Eric Williams's List: Religion

• But, welcome to the future of "religious freedom" litigation.
• But the lawsuit itself, and the related suits challenging the contraception mandate, offer an increasingly troubling look at just how far peddlers of far-right ideology will go not just to claim their own right to live according to their beliefs, but to mandate that you and I do the same.
• for-profit organizations have to cover contraception
• explicitly religious organizations like churches don't have to provide contraception
• religiously-affiliated non-profits that are neither owned nor controlled by religious groups do not have to provide contraception either, but they have to fill out a form certifying that they are religiously-affiliated, and then a third party administrator makes sure that employees can get contraception if they need it.
• All the Little Sisters have to do is fill out a form and the organization will be under no obligation to pay for birth control for its many employees
• but apparently a form is too great an intrusion on their religious liberty.
• Or, they could ditch the Christian Brothers Trust and designate new group insurance coverage, which would cover contraception for employees without making the Sisters pay for or negotiate a single thing, but would again require them to fill out a form that supposedly violates their belief that employees shouldn't be allowed to get contraception.
• The Little Sisters aren't paying for contraception even through a third-party-secured insurance plan; they certainly aren't being asked to distribute it, and Catholic nuns aren't being force-fed birth control pills. They simply have to sign a piece of paper saying they're a religious group, and then turn to a third party to negotiate all the details.
• These ACA-related "religious liberty" arguments aren't actually about the freedom to exercise your own religion, or the right to be free of doing something that violates your conscience. These assertions are about an overwhelming sense of entitlement on behalf of religious organizations to force anyone within their reach to adhere to their beliefs.
• It's not enough to simply encourage religious adherents to take sexual health advice from celibate old men. They have to use coercion and force.
• In other words: the Little Sisters can continue operating exactly as before, and nothing will happen
• But religious liberty should end at your own nose, and not entitle you to demand that anyone within your reach adhere to your same principles
• The American legal system privileges religious belief over many other kinds of deeply-held moral values, so while this line of argument wouldn't hold up in court, it's still worth asking: how is filling out a form a more substantial burden than, say, having to pay hundreds of dollars out of pocket for birth control, or having to travel a substantial distance and spend thousands on an abortion, or raising a child?
• All the Little Sisters and religiously affiliated groups like them have to do is fill out a piece of paper. They will not have to pay for or in any way facilitate contraception access to their employees. That's at least less of a burden than a lawsuit.

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• Politics, it seems, really does ruin everything — including science.
• Politics, it seems, really does ruin everything — including science.
• Politics, it seems, really does ruin everything — including science.
• First, the drop in belief in evolution is among Republicans and, more or less, Republicans only.
• Second, the share of the total population that believes in evolution hasn’t changed at all. The drop in Republican belief doesn’t appear to be people changing their minds about evolution so much as people who already didn’t believe in evolution becoming Republicans.
• The winnowing of self-identified Republicans to these demographic groups has been dramatic in recent years. The overall number of Americans who identify as Republicans hovered around 29 percent from from 2008-2012 as American seniors became dramatically more Republican, the pro-GOP margin shifting from 35-34 in 2008 to 39-29 in 2012. White evangelicals have become similarly more Republican at the same time.
• a greying, born-again Republican Party increasingly out of step with the rest of America’s political views.
• All of this anti-evolution activity makes much more sense if understood as Republican representatives and activists responding to incentives created by their increasingly homogenous base.
• This means that more issues like creationism in schools that don’t play on the national level, but can help local Republicans make a name for themselves inside the party, might make their way into state capitols in the coming year.
• Republicans are overwhelmingly more likely to think the economy is doing well when Republicans hold the Presidency, and ditto with Democrats when their guy holds the White House. A recent experiment found that even basic math is contaminated by politics; people are much more likely to correctly solve basic math problems when, in context, solving them correctly helps rather than hurts their party.

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• • Actually, all religious doctrine is like this. It's not just the Methodists.
• Methodist doctrine is “filled with competing and contradictory statements,

• religious edicts and ignorance
• polio vaccination teams are maligned as un-Islamic or Western purveyors of poison meant to sterilize Muslim women.
• A cleric in Pakistan's Punjab province warned that a jihad would be launched against polio vaccination teams, whose mission he labeled a Western conspiracy, frightening away a team that arrived in Muzaffargarh, according to The Express Tribune.

• The World Health Organization says the once-rare disease could be resurrected and has declared a polio emergency across the Middle East. Allias Durray, a doctor who is the chief of polio eradication for Pakistan, warned that Europe may be next.

  "After the Syrian polio outbreak and the flight of refugees in proximity to Turkey and European Union, it is evident that the polio virus is at the doorstep of Europe," he said.

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• Four infants in Tennessee developed an exceedingly rare bleeding disorder, after their parents turned down the administration of standard vitamin K injections. The cluster of illness, reported this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), highlights the ongoing risks of parents either refusing or delaying preventive injections — like vitamin K or MMR vaccinations — among infants and children.
• infants who don't receive it are 81 times more likely to experience VKDB.
• All of the infants in this illness cluster survived, though longterm neurodevelopmental repercussions (three of them suffered intracranial hemorrhage) remain a possibility.
• which have no scientific backing

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• not "follow a particular ideology"
• "He made a special point of saying that he wants pastoral bishops, not bishops who profess or follow a particular ideology."
• • Paging Cardinal Dolan!
• In a September interview, Francis said Catholic leaders should give greater emphasis to compassion and mercy, arguing the church's focus on abortion, marriage and contraception has been too narrow and alienating
• highlighting the fight with the Obama administration would be seen as out of step with Francis' message
• "missing this essential element" of a focus on the poor.
• "It would help our conference be on record as trying to achieve what Pope Francis has put before us,"

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