In a split second

A police officer in NY had to decide within a split second whether he should shoot an armed man holding a young woman hostage. At first the perp had the gun to her head and was saying he was going to kill her.  Then he raised the gun and pointed it at the officer.  According to reports there was very little time to talk and de-escalate and this kind of thing is the toughest call any law enforcement officer has to make.  Eight rounds were fired.  Seven hit the perp and one hit the girl.  My heart aches for this young lady’s family and for the officer.  The officer is on sick leave and I’m sure he is probably suffering the immense psychological pain that comes with this kind of incident.  He will have to carry the burden of this unintentional victim for the rest of his days.  This is one of the many reasons why more police officers die by committing suicide than are killed by felons every year.  We ask these men and women to carry an incredibly heavy responsibility and burden when we ask them to carry deadly weapons in their community’s defense.

This officer had served 8 years in the New York Police Department and 12 years in Nassau County (basically this is Long Island and much more suburban than the various NYC Burroughs) .  7 out of 8 bullets hit their target—that’s an accuracy level far, far above the average police officer’s accuracy in these kinds of situations where, if they’re really, really good, only about 50% of the bullets fired will actually strike the target.  Some studies show average hit rates as low as 20% at a distance of 7 feet.  Do YOU like those odds, if it was you or a loved one being held hostage?   This low hit percentage is precisely why the policy for such situations is to “talk and de-escalate”.  Talking and not automatically firing reduces the odds that anyone will be killed or injured.  Thousands upon thousands of stand-offs get resolved peacefully without any shots fired.  We only hear about the ones where it doesn’t work, but the reality is that it usually works.  I’m NOT saying the officer in this situation did the wrong thing or that he was a bad shot.  Far from it.  He did a damn good job to hit the guy as much as he did!  And I would never question his judgement call.  I wasn’t there.  His department will take care of that investigation ¹.

The point is that this news story, and the thousands just like it over many decades, demonstrate that even with good training and experience, the innocent still can and do get hurt.  The average gun toting American has never taken a single shooting course.  They may go to the range and they may do a lot of hunting, but at no point do the paper targets or the deer shoot back or threaten the lives of others.  The average American hasn’t had extensive and repetitive crisis response training.  They don’t get periodically certified based on their consistency and accuracy with a particular weapon.  Nor have they had all the other LEO training that teaches an officer on how to handle violent and potentially violent situations both with and without a weapon–so they have fewer tools with which to handle a crisis situation and are more likely to draw than a trained officer would be.  They won’t have had the first aid training of a LEO.  They simply will not have the same skillset as a LEO would have to make such a judgement call.  The average American watches Tombstone and plays Call of Duty on an Xbox and they think they’re ready to protect their fellow citizens ².   So to all the wannabe gun toting heroes running around who think IF they had been there they would have taken out the perp John Wayne-style and all the innocent people would have been saved–I call BS, yet again.

On a related note, yesterday we lost not one but two City of Phoenix public servants in the line of duty–a police officer and a firefighter.    They were both very young and both killed by motor vehicles.  The firefighter was crushed between two emergency vehicles–that’s right, crushed by trained emergency vehicle drivers.  The officer was performing a DUI stop on a surface road when he was struck by a passing vehicle, an incredibly sad but common occurrence in the U.S.  If you wish to offer your condolences and/or donate to help their families (BTW, they make diddly squat in pay compared to what they could have made in private industry) here is a link.

Motor vehicles are deadly weapons even when they are operated correctly.  You can drive absolutely perfectly and still get hit and killed by a bad driver.  But let’s face it we need cars to get around ³ and the car culture isn’t going away any time soon ⁴. But we also recognize that they’re dangerous necessities and as a result we require licensing, insurance and some kind of skills test to get or renew that license.  Yet we don’t have such a thing for guns.

Many will counter that guns are a right and driving is a privilege.  Unfortunately for them, that argument doesn’t fly.  Guns are a right but they are a dangerous right.  We should control them for the sake of safety like we control not only privileges like driving but also other rights such as Free Speech, Freedom of Religion, Freedom of the Press, Property Ownership, etc.  None of these other rights and privileges are absolute.  You can legally own land but you can’t do anything you want to it.  You can’t by a lot in Suburbia and then decide to put a mini-landfill on it.  You can’t shout “fire” in a crowded theater.  You can’t ⁵ advocate for a particular candidate from the pulpit and keep your non-taxable status.  You can’t ⁶ reveal the identities of the U.S. undercover agents in the Press and not get prosecuted for it.   There are limits to all of them.  The 2nd Amendment is the ONLY right that conservatives insist should be absolutely unregulated in spite of the fact that the law itself demands that it be “well regulated”.  Yet, we do regulate every other deadly thing in our society.

Gun control isn’t unconstitutional.  Endangering your fellow citizens should be.  Let’s put some common sense controls in place.

Notes:

1. Every police department in the country requires an investigation when shots are fired by an officer regardless of whether there are any actual shooting victims or not.   In fact in some departments if an officer even unholsters their  weapon, they are REQUIRED to submit a “user of force” report.  In other departments, the report is only required if the weapon is drawn and pointed at a target.  These policies differ depending on location.  In somewhere like LA, they have to draw their weapon all the time and submitting a UOF report for every time would grind the department to a halt.  But in suburban areas, drawing a weapon is the exception, not the rule.  Regardless, if the officer uses force, he is then expected to prove that the use of force was required in that situation.  In the case of a shooting, the officer must prove that use of deadly force was necessary regardless of whether someone died or not.  They don’t just take the officer’s word for it either.  They interview the officer, their partner, both visual and auditory witnesses, the perp and any victims.  They look at the medical records.  They look at security camera and dash mounted cameras.  They retrieve the shell casings and if possible the bullets. They take the weapon and put it under lock and key.  They put the officer on admin leave during the investigation. They fire the weapon in question and compare it to the bullets recovered.  It’s a full investigation except the officer isn’t presumed innocent.  The fact that he fired a shot is known.  The only thing in question is “was it justified”?  For the most part this system works.  It’s rare that a dirty or incompetent cop lasts very long.  When dirty cops are found, the corruption usually extends up into the higher ranking officers so that such investigatory efforts are thwarted.  In those cases, the media and other local government agencies notice a pattern and step in to root out the corruption.  In spite of what Hollywood likes to tell you, systemic corruption such as the LAPD Rampart Scandal are the exception, not the rule.

2. Some will say ‘then maybe Americans should get this training’.  Really?  You want everyone in the U.S. to be trained to the level of police officers?   Because that is what it would take and we would STILL suffer these unintentional deaths.  Last time I checked we didn’t live in a failed, third world state.  This isn’t Somalia where everyone is a potential threat all the time.  This is supposed to be the Land of the Free and it can hardly be that if we all have to run around armed to the teeth and “en guarde” every moment like a LEO has to be. Never mind the fact that the majority of people in the U.S. wouldn’t make successfully through LEO training because they aren’t physically and mentally capable of completing said training. And before you say I’m being a snob, I include myself in this category. I went through LEO training in my 20′s. At 43, I’m not entirely sure I could do it again.

3. Lord knows we don’t have decent public transportation options in this state.

4. The oil and gas industry giants are making damn sure of that

5. At least, we’re not supposed to do it. Although I’ve heard stories of many, many Christian preachers encouraging people to vote for the white guy in the last election.  This mixing of religion and politics make us no better than the religious zealots who control Iran or used to run the Taliban.  We’re supposed to be better than that.  America is not supposed to be a Theocracy. Thomas Jefferson probably rolls in his grave every time a preacher gets political in church.

6. Again, we’re not supposed to do it and if we do we should be punished for it. Except for Dick Cheney and company, of course. He outed Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA agent through his adviser, Scooter Libby, to a New York Times reporter because Plame’s husband had the temerity to report in the Press that Iraq did not have WMD’s in the run up to the Iraqi Invasion. Cheney wanted that damn war so bad he could taste it. After all, Halliburton, a company with whom Cheney’s financial fortune was entangled, was expected to make tens of millions of dollars out of the conflict.  Libby was eventually convicted of lying and obstructing a grand jury investigation into the Plame affair.  He was protecting Dick, of course.  Libby was given a commutation by President Bush, conveniently.  There were no consequences for Darth Cheney, however. Had it been you or I that outed a CIA agency, we would have served hard time in a federal prison.

City on a hill, still

Tom Levenson over at Balloon-Juice.com has something interesting to say about Vice President Joe Biden’s speech given yesterday at the memorial service for the slain MIT police officer, Sean Collier*.  Bolded statements are my doing.

But Biden did limn a present realit [sic] as well, in that we still live in a country where a ruling like Hamdan v. Rumsfeld can be both heard and decided against the government. I live in a town where police officers tackled a cop-killer in the midst of a gun battle, in the hopes of keeping him alive long enough to face a court. Here in Boston, Dzokhar Tsarnaev was charged as a common criminal, read his rights (not fast enough for some, but still) and will in fact face civilian charges. This country are [sic] so far from perfect it sometimes feels like we’re [sic] can only approach perfection the long way round — but that’s in the nature of cities on hills. I’m pretty sure Joe had something like this in mind when he spoke yesterday.

And I have next to no doubt at all that he was scolding that claque of Republican leaders who seem to have lost all courage, John McCain, Lindsay Graham, Kelly Ayotte, and all the rest. They’ve been up on their hind legs since Friday, bellowing the urgency of making sure Tsarnaev face a jury-rigged military tribunal system, and damned be the American constitutional system and any faith in the power of a jury of Americans to do and be seen to have done justice.

That rebuke is what this speech was about, beyond the pure duty of comfort that Biden handled so well in the first, longer section of his remarks. He was telling a failed Republican party that America is something other than [sic] hollow republic the Bush-Cheney regime sought to build. He was as well talking to the broader audience through the TV set, making the case (again!) that there is an alternative to a government based on authority granted out of fear. He was reminding everyone in earshot that the way the Republicans ran the republic — and would do again, if they get the chance — is not just an error; it’s un-American. This was powerful stuff, and inside the political ring, it was [sic] had the power to hurt, a nut-cutting blow.

See, McCain and Company want Tsarnaev, who is a citizen, to be sent to Guantonomo and to be stripped of all his rights.  Why is it the Republicans are so interested in their own rights (see Rand Paul’s statement about drones and hot tubs**) but not all that interested in the rights of “those other” American citizens.  Hmmmmm, it couldn’t be because they ARE considered “other”, could it?

Besides the fear motive, all of this trumpeting originates from the conservative idea that our government is broken and that the only way to fix it is to step outside the rules.  Conservatives often propose letting some supposedly benevolent strong man or men (ala, G.W. Bush and Dick Cheney, but not Pres. Obama, ad oculos) take control of things and take away our rights.  Hell, they’re the main reason, and I mean Cheney specifically*** and his buddies, for the expansion of Executive power in the U.S.  Were it not for them, no current President (who is in office is irrelevant here) would have the ability to start a war and tell Congress afterward or allow the killing of an American citizen without benefit of Due Process or use military tribunals and indefinite detention for civilians.  This was never and never will be a liberal idea.****

Nevertheless for all of the Republican and, quite frankly, Democratic enabled transgressions of our values, we’re still shining on that hill just not as bright as we were before our ill-advised jaunt into Iraq and our fear-fueled foray into torture.  And we are certainly not as bright as we could be and never will be if we don’t remain true to our values.

Notes:

*  Look at his young face, it’s hard not to be angry.  It was hard looking at the photos and video of the bomb victims.  I still can’t look at the picture of that sweet little boy who was killed. I understand their anger.  I don’t understand their throwing our values out the window because of it.  That’s not what grown ups are supposed to do and it sure as hell isn’t what the leaders of the free world are supposed to do.

**Rand does not want to be viewed in his hot tub by a government drone but is A-Okay with drones shooting people in commission of a crime, which goes waaaaayyyy beyond what the police would do.  In fact, Levenson above gives an excellent example of how the police met deadly force with restraint in order to serve the larger goal of justice.  Drones can’t do that and Rand Paul should know better and he probably does.  See he only wants drones to “provide justice” to everyone else but he and his clique.  Stupid man must not have studied history or he was too busy smoking dope to remember that such power never, ever remains targeted at just the people you want it to.  First they came for the Jews, then they came for gypsies, then they came for…..etc, etc, etc.

***Cheney openly admits in interviews and in writing that way back when he was in the Nixon Administration that he supported and pushed for the expansion of Executive Power in a variety of ways.  And when in office he claimed Executive Privilege over the tapes/minutes of his meeting with Oil Executives back in 2003-2004.

****Although not a liberal idea, conservatives will claim that liberal Presidents have not minded using that expanded Executive Privilege.   First, I don’t think we’ve ever had a truly liberal President, maybe Carter? President Obama is not a liberal.  He is a centrist Democrat.  He not only claims this but anyone on the left can categorically tell you, he is not a liberal Democrat and never has been.  Second, every President, regardless of Party, has taken advantage of the expansion of power given to the office because it makes their job easier.  As President Obama said during his interview with Jon Stewart, it’s Congress’ and the Supreme Court’s job to take those powers away and they SHOULD do that.  The branches must balance one another out.  But Congress and SCOTUS, filled with Republicans, will continue to give the Executive Branch more and more power because at some point one of their party will be in office and they REALLY like taking advantage of such things (e.g., waterboarding with impunity) because democracy inconveniently gets in the way of their profiteering….um, I mean governing.

Green eggs and ham

The media, both left and right, seem to be in a tizzy because the U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said that hypothetically the President could authorize drones to kill Americans on American soil. Here are some salient questions we should all be asking ourselves:

• This power is new…..how?
• Why are drones different from any other killing machine?
• Why has it been okay to give this power under previous Presidents but not this one?
• If we’re so concerned why don’t we get Congress to limit the Executive Branch’s war powers since that is the best and longest lasting protection we can hope for?

Apparently Mistermix over at Balloon Juice agrees…..

I don’t understand why using drones to kill an American is any different from using a helicopter, tank, fighter jet, humvee or some other conveyance to deliver deadly force. If Congress doesn’t like the way the President could use force on Americans within our borders, I believe there’s something called the “war power” that can be used to limit it. But instead we get a green eggs and ham discussion (from a drone? on a plane? in a train? from a car? on a bike? from a trike?) and intimations of a grim meathook future “where Predator drones are roaming American skies looking for American citizens to strike at, regardless of the reason” from serious conservatives like Mataconis, just because a new killing machine has been invented. We’ve got plenty of killing machines, so how about we concentrate on regulating the killing?

Everything old is new again

I and many other people have been saying that the Republican Party is destroying itself from within and seems to need little help from their opponents in this matter. Every day I am becoming more convinced that we are seeing the GOP in it’s death throes (1) because the things they are doing are getting crazier and dumber.

Today we find out that Ted Nugent, the gun loving, draft dodging (2) and liberal hating singer, is going to be attending the State of the Union tonight as a guest of Rep. Steve Stockman (R-TX).  Nugent most recently and famously had this to say about Pres. Obama and three of the most powerful and respected women in the world all while brandishing assault weapons:

Obama, he’s a piece of shit, and I told him to suck on my machine gun. Let’s hear it for him. And then I was in New York. I said, “Hey, Hillary, you might want to ride one of these into the sunset, you worthless bitch. Since I’m in California, how about Barbara Boxer, she might want to suck on my machine gun. And Dianne Feinstein, ride one of these you worthless whore. Any questions?

Yes, that’s the kind of man that the Republican Party wants to highlight on national television while the President has invited regular folks who REALLY represent America.  Part of me is delighted because it shows just how far off the Rails the GOP has gone and probably will alienate moderate voters.  The other part of me is pretty angry.  This guy has implied threats to the President’s life (to the point the Secret Service had to have a little talk with him), said some of the most inflammatory things about women and blacks I’ve heard spoken in public, and threatened to turn traitor.  Now yes, we have freedom of speech and no one is saying he can’t say such stupid and offensive things.  I’m just saying he doesn’t belong at the State of the Union because his views are so insulting, ugly and yes, violent.  You won’t see the left doing things like this.  You won’t see Bill Maher, who called Sarah Palin a cunt, attending the State of the Union.  You know why?  Because it’s totally inappropriate and does not help bridge the gap between the parties.  If anything, these kinds of people only make bipartisanship that much harder.  Dems know that and care who gets to represent them. The parties should show their best face forward at such events.  The American people and indeed the world, is watching.  Republicans must not give a shit about what anybody thinks.  They must want a racist, woman hating coward to represent them.  To channel Senator McCain, that’s a problem, my friends.

How about this one…..there is a right-wing radio host, Kevin Swanson, who had this to say:

[W]omen who are on the birth control pill, there are these little tiny fetuses, these little babies, that are embedded into the womb. They’re just like dead babies. They’re on the inside of the womb. And these wombs of women who have been on the birth control pill effectively have become graveyards for lots and lots of little babies.

Did you know this idea is called a homunculus (3) and it dates back to Ancient Greece, in particular to Aristotle?  Did you know that Aristotle and most Greek men at that time hated women?  To them the highest form of love was between two men.  Women were only there for two things:  serving as slaves to their husbands and for breeding.  The idea was adopted by the Catholic Church and stood for a couple of thousand years (may still be part of their catechism).  But in the 19th Century modern science began to understand about sperm and eggs and development of the fetus, etc so that this homunculus theory has been proven wrong.  Pushing this kind of ignorant and debunked thought is now makes no sense unless they want people to start thinking this way again.  After all it won’t be too much of stretch for many Republicans, if their politicians are any indication.   Why?  Let me show you.

• A bill was recently introduced in New Mexico that would make any woman who aborted a baby conceived due to rape a criminal.  For what?  Tampering with evidence.  The bill was withdrawn, however the fact that they thought it was perfectly acceptable to bring it up for discussion is horrifying to me.
• So many politicians have said stupid and offensive things about rape in the last couple of years so that the GOP held a retreat and had to have an outside consultant talk to them and convince them that they needed to stop using the word “rape”.  Not change their thoughts about it, not reconsider their position or become more empathic to their constituents positions on it, but just stop saying the word.  Nothing about the wrong and right of it, just completely stop talking about the topic.  See, if a guy thinks that “some women rape easy” or that the vagina has defensive mechanisms to repel a rapists sperm or that there are forms of legitimate rape (4), then they can think it, the ethics of it be damned, all they want but they can’t alert their female constituents to their beliefs because it will cost them votes.  Hmmm, wonder why it would cost them votes…..? Because it’s completely wrong and  horribly offensive, maybe?!?!
• Besides an attempt to have a national amendment for Personhood, several state Republican legislators have been pushing Personhood laws and amendments as well.  In which things like abortion at any stage would be murder.  IVF (5) would be murder.  Miscarriage would be investigated because what causes a woman to miscarriage?  You don’t know until you investigate, right?  And the fetus would be a person, so did the mother do anything to cause it? Can you imagine just having had a miscarriage while you are grieving you could be investigated for murder for that very same thing?

Such willful ignorance as Swanson spewing is falling upon very fertile ground.  That ground is full of conservatives who think in similar ways, believe similar things, and who reject science if it doesn’t fit their narrative.  They home school their kids and teach their kids abstinence.  They believe what their preacher, their priest, their favorite  right-wing TV and/or radio host, and their Republican politicians tell them, even if it is just batshit crazy.

Yet another example of the nutso caucus was the decision to have not one but two Republicans give a response to the State of the Union.  See it’s tradition for one of the opposing party to speak after the President. The GOP decided they would have Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) speak in English and then Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) speak in Spanish.  This idea was quickly squashed by others in the Party not because it is breaking with the tradition of only one response. Not because it is a waste of time since all three of the Hispanics who really want to watch the speeches can find a million other ways to hear and read it translated.  It was squashed because Republicans didn’t want to give the impression that they supported any other language but English.  That’s right.  They turned down the opportunity to reach out to the fastest growing ethnic group in the U.S., a group whose vote they resoundingly lost in 2012, because they didn’t want to legitimize that group’s language.  Keep going Republicans, you’re doing great!

Another….the President receives 30 threats against his life every day.  This is 400% increase.  He is so threatened that the Secret Service is being overwhelmed.

And so many others like…..

• the rapid growth in the gap between rich and poor and the corresponding shrinking of the middle class,
• the extreme opposition to reasonable requests for gun control reform,
• the rise of a propaganda arm of the conservative agenda that disguises itself as objective journalism (Fox News),
• the gamble with the debt ceiling and putting the global economy in jeopardy,
• the willingness to let the sequestration occur and slow down the U.S. economy’s growth just after a recession,
• the number of threats of impeachment the President has received,
• the entire “Birther Movement”,
• the purposeful misconstruing of the health care law,
• the surge in actual political power enjoyed by shock jockeys and TV grifters like Limbaugh and Beck,
• the resurgence of secession talk, etc, etc, etc.

I know that none of these things alone are all that unusual and they have all happened before (except for the Nugent thing, I guess, but we could consider the “You lie!” yell during the 2009 State of the Union to be in this class of offensive and tasteless behavior).  But put together, I am beginning to see a pattern of hate, rage even, that is coordinated, stoked and growing.  And it is helping the Republicans destroy themselves.  Which, in all honesty, is to the good in my eyes.  Unfortunately, it’s also hurting the rest of the country too.   If we don’t learn from the past we are doomed to repeat it and I can tell you, minorities and women do not want to and WILL NOT allow us to go backwards to the dark days when we only had second-class status.

Notes:  

1.  It will take several more election cycles, but I’m thinking around 2020

2.  Just in case you didn’t know, this man who is constantly brandishing guns and bragging about how he would revolt and fight against the evil Government, wasn’t so brave when he actually had a chance to serve his country, in order to avoid going to Vietnam Nugent by his own admission smeared shit all over his body and feigned insanity.  He got a deferment 4 times and was eventually given a 4-F.   But now, now he’s a big, big man and people should fear him.  Did he grow a pair over the last 20 years or is it that his kettle of bigotry and misogyny finally boiled over?

3.  various spellings, not sure which is official

4.  there are too many examples to link to here

5.  IVF, test tube babies, usually they fertilize many eggs, implant them in the womb and then once they attach, those that aren’t attached are removed and disposed of

The inconvenience of personhood

The Catholic Church has been a major pro-life player in U.S. politics and one of their explicitly stated goals is to overturn Roe V. Wade. Although they opposed the failed push for fetal personhood in Mississippi in 2010, they did so not based on any moral grounds but because they felt, legally, it was smarter to push for a Federal Constitutional Amendment. Their reasoning, why waste time on a state level? They felt it smarter to pool their resources and put maximum pressure on Congressional members. After all, they get much bigger bang for the buck in Washington, D.C. than Jackson, MS. Amiright?

Now, here comes the heart wrenching tale of a 31-year-old mother who was seven months pregnant with twins who died while sitting in an ER–a Catholic hospital’s ER. The mother and both babies died. The father sued, of course. Unfortunately for the father, he will not receive compensation for three lives lost–only the one, his wife. Why? Because the Catholic Church argued that babies were not, legally speaking, “persons”.

Some are crowing that it’s hypocritical (ht to JM Ashby at BobCesca.com for alerting me to this story). Yes, it is and you can put me in that “crowing” category. While the tragedy is indeed horrible, this case just goes to show you how incredibly opportunistic and dare I say venal the Catholic Church truly is. They are clearly taking this stance because it will save them money. And make no mistake about it, it is about the money. If it was about the principle of the thing, they’d simply pay the poor grieving man for the lives of three people and not one.

There are two reasons that this irks me so. First is the Church’s refusal to acknowledge other equally ugly scandals in order to avoid moral responsibility but also to avoid having to pay out enormous sums of money. The most obvious one being the hundreds of if not thousands of years of pedophilia that they knowingly protected and ultimately institutionalized. Sure they made private settlements but those were nothing compared to what they would have paid out in terms of money and reputation had they been taken to civil court for each and every case. That’s why settlements are made in the first place–to save the accused money and embarrassment. They are never, ever about the accused conceding that they were truly wrong in any way. The Church saved money by making settlements and it avoided admitting fault. Where’s the principle in that?

The other reason it irks me so is that I have seen with my own eyes the tip of the Vatican iceberg of treasure. I don’t mean the struggling parishes throughout the U.S. or the destitute missions in third world countries. No, that’s not how it works. See for the most part parishes and missions support themselves and if the hierarchy wants to spread that wealth downward they do. That allows the Bishoprics and the Vatican to keep a death grip on their own treasure. What I mean is that I have seen the Vatican itself. The actual buildings, the stolen treasures from Ancient Civilizations (yes, stolen, you don’t think Egypt willingly gave up those mummies and all their afterlife treasure did you?), the vestments, the artwork, etc, etc, etc. And that is only what you can see. They have investments in the hundreds of millions in the largest and most profitable companies in the U.S. alone. They have billions in solid gold. They have stuff in storage that will never see the light of day that is worth just as much. The Vatican alone is worth more than most countries in the world to say nothing of the worth of the Bishopric of some of the larger U.S. cities like Boston. In spite of their vast riches, they will not payout a measly sum to acknowledge their own principle that the life of a fetus is equal to that of the mother. Hell no!

And as much as their penny-pinching irks me, there is something else equally annoying. Some on the left are arguing that the Catholic Church is following the law and that’s a good thing. Their point being that, by making such an argument, the Church is establishing a legal precedence that a fetus is indeed not a person and they are also showing signs of being reasonable. And if you’re pro-Choice, then you should be all for that, right? Except this presumes two things. First it assumes that the Catholic Church will continue to act in this way. Only a naive fool would believe such a thing. They have been and will continue to be one of the most powerful forces behind a national personhood amendment in the U.S. (and elsewhere). The second is that this legal precedence will actually matter. And if we were only considering a strictly legal case that worked its way up through our system to the Supreme Court, this MIGHT be true. But we’re not talking about a single case making the long trek to SCOTUS where legal precedence is SUPPOSED to matter*. We’re talking about either a law passed by Congress or a federal Constitutional amendment. Neither of those processes, nor the actors in those processes, really give a tinker’s damn about legal precedence.

So the fact that the Catholic Church is being a hypocrite about their very own morality for the sole purpose of protecting their pocketbook should be loudly exposed. Shout it from the rooftops and don’t give them any credit for being reasonable. Their intention is to save money, not to do what is right. Silly me, expecting a church supposedly representing Christ on Earth to actually do the right thing for the right reasons! The left is often so incredibly naive and willing to believe that others will be on their best behavior, even when it has been proven otherwise. Since there is nothing in the Church’s character nor their past behavior to indicate they will in any way continue to be reasonable in future nor care that they have taken the opposite stance in the past, I refuse to be so sanguine.

__________

*There are so many SCOTUS bad cases that were decided without a lack of precedence like Citizens United–that I have no faith that the precedence in this one case or even a dozen similar cases would amount to a hill of beans in the end.