the victim of a Big Lie. Most voters, however, aren’t my open-minded sister and, even worse, they don’t have me sitting there walking them through the lies and smears. Instead, they’re begin manipulated into believing that Republicans and conservatives are depriving women of all access to contraceptives and then, once they’re pregnant, raping them. That’s the Big Lie, and that’s what Democrats think will win them the election in 2012.

Many commentators have shuddered at the way in which Republican candidates are stupidly making this election about women’s sexual rights. What they miss is that the whole abortion/contraception issue is a tar baby* that Democrats placed squarely in the Republicans’ path, so that it was impossible for Republicans to avoid.

Russell Shaw: A Series of Ugly Events:

If the bishops reject this deal, they don’t have a lot of options. Closing down thousands of Catholic institutions and programs isn’t likely. Remedial legislation pending in Congress has little chance of becoming law with Democrats controlling the Senate and the White House. As for simply refusing to obey the HHS rule, it’s a last resort.

​That leaves litigation.

Josh Good: Last Thursday’s hearing was chilling

David P. Goldman: Memo to Jews: after they come for the Catholics, they will come for us

Mark Shea: The Mentality of our Ruling Class

It is about power, and control, a contempt for the masses that insists they must be ruled, rather than lead.

“Ongoing, comprehensive Government Surveillance”

Andrew Klavan so often says precisely what I think, and here he nails it; the left’s obsession with always needing to be perceived as “cool” has played a large part in our undoing, because the culture has adopted that mindset. The government, the media and academia are all in the clutches of perpetual 14 year-olds forever chasing times and trends to maintain the aura of hipness that keeps them sitting at the lunch table with the “cool” kids. The spoiled cool kids who think they’re just entitled to everything. Which is generally what 14 year-olds do think.

No critic who values his relevance wants to point out that Bridesmaids soiling themselves while in wedding regalia is not really funny; or that Katy Perry’s hummable hit tunes peddling alcohol abuse and cheap sex to 12-year-olds are reprehensible; or that Sacha Baron Cohen mocking ordinary people for their non-ironic faith, manners or dedication can be at once hilarious and morally wrong — like laughing at a slapstick accident that leaves someone dead. No one wants to turn into the old man waving his cane from the porch rocking chair shouting at the young folks to stop all their goldarned canoodling and quit parading around with their hoo-has and what-nots hanging out, for the love of Mike.

And yet the nation hungers for just such behavior. Witness the recent YouTube video of a father punishing his spoiled daughter for a snarky Facebook post by plugging her laptop with a .45. The thing went viral to the tune of tens of millions of viewers. Why? Because it was wonderful to see someone finally step up and be Daddy.

Nations cannot be governed by 14 year olds. Read it all.

I’m feeling kind of “get-off-my-lawn” today.

UPDATE:
Apparently Matt Archbold is feeling it, too:

I’ll admit I’m in a mood. I watched a video yesterday that really stuck with me. I put it up on The Reader under “That’s not Funny.” You can check it out but it shows high school kids who know absolutely nothing about their state, their country, or their history. Nothing. It’s painful to watch. And what makes it all worse is that the whole time, they’re all laughing and giggling about their own ignorance.

I wasn’t laughing. Here we are. The most advanced and prosperous civilization the world has ever seen and it’s like we’re all just assuming it’s always been like this and always will be. We’ve forgotten that this wonderful lifestyle we lead isn’t a given. Freedom isn’t a given. We’ve gotten to this wonderful place and we’ve torn up the map how to get here. Many of the people who educate our children don’t believe in the Constitution. They don’t believe that the values that built this society are anything special. And we’ve left them in charge of our children. So how can we be shocked when our children know nothing of the uniqueness of our country when their teachers don’t believe there’s anything unique about it.

Yup, here we are. I remember getting mad at one of my nieces who gave up good grades in order to be cool. Ignorance was cool. She eventually came to her senses, but yeah. Here we are.

From Charles Kadlec at Forbes, the must read of the day!

Before our very eyes, President Obama is on the verge of establishing the principle that the right to religious freedom comes not from our Creator, but from those who rule us. A government endowed right granted to women now trumps our unalienable right to act in accordance with our religious beliefs and conscience. Not only does this overturn the First Amendment, it also tramples the nation’s founding principles as announced in the Declaration of Independence. Such an achievement would be the true audacity of power.

The fundamental question is whether the Catholic Church, and by extension, individual Americans have to engage in activities according to the rulings of this and future Presidents, or are we free to live our lives as we choose as long as we do not harm another. Are we free to engage in long standing religious practices that have never before been deemed unlawful, or has the federal government established a de facto state “religion” that it is prepared to enforce through the full coercive power of its financial resources and the imposition of financial penalties.

If the Catholic Church and the American people choose the face saving “Option A” instead of “Option C,” then President Obama will have transformed America. We may be allowed the illusion of exercising our freedom, but in truth, we will be subjects in ObamaLand, required to do the bidding of this and future Presidents in the name of some higher, collective good.

However, the Catholic Church can turn the tables on the President by taking Option A off the table with a humble statement of principal that in the matters of religious practices and conscience, there is a higher authority than government Who it chooses to obey. If President Obama prevails and unleashes the full force of the federal government against the Church, the cost will be the closing of Catholic schools, hospitals and the loss of social services that play a vital part in communities across the nation. Such a stand would make clear to the American people that the alternative to religious freedom would be a mortal wound to our civil liberties and a complete disruption of civil society.

I am not a Catholic, nor do I believe in the Church’s opposition to contraception. But I pray that the leadership of the Catholic Church will have the faith and courage to stand for its core beliefs and use all of its moral power and political influence to defeat the President’s edict. I pray they will reach out across the political spectrum to people of all faiths, agnostics and atheists in the name of religious freedom and individual liberty. By so doing, they, and the institution of the Catholic Church, will have my love and respect for the rest of my life.

Read it all; send it to everyone you know. Tell it at the table and to your children. This is not just a Catholic battle; it’s not just a church battle.

“We are only a few days away from fundamentally transforming America!”
— Barack Obama, November 2008

Me, in 2009

Look, liberty is not lost in a day. It is lost in increments and inches. Today you will not smoke in a pub – or smoke at all – even though those in charge might. Tomorrow the government will set your house temperature for you, while keeping their own set to their comfort levels. They will tell you how much money you may fairly earn, while “they” are not quite so limited. Next year your son will be forced to participate in mandatory volunteerism, and so will your mother. Soon you will be advised to abandon your hate-filled intolerant church for the approved and correct one. Someday, you may be asked to bow before someone and you will have to say “yes” and then live with yourself, or say “no” and live with those consequences. The banality of slavery…it is almost a tedious thing.

Just be ready, is all I am saying. And practice prayer – which is the most subversive of liberties; it can never be taken from you, and is a source of power and strength. Train yourself in prayer. Begin now, so that you are a fit, skilled practitioner when the need arises.

It will be easier to train yourself, and to read the data, if you put on the mind of exile before it is forced on you. What you do or give freely is never diminishable.

Russell Shaw at OSV: Why People Don’t Like the Catholic Church:

. . . the Catholic Church stands as the principal obstacle to realization of the secularists’ procedural paradise of all-but-unconditional choice. However the current controversy ends, this larger conflict will continue.

Pope John Paul II and Ignatius Cardinal Kung Pin Mei

UPDATE:
From the Progressive Christian portal comes a voice of understanding and support

Also, David Warren Pipes in from Up North

UPDATE II: Joanne at Egregious Twaddle on being Catholic, liberal and American during a most illiberal time — it’s a good, thoughtful and honest read. Highly recommend!

RELATED:
The Art of the Painless Coup
Tumbling America and the Narrative Thrust

In 2009 Ignatius press released this prophetic little volume, written by our pope over 1969-1970 — while the world was in the first throes of the social revolution. I thought I’d share a few of Joseph Ratzinger’s prescient thoughts. They seem timely:

“The church will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes . . . she will lose many of her social privileges. . . As a small society, [the Church] will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members.”

He goes on, saying: [the church]

“It will be hard-going for the Church, for the process of crystallization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy. It will make her poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek . . . The process will be long and wearisome as was the road from the false progressivism on the eve of the French Revolution – when a bishop might be thought smart if he made fun of dogmas and even insinuated that the existence of God was by no means certain . . . But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church. Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.

And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult, which is dead already with Gobel, but the Church of faith. She may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently; but she will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man’s home, where he will find life and hope beyond death.”

The book is only 160 pages. It’s available on Kindle, too.

I am frankly very consoled by these thoughts. At the dawn of the social revolution, Ratzinger saw all of this, and now he is our Pope, leading us through these first serious labor pains. Who knows if he will be with us through the delivery — I very much doubt it — but seeing him in Peter’s chair at this time reminds us that God has his hand in all things, even in the pastoral weaknesses of the past few decades that have helped us get to this place.

By the way, if you still have not read this brief but also prophetic document, written by Pope Paul VI, the time to read it is now. More on it here

And here is Elizabeth Duffy:

“Putting her on birth control would give her a pass to continue with that behavior. Then this unsavory guy would be hanging around wanting sex, which is not safe for her, or our family.”

The role of a guardian is not to provide a scuba suit so that a child can keep swimming in toxic water. It’s to pull the child out of toxic water, prevent her from making unhealthy alliances with poor potential mates at a vulnerable time in her life, and teach her about true love, so that the girl who is unfit to be a parent at 14, will be fit when she reaches adulthood.

This is where conscience clauses come in. Rather than thinking like Margaret Sanger, who advocated the use of birth control “to stop the multiplication of the unfit” the Catholic sexual ethic looks beyond the good of the state to see the ultimate good of the person.

And check out Obama, Athanasius and the Bishops

And correcting George Will and Jay Carney

Two related pieces, from 2009:
The Coming “Catholic Church of America”
The Shadow of the Jackboot

Thus, the move to dismantle the Catholic conscience — or at least to redefine it as a threat to the public good — is underway. To that end an administration that didn’t need to involve the churches in its policies at all has gone out of its way to do exactly that.

And now, comes a “nuanced” assist.

Planned Parenthood called Paul’s Pantry, part of the St. Vincent de Paul Society and the biggest food pantry in Wisconsin, and asked them to come and pick up donations, which may have been noble, but wasn’t something the Catholic organization felt comfortable doing — sending a truck over and perhaps giving the abortion provider a photo opportunity. The American Life League reports what the worker at the pantry said:

All I told the young lady from Planned Parenthood was that I couldn’t send a truck to pick up, and gave her a list of other food pantries that might want to pick up, I gave her no reason at all and she didn’t ask why. Soon after, I started receiving the hate e-mail and phone calls. I politely explained to callers that although we are non-denominational in regards to those we serve, we are a Catholic organization who shares a board of directors with our sister organization, St. Vincent de Paul. We adhere to the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church and to the Rule of St. Vincent de Paul. I also explained our Gift Acceptance Policy and how acceptance of the donation would compromise our core values and possibly damage the reputation of Paul’s Pantry.

What happens next, of course, is entirely predictable, and of a piece with President Obama’s move with the HHS Mandate; this is all gauged to eliminate the churches from the public square. Here comes the creation of a narrative that supports that effort while being all out of alignment with what has always been true about Catholic missions:

Planned Parenthood (and its friends) are entities that serve the public good; the Catholic Food Pantry (and its friends) are entities that block the public good

Suddenly, PP needs to donate food to a Catholic food pantry (“come over here, little mouse, I have a nice bit of cheese for you…”) and snap!; just as suddenly the conscience of the church that has served the nation since its inception is problematic and a detriment to its communities.

Sudden and conveniently so. With a bit of publicity from the press, and the usual social media machinations, before you know it the government will insert itself into the story and say:

“Catholic Food Pantry, You Have No Right To Your Conscience; Surrender Your Conscience to The Civic Arena, Or Close Down!”

Things are moving very swiftly, and it is all meant to foment social chaos and division. Those willing to be manipulated will be, but if you do not wish to be manipulated, you need to understand: this is a deliberate move to provoke Catholics and others into confrontation with a government that is eager to define down the whole notion of conscientious objection.

This is descent into diabolical disorientation with a sidetrip to the dictatorship of relativity.

The vacationing Deacon Greg Kandra has still managed, between spending time with Mickey and Minnie to post this interesting piece by Dave Gibson, who has written an informative article about what I called my First Things piece, yesterday, the “nuances between direct and indirect co-operation with evil”.

Gibson does his usual brilliant job in expanding on it, but he does so from a place accepting that President Obama’s recent “accommodation” did actually accommodate the churches. Completely ignored here is that the administration has already codified their decision in precisely the language — the original language — that gave most Catholics such agida to begin with.

How does this work? How does the illiberal language of the HHS Mandate — proposing unprecedented intrusion by the government into church matters — language that, pretty much all Catholics agreed in the first week could not stand, become codified in the next week with the approval of some of those same Catholics? Is this president’s word so trustworthy that it was enough for him to merely say he would change something he did not change and clearly has no intention of codifying?

Were some Catholics simply looking for a face-saving cover? Why, then? Because unity with their party was worth helping to set a bad precedent? What, specifically, in the codified language (or in Obama’s subsequent statement) has assuaged any conscience sufficiently to bring about an endorsement?

Much more importantly, with some Catholics now on board and making a variety of arguments supporting the administration, they are — intentionally or not — helping to distract people from the crux of the matter, which is simply this: when the CDC itself admits (as it did in 2009 [pdf]) that contraception is so widely available that fully 99% of women report using it at some point (so much so that, as Shea notes traces of birth control residue are found in our water supply), why did the administration find it necessary to even go where it went on the issue of contraception; why is it intruding on the churches own rights and abilities to own their conscience and define their missions?

That’s the question; it’s the ball we must keep our eyes on, and some are happy to get distracted, swing and miss.

It’s a political wedge issue, I get that, meant to divide and conquer, and the administration has clearly managed to do that, but this is also a genuinely bad precedent — so bad that I just cannot understand anyone’s willingness to support it, when this administration has demonstrated more than once that it means to put the churches in their places, and that their places are to be within the government’s mandates (hello Hosanna Tabor), or outside the public arena, altogether.

That anyone is willing to overlook the question of constitutionality for the sake of political expediency, I just don’t get.

But then, I was raised a classical liberal and I still actually believe that the press should be detached, people should be entitled to their differences and that (unlike monastic models, which are voluntary) government-enforced sameness is a tyranny, albeit a “soft” one, and I believe that the Bill of Rights is the thing you go to the mat for, no matter how much you like a candidate or (and, not without reason, are aghast at your other choices).

My parents adored Adlai Stevenson, but they voted for Ike because sometimes, no matter how much you like a guy, you have to know when you can’t trust him.

And to that point, here’s a good related question: Do employees of religious schools and other organizations get to make claims on employers that violate the tenets of the organization’s faith, but not on government on the basis of that same faith?

Gibson’s piece is undoubtedly smart and it will, undoubtedly, be effective in swaying many, but its efficacy depends upon ignoring a crucial reality, and it is a reality that we simply cannot afford to push aside.

Ed Morrissey has a great deal more on this, and I urge you to read him both at that link and at this one, too.

And btw, no one has asked me, and really, my opinion doesn’t matter except in my own little World of Lizzie, but I think the Blunt rule is an overreach that will backfire. Again, it’s taking the eyes off the ball, and playing into the administration’s hands. Which is precisely why Reid is allowing the vote. The GOP are such suckers.

More: Rivkin and Whelan say the Mandate is Unconstitutional

Max Lindenman is taking it all down for posterity

A thoughtful and worth pondering comment from “jkm” at Greg’s — it well-notes the validity of two sides of the argument but, to my way of thinking, too quickly shrugs off the constitutional issues. DOES the larger society want the government to insert itself into church affairs? Up until a few weeks ago, I think that answer was a resounding “no”. Now, suddenly, freedom of religion is a shrug-off? And if it IS something the larger society wants, is this something we do by presidential fiat or by constitutional amendment?

The Rhetorical Battle within the War:

“. . .in what way is the Catholic Church supposed to be depriving women of birth control? Is the Church picketing Walgreen’s? Is it highjacking shipments of Depro-Vira? Are they calling for the ban of condoms because they pose a danger to seagulls? No. They simply don’t believe that they should be forced to pay for their employees’ subsidized access to those things, accounting trick or no accounting trick.”