March 6, 2012 Should The Catholic Church Be Forced To Pay For Your Birth Control? Luke Ford No sacred cows.

Should The Catholic Church Be Forced To Pay For Your Birth Control?

Posted on March 6, 2012 by Luke Ford

Rush Limbaugh did the conservative cause no favors by calling Sandra Fluke a slut and a prostitute and the like.

He should’ve stuck to the issues at hand and avoided the name-calling.

Rush Limbaugh is an entertainer and entertainers sometimes go over the top. One should not expect him to be as thoughtful as George Will or Dennis Prager.

If you want to make yourself the poster child for demanding that a church be forced to go against its sacred teachings to give you free birth control, you should be prepared for some blowback.

This has nothing to do with “silencing women.” A man who advocated the same thing would’ve received similar treatment.

Cathy Ruse writes in the WSJ:

Last week Sandra Fluke, a student at Georgetown University Law Center, went to Congress looking for a handout. She wants free birth-control pills, and she wants the federal government to make her Catholic school give them to her.

I’m a graduate of Georgetown Law and former chief counsel of the House Subcommittee on the Constitution. Based on her testimony, I wonder how much Ms. Fluke really knows about the university or the Constitution.

…In her testimony, Ms. Fluke claimed that, “Without insurance coverage, contraception, as you know, can cost a woman over $3,000 during law school.” That’s $1,000 per year. But an employee at a Target pharmacy near the university told the Weekly Standard last week that one month’s worth of generic oral contraceptives is $9 per month. “That’s the price without insurance,” the employee said. (It’s also $9 per month at Wal-Mart.)

…Ms. Fluke’s crusade for reproductive justice is simply a demand that a Catholic institution pay for drugs that make it possible for her to have sex without getting pregnant. It’s nothing grander or nobler than that. Georgetown’s refusal to do so does not mean she has to have less sex, only that she has to take financial responsibility for it herself.

Should Ms. Fluke give up a cup or two of coffee at Starbucks each month to pay for her birth control, or should Georgetown give up its religion? Even a first-year law student should know where the Constitution comes down on that.

Should we pay for Sandra Fluke’s recreational sex acts?

Posted on March 6, 2012 by Luke Ford

Greg Leake emails: Hi Luke,
Sandra Fluke, a law student at Georgetown University, is demanding that the Catholic Church and American taxpayers pay for her recreational sex acts.

The amount of money she is requesting rounds out to about 1,000 sex acts per year that we need to pony up for.

Luke, it seems to me that this automatically falls into your territory of expertise.

Now another girl at Georgetown has said that Ms. Fluke does not represent the opinion of most students at Georgetown. She is the head of the conservative students organization and stated that most students are aware that Georgetown U is a Jesuit organization and therefore bound by theological proclamations from the Magisterium in respect to birth control.

All this being the case, I have a few suggestions.

1. As we can see from the conservative leader, Ms. Fluke does not speak for the student body at Georgetown. Therefore, her request for subsidized birth control most be seen as simply a personal request on her part for the rest of us to pay for her recreational sex acts.

My view is that the full Congress and Senate should be summoned to have a national discussion about whether citizens of the United States should pay for Ms. fluke’s escapades. They should have a conference committee between the House and Senate to nail down the particulars of what the US government is going to do to fund Ms. fluke’s birth control.

2. Should it be decided that the American people, out of a sense of fairness and justice and respect for the people who won World War II, believe that we should subsidize Ms. Fluke, then we need to hear debate on the floors of the House and Senate how many sex acts the people should have to subsidize. Senators from Massachusetts or California, for example, might feel we should fund all the 1000 or so sex acts per year. But what if some of the sex acts are with other women? What if some of the sex acts involve coupling in such a way that birth control is unnecessary? The debate needs to take place on a national level, and other problems should be put aside while we immerse ourselves in contemplation of Ms. Fluke’s sex acts.

It is clear that Ms. Fluke feels that the American people and the wider world are out of step with history if we do not realize that the universe revolves aroundMms. Fluke’s sex acts.

So, Luke, my request is that you get in touch with your friends at Vivid or Evil Angel or another huge porn producer and get ready to document each of Ms. Fluke’s sex acts. There must be oversight. We must ensure she is squeezing in a thousand sex acts per year, and that there is a payoff for us as we cater to her whims. Certainly the presidential elections should be put aside until this is accomplished.

Posted in Rush Limbaugh, Sex | Comments Off

When Islam Breeds Atheism

Posted on March 6, 2012 by Luke Ford

Dennis Prager writes:

Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qaida, the Muslim Brotherhood, the ayatollahs, Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan, the Taliban and all the other Islamist organizations actually decrease the number of believers in the world.

Over the course of time, people do not judge religions by their theology. Yes, some people convert to a religion thanks to its convincing theology. And many remain in a religion because of family ties, cultural norms and sheer inertia. But over time, religion — and faith in God itself — is judged by its fruit. Which is how it should be.

And the best known fruit of Islam today — countries calling themselves Muslim, such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Taliban Afghanistan, not to mention Islamist groups — is so ugly that many millions of people are increasingly repelled by religion and by God.

Posted in Dennis Prager, Islam | Comments Off

Letter To The President

Posted on March 5, 2012 by Luke Ford

Batia emails: Mr. President,

Watching the news coverage Israel’s President Peres & Prime minister Netanyahu’s current visit in the U.S.

I paid special attention to your statements in AIPAC and in the white house, today. Here is some feedback to all I have seen:

– No sir, You are not Israel’s BFF. Mr. Peres in a nice old man, known to say things and get a Nobel peace prize. You got one like that, too. So, giving the medal fits in beautifully.

– I don’t think the speech at AIPAC will do the trick and erase the bias, harsh and arrogant tone you used with the Israeli leadership throughout your tenure in the White house.

– Watching your body language today as P.M. Netanyahu speaks about both countries mutual interests…says it all. Confirming what I’ve always known: You, Sir, don’t like us at all.

– I still hold that an a gesture or an act of good will, such as, freeing Jonathan Pollard may open up a new window to the Jewish community. It is long overdue and is the right thing to do. This may do the trick and is worth a try.

After all, Sir, what do you got to lose….only the presidency?

Posted in Barack Obama | Comments Off

Andrew Breitbart Died Just Before He Was Due To Release Damaging Obama Footage

Posted on March 2, 2012 by Luke Ford

As soon as I heard Andrew Breitbart was dead, I thought he’d been murdered. Nothing else made sense. The guy was only 43. He was full of life.

He had damaging video of President Obama he was due to release March 1.

And then he was dead.

And some of us wonder if he was murdered. There are a lot of things you can do to someone to make it look like they died of a heart attack.

Here’s more:

In a stunning coincidence, It appears Andrew Breitbart suffered his untimely death just hours before he was set to release damning video footage that could have sunk Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign.
Around three weeks ago on February 9 during the ‘Blog Bash’ event in Washington DC, Breitbart made a prophetic comment that takes on a somewhat chilling nature given the fact that he died in the early hours of March 1st.
Speaking to Lawrence Sinclair of Sinclair News, Breitbart stated, “Wait til they see what happens March 1st.”
It’s almost certain that Breitbart was referring to his plan to release damning footage of President Obama that he had been promising to reveal throughout the month of February.

Posted in Andrew Breitbart | Tagged Andrew Breitbart, Barack Obama, election campaign, untimely death, video footage | Comments Off

Should Israel Attack Iran On Purim?

Posted on March 2, 2012 by Luke Ford

Neil Rubin:A bizarre thought: Would Israel (for irony’s sake and a whole lot of other reasons) attack Iran on Purim?

Posted in Iran, Israel | Comments Off

Do You Lead With Your Jaw?

Posted on March 2, 2012 by Luke Ford

When life is not what I want, I feel a huge emotional need to clench my jaw. I just want to grind my teeth. I’m frustrated and I have to express this frustration through body tension.

That’s one of the principle ways I know myself — through my layers of body tension. As I’ve learned to let them go over the past few years, I’ve journeyed into a new land and found a new me.

Jan Batty gave a radio interview on the Alexander Technique: “Think about how many millions of times we nod our heads. How we nod our head either frees the spine or brings more tension. When most people nod their head, they lead with their jaw. If you do lead with your jaw, even gently, you create a whole pattern of tension through your body, just like pushing down on a rubber ducky under the water in the bath tub.”

“If you let the desire for the movement to come from the top of the head, that allows a beautiful sliding and gliding on your top joint, which is between your ears.”

“Most people nod their head starting from the jaw, tightening the neck… When you add this body tension, you’re taking away from your emotional availability to life and creating anxiety and extra stress.”

“Decide to receive with our eyes. Sight comes to our eyes. We receive into deep pools. Instead, we push our eyes out to see or to think. That stiffens our whole body. If we only received the image into soft eyes and let that feed our whole body kinaesthetically, that would turn around how we function through the day. The interference is staring or holding or tightening or over-working in the eyes.”

“Notice what happens to yourself when you do that.”

“I didn’t tell a student that if he continues with this, he’ll find a lot of things in his life begin to change. He told me, ‘I’m noticing that when I’m in class and I’m sensing myself with more ease, my learning is changing. I’m appreciating more things. I’m noticing things that are beautiful. I’m relating to my friends differently.'”

Posted in Alexander Technique | Comments Off

James Q. Wilson Was 80

Posted on March 2, 2012 by Luke Ford

My liberal professor of political science at Sierra Community College nonetheless assigned James Q. Wilson’s poli sci textbook in 1986.

I remember how impressed I was by the book’s fairness and quality. I particularly liked its chapter on the media and its left-wing bias.

In January of 2008, I heard James Q. Wilson speak at a conference on downtown policing.

Here’s my video:

Boston.com reports:

James Q. Wilson, a political scientist who coauthored the influential “Broken Windows” article in The Atlantic Monthly in 1982, which became a touchstone for the move toward community policing in Boston and cities across the country, died early this morning in Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

He was being treated for leukemia, according to a family friend.

Dr. Wilson, who was 80 and lived North Andover, returned to Boston a few years ago to become the first senior fellow at the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy at Boston College, and a distinguished scholar in the college’s political science department.

He had taught at Harvard University for 26 years before leaving in the late 1980s for California, where he had grown up, to teach at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Pepperdine University.

Considered one of the nation’s most significant thinkers about crime and other urban matters, Dr. Wilson cowrote the Atlantic article with George L. Kelling.

The article, Dr. Wilson said last year in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, suggested that “public order is a fragile thing, and if you don’t fix the first broken window, soon all the windows will be broken.”

Kelling and Dr. Wilson wrote in the Atlantic that “at the community level, disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence. Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods as in rundown ones. Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. (It has always been fun.)”

Posted in Crime | Comments Off

The Largest, Most Public Agunah Campaign Ever

Posted on March 2, 2012 by TheJewishChannel

Posted in Articles | Comments Off

Who Lost China And Who Killed Andrew?

Posted on March 1, 2012 by Luke Ford

As soon as I saw the headline this morning on NYTimes.com, I thought Andrew had been murdered.

Now I keep reading it was natural causes.

My second thought was, “I’m next!”

I’m 45. Andrew was just 43. All these writers I’ve known in their 40s who died — Cathy Seipp, David Aaron Clark, and now Andrew Breitbart.

When and where’s the funeral?

TabloidBaby tweets: Heard Breitbart subbing for Dennis Miller last week, winded, saying he couldn’t fit in his clothes. Thought he was Louie Anderson.

Breitbart sipping red wine, talking politics at The Brentwood bar an hour before he died. Fellow barfly: “No signs anything was wrong.”

Posted in Andrew Breitbart | Comments Off