The Nature of Things

At my book club meeting yesterday, the conversation veered off-topic as it often does, this time into the charged arena of teen pregnancy and contraception. One of the attendees commented that she had read that schools in New York were giving out condoms to students. Another member remarked that they would let them have condoms but wouldn't let them have "Big Gulp" soft drinks! At which point someone said, "Yeah, their priorities are a bit skewed." And I thought, but did not say, "No, I'd say their priorities are about right." The rate of  teenage pregnancies has been falling in this country as a whole, but it is still a very serious problem, especially in the most conservative states in the country. States like Texas. Or Mississippi. A map showing the rate of teenage pregnancies in the various states very clearly shows this. The map shows the rates as shades of red ranging from near white (15 or less births per 1000 women aged 15 to 19) to darkes...

Remember the notorious Blunt-Rubio amendment that the Senate voted on last week? If you've erased it from your memory chip already, let me just remind you: It would have allowed employers to exclude insurance coverage for any type of medical procedure from their group policies for employees if they had "moral objections" to that procedure. Thus, if an employer objected on moral grounds to some doctor poking around in the butts of their employees, they could have excluded coverage for colonoscopies. Of course, colonoscopies were not the target of Roy Blunt and his gang. Their target was women and contraception, but the amendment was written so broadly that it could have applied to anything. When the amendment came up for a vote, every single Republican in the Senate, with the exception of Olympia Snowe, voted for it. (Snowe had just announced a few days earlier that she was retiring. If she had been running again, I'm guessing that she, too, would have voted for it.) T...

Reporting by the mainstream media, by which I mean mostly the inside the beltway media, regarding the Obama administration's rule about providing contraceptives as preventive health care under the new Affordable Care Act has been noticeably co-opted by the Catholic bishops. The press has basically swallowed hook, line, and sinker the outrage of these allegedly celibate old men who are in no way affected by the rule. Even such normally reasonable pundits as E.J. Dionne and Mark Shields   have fallen in lockstep with their more conservative fellows on this issue. They are sure that President Obama has rung the death knell for his presidency and for his hopes for reelection with his stance on this issue. Catholics will never support him now. Republican leaders in Congress are trying to latch onto what they see as a winning issue by hopping on the bandwagon One thing you might notice about all the reporters reporting and all those pontificating on the issue: They are almost all middl...