{"id":13978,"date":"2012-02-10T13:19:53","date_gmt":"2012-02-10T18:19:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2012\/02\/10\/13978.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T19:03:42","modified_gmt":"2018-03-14T00:03:42","slug":"extremely-stupid-and-incredibl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2012\/02\/10\/extremely-stupid-and-incredibl\/","title":{"rendered":"Extremely Stupid and Incredibly Dim"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

You know, there is something about this incredibly stupid political foofaraw that I haven’t seen. The foofaraw in question, of course, is the uproar about the regulation that health care insurance cover contraception; the stupidity is that the Other Party seems to think that the birth control pill is unpopular in America. They are mistaken. I imagine it is another example of the insularity of a small tent; perhaps in certain circles it is gauche to speak up in support of planning parenthood, perhaps in certain circles Margaret Sanger is not a great American hero, perhaps in certain circles Our Bodies Ourselves<\/a> is still counter-culture. And if you never get outside those circles, well, you’re a moron. I’m sorry. But if you never get outside those circles, it must be easy to forget that most of us want access to the Pill. Most of us want every adult woman who wants to be on the Pill to be on the Pill. The idea of anyone putting barriers between women and birth control is bizarrely old-fashioned to us, to anyone outside those circles. Old-fashioned, nasty-minded, and a little bit crazy.\n

And that has all been covered pretty well, it seems to me, in Left Blogovia and the newspapers. What I haven’t seen (and to be clear I haven’t searched for it) is an estimate of just how many people will now be covered. How many people does the Catholic Church employ in its various secular organizations? How many people work at Boston College and Fordham and Merrimack and Villanova and Iona and Gonzaga and Seton Hall and Creighton and Albertus Magnus and Chestnut Hill and Holy Cross and John Carroll and Marquette and Loyola (and Loyola Marymount) and Mercyhurst and DePaul and St. John’s and St. Joseph’s and St. Mary’s and St. Norbert’s and St. Anselm’s and St. Xavier’s and St. Scholastica’s and St. Edward’s and St. Martin’s and St. Elizabeth’s and St. Vincent’s and St. Michael’s and St. Clara’s and St. Francis’ses and St. Thomas’ses and St. Louis’ses? How many people work at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital and St. Francis’ses Hospital and St. Joseph’s Hospital and St. Agnes’ses Hospital and St. Francis’s Hospital and Good Samaritan Hospital and Divine Providence Hospital and Caritas Christi and Our Lady of Mercy Medical Center and Mercy Hospital and Marian Cancer Center—and Parkway Lab and Imaging and Redding Surgery Center and the Family Birth Center at Woodland Healthcare and Desert Ridge Outpatient Surgery and Mt. Sinai Hospital and Johnson Memorial and Garvey Manor and Kingston Hospital and Seton Health and Axess Ultrasound and Dubuis Hospital? I would guess that it’s millions of people—I have no idea, but I’m guessing millions of people are employed at workplaces that are affiliated with the Catholic Church. Is that true? I would like to know. I haven’t seen the numbers.\n

Again, I feel I should make it clear: Hooray for the Catholic Church’s investment in education and health! It’s a fantastic thing, a terrific thing, and I’m very, very glad that they include those things (along with feeding the hungry) in their mission. Yay! Well done, Catholics. I consider the millions of people you employ (if I am correct) to be an honor roll. It doesn’t let you off the hook for providing adequate medical coverage for those people.\n

Do you know what I would consider a reasonable compromise<\/a>, under the circumstances? I have two possibilities that make perfect sense to me. The first is that the federal government institutes a single-payer system with adequate family-planning and reproductive care for everybody in the country. That would let the Church off the hook; it would not be directly paying for anybody’s contraceptives or prophylactics. The Other Party should agree to that right away.\n

The other compromise would be that the Federal Government would offer to simply take over the management of all those hospitals and universities, as well as any other institutions that the Church does not feel can provide adequate coverage for its employees. Just have them all nationalized, lock and stock, grounds and goodwill, and a grateful nation won’t force you to think about birth control any more.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger estimates perhaps a third of the Gentle Readers of this Tohu Bohu. Could be less, but almost certainly more than a fifth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[202],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-item"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13978"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13978\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19494,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13978\/revisions\/19494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}