"Born Free" — The Movie Classic

The other day on Turner Classic Movies I watched the classic film Born Free for the very first time.

Elsa the lioness

It's a true story about a British couple, Joy and George Adamson, who lived and worked in the wilds of Kenya and, while there, raised a female lion cub, Elsa, from the age of four weeks on. Once Elsa reached adulthood, they successfully trained her to fend for herself, kill her own food, and "live free." They then released her to dwell with other lions in the wild.

The Born Free movie from 1966 was based on a 1960 book by the same title, written by Joy Adamson.

Elsa, after her return to the wild, continued to visit the Adamsons regularly. She never lost her gentleness toward and affection for her human "foster parents." As a by-that-time "wild" lioness of three years of age, Elsa would even bring her own never-tamed lion cubs to the Adamsons' for friendly visits.

Joy Adamson with Elsa

Sadly, Elsa passed away prematurely a few days short of her sixth birthday, due to a rare tick-borne disease. According to the web page "Tribute to Elsa the Lioness," Elsa died with her head in George Adamson's lap! Her ashes are marked by a headstone which can yet be visited today in Kenya's Meru National Park. Some of the ashes of Joy Adamson, who died in 1980, are buried there as well.

George Adamson's life continued until 1989. According to his Wikipedia article:

On 20 August 1989, George Adamson was murdered near his camp in Kora National Park, by Somali bandits, when he went to the rescue of his assistant and a young European tourist in the Kora National Park. He was 83 years old. He is buried in the Kora National Park near his brother Terance and Boy, one of the lions who was part of the Born Free film.

*****

These are important lessons here for us today. One is that humans can develop deep, bidirectional bonds of mutual respect and deep, lasting love even with animals from species that kill for a living.

Another lesson is that we humans, any of us, can be killers. In fact, the only reason Joy and George Adamson had an opportunity to raise Elsa and her litter mates, Big One and Lastika — both of whom were eventually donated as adults to the Rotterdam (Netherlands) Zoo — was that George, employed as a game warden in Kenya, had been forced to shoot the cubs' mother as, acting instinctively in defense of her offspring, she charged him.

The overarching lesson here is that our nature — indeed, all of nature, including that of meat-eating animals at the top of the food chain — is split. We humans can deeply love many others of God's creatures, even though some of those creatures under certain circumstance may pose deadly threats to ourselves. When it comes to our own kind, we can love some of our fellows and kill others. When we do kill, it can be a justifiable or even a righteous act ... or it can be the epitome of evil.

Elisabeth Warren's Pro-Marriage-Equality Zinger

Ruth Marcus

Check out The Washington Post op-ed writer Ruth Marcus's column today: "Warren had a good zinger on gay marriage. It was bad politics."

Ms. Marcus chastises Senator Elizabeth Warren, one of the Democratic party's leading presidential candidates, for her answer when asked at a recent LGBTQ forum:

How would she respond, Warren was asked at CNN’s forum on LGBTQ issues, to a voter who told her, “I’m old-fashioned, and my faith teaches me that marriage is between one man and one woman”?

Her response, as characterized by Ms. Marcus:

The Massachusetts senator and Democratic presidential candidate couldn’t resist the opportunity for a double dig. “Well, I’m going to assume it’s a guy who said that,” she began, giving the audience the chance to snicker along about the evident cluelessness of the male gender. “And I’m going to say, ‘Then just marry one woman — I’m cool with that.’”

Warren shrugged, as if to say, no biggie, live and let live. The audience whooped with delight. Warren shrugged again. Then she went in for the easy kill. “Assuming,” she said, “you can find one.” She turned, clapped along with the audience, nodded in evident satisfaction, put palms up as if to say, what is wrong with people who just don’t get it?

I agree with Ms. Marcus that

... it was a mistake that evoked missteps of Democratic campaigns past — a dismissiveness that Warren and her fellow candidates would do well to avoid.

This is bad politics, which may be the strongest immediate argument for shifting course, yet it is something worse than that. It reflects an attitude of intolerance and disrespect toward people of faith. Those who reasonably expect tolerance and respect should think about — well, they should think about the importance of practicing what they preach.

Sen. Elizabeth
Warren

I had the same reaction when I first read Annie Linskey's coverage of the event itself. Her coverage appeared on The Post's front page on October 11 of this year. Ms. Linskey wrote:

After landing her punchline, Warren turned, took a few steps and smiled broadly as the room exploded in laughter. Her response went viral online, and by Friday afternoon, Warren’s campaign team, which rarely brags about such things, was crowing that the clip had garnered more than 12 million views on Twitter.

I'm a Catholic who is torn between my church's proscription of marriage between two members of the same sex and today's widespread acceptance of it. I am also aware that many Protestants oppose same-sex relationships because the Bible's Book of Leviticus (for instance) says:

“[Men] shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female; it is an abomination.” (Leviticus 18:22)

There are other biblical references, both in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and in the New Testament, to homosexual relations being theologically anathema. My understanding is that members of many Protestant denominations read the Bible as their exclusive source of understanding of the God they worship, and the Bible seems to be pretty clear that homosexuality is, in its terms, an abomination.

St. Thomas Aquinas
(1225-1274)

But as a Catholic I also realize that my church has historically added to the understanding of God that the Bible itself bestows. There have been centuries of thinking and writing various treatises about what we Catholics, as Catholics, ought to believe. Much of this writing, including that of St. Thomas Aquinas, has invoked "natural law."

I realize that natural law philosophers/theologians maintain that we humans — whether or not we are Christians or even believers in God — have certain ideas about right and wrong graven on our hearts; we're divinely endowed with the capability of rational thought about what is moral and what is not.

I've begun reading David Haines and Andrew Fulford's Natural Law: A Brief Introduction and Biblical Defense. It's good, but it's aimed mostly at modern Protestants who have factored out natural law from their theological belief on grounds that natural-law thinking seems to support a Catholic idea that salvation can come from doing "good works" sheerly out of the goodness of our hearts. Most Protestants believe that salvation comes solely through faith in Jesus Christ alone, not out of "works," no matter how "good."

This emphasis by Haines and Fulford, from the perspective of my Catholic belief, misses the point.

*****

By chance I've also just run across an apt article in a recent Commonweal magazine, "Does Church Teaching Change? Church Doctrine at Trent, Vatican I, and Vatican II," by John W. O’Malley, S.J. Prior to the Council of Trent of 1545-63, Fr. O'Malley says, it was generally understood that Catholic teachings could never change. That attitude prevailed in the Catholic Church until Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni patris (1879).

That encyclical, not coincidentally, followed in the wake of the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species, the book which expounded what became known as the theory of evolution. If species actually evolve over time, Darwin's thought implied, then nothing is completely immune to change. Ergo, Catholic teaching itself has never been immune to change. Per Fr. O'Malley, Leo XIII’s encyclical accordingly initiated a revival of the study of the works of Thomas Aquinas.

Such a revival was termed ressourcement, a French word for "return to the sources." Perhaps errors had crept into Catholic teachings that were derived from Aquinas's writings — such as his Summa Theologica, the work from which many Catholic teachings about natural law had long been derived.

In the early 1960s, ressourcement became one of the major concerns of the Second Vatican Council. Fr. O'Malley writes:

In the mid-twentieth century, return to the sources, now explicitly under the neologism ressourcement, drove much of the theological ferment in France that played such a major role in Vatican II. At the council virtually all the participants accepted the validity of the return-to-the-sources principle. Disputes over it arose only when it seemed to be applied too radically. Those who balked at such application had a point because ressourcement had more potent implications than [mere] development. While development implies further movement along a given path, ressourcement says that we are no longer going to move along Path X. We are going back to a fork in the road and will now move along a better and different path.

Development and ressourcement are both about corporate memory, the memory that is constitutive of identity. What institutions wittingly or unwittingly chose to remember and chose to forget from their past makes them what they are. The great battles at Vatican II were battles over the identity of the church: not over its fundamental dogmas, but over the place, relevance, and respective weight of certain fundamental values in the tradition.

What Fr. O'Malley writes in his article clearly implies that post-conciliar Catholic theologians are not yet in complete agreement about how the natural-law teachings of Aquinas, given ressourcement, ought to be applied today ... and, in particular, how they should inform today's Catholic beliefs about sex, marriage, procreation, and LGBTQ issues.

In other words, I'm still searching for Catholic answers, firmly grounded in natural law, to certain questions that are of the utmost sociocultural importance today.

Ban Military-Style Assault Weapons!

Last weekend saw two mass shootings, one in El Paso, Texas, and one in Dayton, Ohio. The one in El Paso was done with an AK-47 semi-automatic assault rifle:

AK-47 assault rifle

The AK-47 is a military-style weapon. Many of us have erroneously assumed that private ownership of AK-47s and similar semi-automatic, military-style weapons is protected by the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution — but it's not! According to Barry Mendelsohn's letter in today's Washington Post (scroll down to find it):

In the written 5-to-4 District of Columbia v. Heller Supreme Court decision, which dramatically expanded the Second Amendment rights of individuals to possess guns outside of militias, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia explicitly excluded military-style weapons from that right.

According to this article about the Heller decision:

The Supreme Court stated, however, that the Second Amendment should not be understood as conferring a “right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.” The Court provided examples of laws it considered “presumptively lawful,” including those which:

• Prohibit firearm possession by felons and the mentally ill;
• Forbid firearm possession in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings; and
• Impose conditions on the commercial sale of firearms.

The Court noted that this list is not exhaustive, and concluded that the Second Amendment is also consistent with laws banning “dangerous and unusual weapons” not in common use at the time, such as M-16 rifles and other firearms that are most useful in military service.

The AK-47 qualifies as a type of weapon that is "most useful in military service." So does the similar AR-15 assault rifle:

AR-15 assault rifle

Therefore, banning the AK-47 and the AR-15 would not violate Heller. Banning weapons like these would prevent untold numbers of mass shootings in America. So let's ban all privately owned military-style assault weapons now!

Let's Plant Some Trees!

"Scientists say planting a trillion trees globally could be the single most effective way to fight climate change." That quote comes from an article found here. The article continues:

According to a new study in the journal Science, planting billions of trees around the world would be the cheapest and most effective way to tackle the climate crisis. Since trees absorb carbon dioxide, which contributes to global warming, a worldwide planting initiative could remove a substantial portion of heat-trapping emissions from the atmosphere.

The researchers say a program at this scale could remove about two-thirds of the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions caused by human activities since the start of the industrial revolution, or nearly 25% of the CO2 in the atmosphere.

In other words, we need to pursue what advocates are calling "reforestation."

One of the best things about
forests is their natural beauty.

Humans have over the years cut down huge numbers of forest trees in order to expand their economic activities. Those economic activities have involved burning fossil fuels — coal, oil, gasoline, and natural gas — to generate power.

Cutting down trees causes the fallen trees to release their stored CO2 — carbon dioxide — back into the atmosphere. If the downed trees are burned, that process happens even faster.

Burning fossil fuels puts yet more CO2 into the atmosphere. CO2 is a so-called "greenhouse gas." The extra CO2 in the atmosphere traps heat that reaches us from the sun. The trapped heat raises temperatures at the Earth's surface. This is the cause of global warming, also known as climate change.

Reforestation — planting billions and billions of trees throughout the world — can help reverse much of the climate change that has occurred since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution some two centuries ago.

*****

Where can these trees be planted?

One excellent place, surprisingly, is in our cities. Many of our cities were built, in fact, where forests once thrived. We simply cut down the trees to build our civilized, city-based habitats.

Now we need to restore the trees. And in performing that so-called "urban landscaping" today, we ought to prioritize the poorer communities in our cities. See "How Can We Get Trees to the Communities That Need Them the Most?" for ideas about why and how to do that.

Also see "The Benefits of Trees" for a rundown on all the many reasons why we'd be smart to plant trees wherever possible, including our cities, and particularly in our cities' poorer neighborhoods. In particular, notice that "Urban landscaping, including trees, helps lower crime rates."

*****

Senator Kamala Harris, a Democratic presidential candidate, and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have "unveiled legislation aimed at ensuring that climate change plans benefit low-income communities," according to The New York Times. They call their goal "climate equity." It's part of what's being called "the Green New Deal."

What better way to target our efforts to deal constructively with climate change than to aim urban landscaping plans, including the planting of trees, directly at poorer communities?

*****

Yet let's not fool ourselves. This would be a hard sell politically. "Study explains why thousands of Detroit residents rejected city's tree planting efforts" tells why. That article clues us in that once a city government or other organization plants trees in a neighborhood, it has to follow through and take care of the trees: giving them tender, loving care while they're young; pruning them back away from power lines when they get bigger; and raking up leaves every fall. Neighborhood residents have enough to worry about; they don't need the extra responsibility of tree maintenance.

Obviously, expanded tree maintenance done at the city level costs money. Often, that kind of money is not easily available in city budgets. So money for the maintenance of new trees planted in poorer communities needs to derive from the federal government. Such funding needs to be part of Sen. Harris's and Rep. Ocasio-Cortez's "climate equity" plan; it has to be part of the Green New Deal.

Don't Panic!

Everyone should read the recent New York Times column by law professor Ilya Somin, "How liberals learned to love federalism." Its subtitle: "The left was skeptical of giving power to the states. Until the Trump era." Its premise: During the Trump years, liberals are finding reasons to rethink their rejection, especially during the civil rights movement, of the idea that state and local governments ought never to overrule or block the initiatives of the national government.

Graphic from the article. Click to enlarge.

Why the change of heart by liberals? Because today, state and local governments are flexing their muscles to block Trump's right-wing initiatives. A case in point: Trump's efforts to put the kibosh on "sanctuary cities" for undocumented immigrants are being effectively resisted by the affected states and cities themselves.

"Americans of every political stripe," Somin writes, "have much to gain from stronger enforcement of constitutional limits on federal authority. One-size-fits-all federal policies often work poorly in a highly diverse and ideologically polarized nation." This is because strong federalism, with political power duly exercised at all governmental levels, acts as a kind of ballast whenever polarization tries to yank us too far to the left or too far to the right.

President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal moved us decidedly leftward toward bigger national government. But let's not forget that his first New Deal effort, the National Recovery Administration, was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, which unanimously declared that the NRA law was unconstitutional. This happened in 1935, within two years of its 1933 passage. The Supreme Court declared that it infringed the separation of powers under the United States Constitution. Then, when FDR in 1937 tried to pack the Supreme Court with extra pro-New Deal justices, the Senate defeated his bill.

Somin's viewpoint can accordingly be extended to lauding the checks and balances afforded by having three coequal branches of the national government, including not only the president but also the congress and the judiciary. Somin writes:

Many cities, plus a coalition of seven states led by New York, sued to challenge the new conditions linking [federal grants to the sanctuary cities] to immigration enforcement. At least a dozen federal trial court decisions and four appellate rulings have gone against the administration, while none have supported it. Only Congress, these decisions have affirmed, can impose such terms on grants given to states and towns.

Note also the importance to federalism of not just the Supreme Court but also the lower tiers of the federal judiciary, such as the trial and appellate courts.

The takeaway from all this is that there is a long history of federalism's ability to offset lurches to the political left or to the political right such as we're seeing every day in today's headlines and Twitter feeds. So much of the political rhetoric we hear today is proclaimed out of a sort of panic mode that bodes the end of the world as we know it. The lesson of Somin's benevolent history of American federalism, summarized in two words: Don't panic!

Racism, Busing ... and Joe Biden

In the recent TV debate among 20 Democratic presidential hopefuls, Sen. Kamala Harris upbraided former Vice President Joe Biden for, among other things that imply Biden was never sufficiently "woke" about race issues, his opposition to federally mandated "busing" as a young senator in the 1970s.

Kamala Harris (on left) and Joe Biden

Harris's ploy worked well for her. Although Biden still is at the top of the presidential polls, he quickly lost ground to Harris, who jumped up in the polls to somewhere between second and fourth place, depending on the poll.

There is a front page article in today's Washington Post, "What a lifeguarding job on the black side of Wilmington taught Joe Biden about race," that gives an in-depth look at how the young Joe Biden learned to despise the racism in American life and history. By the time a few years later when he entered politics, Biden had personally earned the friendship, respect, and support of the black community in Wilmington, Delaware. The loyalty from that time persists today.

The talk of "busing" in the TV debate was probably less than comprehensible to many younger viewers. Nikole Hannah-Jones's recent article in The New York Times, "It Was Never About Busing: Court-ordered desegregation worked. But white racism made it hard to accept" explains all.

Illustration from the article.

"Busing" was a term used in the 1970s to refer to a last-ditch effort by anti-segregationists to force public schools to integrate. After the Supreme Court, in its unanimous decision in the 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education, said segregated schools were unconstitutional, school boards and local governments in both the South and the North found a variety of ways to sidestep integrating their schools. Pro-integration forces in school systems responded by simply assigning black children to formerly all-white schools, and vice versa. Since the affected schools were not in the actual neighborhoods of the affected children, the children had to ride school buses to their new schools.

White families in particular — but also some black families — vociferously objected to the fact that "busing" was taking children away from their closest neighborhood schools. Objecting black families simply wanted their neighborhood schools to be brought up to white schools' standards of quality. But objecting white families assailed "busing" rather than admit that what they really hated was the fact that integration would force their children to sit next to black children in schools.

It's obvious, then, that those old battles about race have not really been won by the forces of justice and racial equity. (Nor are those who favor racial equity today necessarily on the same page as to how to achieve it.) In fact, as this graphic from the Hannah-Jones article shows ...

Click to enlarge.

... integrationist gains which had been achieved by "busing" and other means after 1968 were rolled back significantly after 1988. This sad fact was true in various parts of the country outside the Northeast. Even sadder was the fact that in the supposedly "blue" and liberal Northeast, there had been no integrationist gains in school systems in the first place.

Real Clear Politics 2020 Presidential Polls, No. 3

Last week, on June 26th and 27th, 20 of the Democratic presidential hopefuls squared off in a two-night, 10-candidate-per-night TV debate. As of today, July 2, Real Clear Politics shows (here) that the debate had a profound effect on how well the various contenders are polling. (See "Real Clear Politics 2020 Presidential Polls, No. 2" for how they were doing prior to the debate.)

Here's the crucial chart as of today:

Click to enlarge.

The crucial post-debate changes show up at the right edge of the chart. Joe Biden, though still on top, has dropped enormously. He's now polling at just 27 percent. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris has shot way up from her earlier low support level to 13.4 percent. The reason for both those changes is the way that Harris took Biden to task during the debate for failing to support federally mandated busing and for having worked amicably in Congress with southern senators who were white segregationists.

The number two Democratic candidate, Bernie Sanders, has likewise lost ground in the post-debate polls. Elizabeth Warren, for her part, is still just barely in the number three position, having impressed on the first night of the debate ... but Harris, from the second night, is hot on her heels at number four. The number five candidate, Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, has declined in his post-debate support, even though I personally thought he did extremely well in the debate. All of the other Democratic candidates are coming in with less than three percent support apiece.

Real Clear Politics 2020 Presidential Polls, No. 2

The RealClearPolitics web site keeps track of the latest 2020 presidential polls, even though it's only mid-2019. As of today, Wednesday, June 19,

Click to enlarge

former Vice President Joe Biden, in a USA/Suffolk poll, has a sizable lead of 15 percentage points over his closest Democratic presidential rival. Biden's point total is 30 percentage points — i.e., 30 percent of polled Democrats said they would prefer Biden as their 2020 candidate against President Trump. Biden's two closest rivals are Senator Bernie Sanders, at 15 points, and Senator Elizabeth Warren, at 10 points. All the other Democrats have single-digit point scores.

In direct matchups between leading Democrats and Donald Trump in a hypothetical 2020 general election

Click to enlarge

we find that Trump would lose to any of these five candidates: Biden (+10 points over Trump), Sanders (+9), Warren (+2), Senator Kamala Harris (+1), and South Bend Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg (+1). This poll was published by the pro-Trump FOX News organization on Sunday, June 16.

Looking back at "Real Clear Politics 2020 Presidential Polls, No. 1," posted on Tuesday, May 07, 2019, we find that as of this point the leading Democrats all surpass Trump, whereas in the earlier post Trump had a 1-point lead over Warren while losing to Biden, Sanders, Buttigieg, Harris, or then-very-popular Texas former-Representative Beto O'Rourke. This indicates that Trump has lost a lot of ground in general and that Warren has gained quite a bit of ground in the last month or so. Meanwhile, O'Rourke seems to have lost most of his earlier popularity.

Here's an overall look at the state of affairs among Democratic hopefuls:

Click to enlarge

On the above graph, Biden (the green line at the top) still leads all the other candidates, but his lead has fallen since the beginning of May. Second is still Sanders (blue line), but his support has also dropped since May. The only candidate to show much of a gain is Warren (brown line), whose following has jumped up in the month of June. Buttigieg (purple line) has also shown a bit of an increase in June. Harris (orange line) has lost some support recently. All of the other candidates remain stuck in the low-to-middle single digits.

The top 20 Democratic candidates will engage in two televised debates on June 26 and 27. The lineups:

Click to enlarge

Expect changes in their relative positions in the polls afterwards ...

Abortion and Religion

A lot of political opinion on the topic of abortion rights has to do with organized religion, or the absence of it, in people's lives. I personally am Roman Catholic, and my Church teaches that abortions are sinful, so it's probably no coincidence that I am pro-life. But there are a lot of other pro-life people. I expect that many many pro-life people, though not Catholic, are nonetheless intensely religious.

I am also aware that there are many Catholics and members of other traditional Judeo-Christian faiths who are not pro-life, but instead pro-choice. Some are pro-choice "all the way," meaning they support the right of every pregnant woman to obtain an abortion no matter what the background of her pregnancy is or how long she's been pregnant. Others are pro-choice in a more limited way, believing that abortions ought to be available only early in pregnancy and only in cases such as rape, incest, or a medical threat to the life of the mother.

And of course, there are large numbers of pro-choice people who are not active members of any traditional religious faith. Some are outright atheists or agnostics. But, according to New York Times columnist David Brooks, today there are an increasing number of folks — particularly millennials — who call themselves Wiccans or neo-pagans. See Brooks's "The Age of Aquarius, All Over Again! Belief in astrology and the occult is surging."

The millennial Wiccans/neo-pagans have a wide progressive agenda, not necessarily just a pro-choice one. Their overall agenda is, broadly speaking, born of today's radical, anti-Trump left. That can be seen in this photo:

Protesters at a free speech rally
in Boston in 2017.

There are now some 134,000 people who today identify as Wiccans, and when combined with the many people who style themselves neo-pagans, together they form quite a large group of over a million Americans. These people, says Brooks, are into astrology, witchcraft, mindfulness, and (in today's polarizing terminology) "wokeness."

According to Wikipedia, Wicca is, say certain authorities, "a form of nature religion, a term that is also embraced by many of its practitioners, and [Wicca is also seen] as a mystery religion." Wiccans are, by their older name, witches. Wikipedia says:

... the Modern English term "Wicca" is derived from the Old English wicca ... and wicce ... , the masculine and feminine term for witch, respectively, that was used in Anglo-Saxon England. By adopting it for modern usage, Wiccans were both symbolically cementing their connection to the ancient, pre-Christian past, and adopting a self-designation that would be less controversial than "Witchcraft".

Brooks writes that "During the Kavanaugh hearings, 13,000 'resistance witches' cast a hex on Brett Kavanaugh." Brett Kavanaugh, of course, is President Trump's recent appointee to the U.S. Supreme Court. He, it's said, could become the deciding vote in some future case that would overturn Roe v. Wade and make abortion once again illegal in states that choose to ban it.

One researcher on "progressive occultism," Tara Isabella Burton, says, “Wicca ... is technically the fastest-growing religion in America.” She calls this movement "the Great Awokening." Per Brooks, "Burton’s essay is really about how astrology and witchcraft have become important spiritual vocabularies within parts of the social justice movement." Per Burton herself, "Last month ... when pro-choice advocates marched on the South Carolina State House to protest the Alabama abortion ban, protesters held signs identifying themselves as 'the grandchildren of the witches you could not burn.' (This phrase has also been spotted on placards at the annual Women’s March)."

Brooks points out that today's burgeoning Wiccans are people who:

• Want to "find a way to be spiritual"
• Want to "slow down," to "escape the pace of life technology wants and to live at a human pace"
• Want "identity markers" that "tell [them] what sort of people [they're] likely to be compatible and incompatible with"
• Want to "express alienation" and reject "the traditional organized religions [that] are implicated in the existing power structures"

Brooks adds:

Being occult is a way to announce that you stand on the fringe of society, that you stand against the patriarchy, against the heteronormative culture and against the structures of oppression. Political alienation manifests itself in the alt-right and [also in] the energized radical left. It makes sense that it would manifest itself in the spiritual realm ...

Brooks sees Wiccans and neo-pagans as having "the desire to live within a coherent creed and community, but without having that creed impinge on your individual autonomy. ... The emerging spirituality is a hodgepodge spirituality. Each person borrows practices from, say, Native American, Buddhist, Christian, Jewish and SoulCycle [see "When SoulCycle Is Your Religion"] traditions and blends them in a way he or she finds moving. There is no grand narrative, no specific way one is expected to live, no set of laws you have to obey or even a specific cult leader who might boss you around. Religion bows before individualism."

*****

David Brooks is a middle-of-the-road opinion writer by today's standards, and so is The Washington Post's Michael Gerson, who calls himself an "evangelical Episcopalian." Gerson's recent column "Gillibrand’s vilification of pro-life people proves how hopeless she is" has it that:

One measure of the seriousness of a Democratic candidate for president is his or her understanding of the importance of religion in our common life. I am not talking here of the perfunctory bow toward personal, sectarian belief, which is neither qualifying nor disqualifying in a prospective president. I refer instead to a candidate’s recognition that faith helps define compassion and justice for millions of Americans.

Barack Obama provided the model in his 2006 Call to Renewal speech. “Secularists are wrong,” he said, “when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King — indeed the majority of great reformers in American history — were not only motivated by faith but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. So to say that men and women should not inject their ‘personal morality’ into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.”

Kirsten Gillibrand

But what happens when over a million people, many of them millennials, expressly reject the Judeo-Christian tradition in favor of Wicca or neo-paganism? One Democratic candidate who would like to unseat President Trump is Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. Gillibrand is (according to "Religious affiliation in the United States Senate") officially Catholic. Yet it's not clear whether Gillibrand actually supports Catholic teaching. Gerson writes of Gillibrand:

In a recent interview with the Des Moines Register, [Gillibrand] judged the religious motivations of people who are pro-life to be democratically illegitimate, because it is wrong to “deny women basic human rights.” She continued: “I think there’s some issues that have such moral clarity that we have, as a society, decided that the other side is not acceptable. Imagine saying it’s okay to appoint a judge who’s racist or anti-Semitic or homophobic. Asking someone to appoint someone who takes away basic human rights of any group of people in America, I don’t think those are political issues anymore. . . . All these efforts by President Trump and other ultra-radical conservative judges and justices to impose their faith on Americans is contrary to our Constitution.”

In Gillibrand's view, I assume, the faith being "imposed" on Americans by pro-life people is that of the Judeo-Christian tradition — including her own nominal Roman Catholicism — which many of its opponents reject as intrinsically patriarchal.

So, I have to conclude, the polarized politics of today is as much about religion as it is about any more traditional "political" subject ...

Abortion: Hot Topic in Today's Politics Could Readily Be Cooled Down

Abortion is such a hot political topic today. Here are some examples from Letters to the Editor, The Washington Post, June 13, 2019:

To have a child or not. To have this child or not. To have a child at this time or not. Having a child or not is a complicated and exquisitely personal decision. Which is why the only one who can make it is the individual who is pregnant. Everything else is commentary.

Kathleen Parker [“Terminate abortion, please,” op-ed, June 9] and others are entitled to their own opinions about abortion. But they cannot and should not feel entitled to prevent — or judge me about — mine.

Susan Bodiker, Washington

*****

It would be great to make abortion irrelevant. Kathleen Parker is either naive or, more likely, willfully cherry-picking the facts regarding the reality for many of the women who need this type of health care.

Ms. Parker wrote in her June 9 op-ed about those millions whose “profound religious conviction” should be respected. The result is that federal funding for abortion is banned. In fact, those beliefs hold much of the country hostage. People refuse to do their jobs in the form of conscientious objection by healthcare workers, beliefs that deprive women of the means to avoid pregnancy and that drive the dissemination of false information about the reality of the procedure.

Why must my federal tax dollars, and those of the millions who believe as I do, be withheld from helping women in need who would choose an abortion? How come only religious beliefs count? How does Ms. Parker see a clear path to making birth control freely available with the likes of the Little Sisters of the Poor and the Green family, who either refuse to cover any birth control or will cover only the forms of birth control they designate as acceptable for their workers? Why can parents opt their children out of sex education in schools in some parts of the country?

“We should be talking about” it, she wrote. Yes. Let’s.

Nancy Poole, Newton, Mass.

*****

Paul Kane ended his June 9 @PKCapitol column, “Democrats on defensive as abortion foes wonder if party tolerates their views,” with a quote from former congressman Bart Stupak (D-Mich.): “It’s not the same party anymore. You’re driving people away.” I am among those who were driven away.

I registered as a Democrat in West Virginia way back when I was first old enough to vote, but I threw in the towel at long last about three years ago. I am pro-life, yet I believe in gun control and climate change, so I could find no seat at the table of either party. I’m now registered as independent.

It seems that right now one has to favor abortion rights, including late in pregnancy, to be included in the Democratic Party. Extremists in both parties and their litmus tests are driving people away. Some of us feel we have nowhere to go without being attacked for our beliefs.

Sharon Klees, Hyattsville

*****

I'm mostly in sync with the last one, that of Sharon Klees. As a pro-life Democrat, I tend to feel I have "nowhere to go" politically these days. None of my party's 20-plus presidential candidates seem to be even tangentially pro-life. This is especially true of leading candidates such as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris — not to mention the one whose poll numbers are currently the highest among Democratic voters: Joe Biden. Biden recently flipped his erstwhile support and came out against the Hyde Amendment which currently blocks federal Medicaid payments to cover poor women's abortion costs.

As I pointed out in my earlier post, "Contraception, Pregnancy and Abortion," almost all women can today get health insurance that covers the full cost of contraceptive medications and techniques: birth control pills, IUDs, implants, etc. Women without jobs that provide health insurance can, during "open season," get it online through "Obamacare," i.e. the Affordable Care Act. Households with incomes between 100% and 400% of the federal poverty level are eligible to receive federal subsidies for policies purchased via Obamacare, so for those households Obamacare is reasonably affordable.

*****

I'd like to find out why there are there so many unwanted pregnancies that often result in abortion. Why aren't more sexually active women — not to mention the men they have sex with — using "protection," if they don't want to get pregnant? Or, if they're using it, isn't it working all that well?

My Catholic religion is super-strict about topics related to sexuality and reproduction:

1. Sex is permissible only between married heterosexual couples. It is never permissible prior to or outside such unions.
2. Means of contraception other than the so-called "rhythm method" — whose official name is "natural family planning" — are impermissible. They are considered "artificial," therefore sinful.
3. Willfully obtained abortions, even for women who have strictly obeyed the first two rules and have still become pregnant, are in all cases contrary to the church's moral teachings.

I suppose one reason why certain couples might avoid using "artificial" contraception has to do with a religious ban such as the Catholic Church imposes. But I'd say that that can't be the main reason for so many unplanned pregnancies. According to the Washington Post story "Almost half of pregnancies in the U.S. are unplanned. There’s a surprisingly easy way to change that":

Many women get pregnant while using birth control. From a behavioral economics standpoint, the most widely used forms of birth control in the United States — the pill and condoms — are pretty terrible. They require frequent and specific action, offer little room for error, require action in times of emotional distraction, and have comparatively high rates of failure: For every 100 women who rely on the pill for one year, nine will get pregnant; for every 100 women who rely on condoms for one year, nearly 20 will get pregnant. By contrast, if 100 women rely on the IUD (intrauterine device) or the implant (a matchstick-sized plastic rod inserted just below the skin in the arm that releases pregnancy-preventing hormones) for one year, just one, or possibly none, will get pregnant.

This story points to better ways of avoiding unplanned pregnancies (IUDs and implants) than those which are currently widely used (the pill and condoms).

If only such facts would get more exposure, the greater part of the hot abortion controversy in today's politics would become moot. Wouldn't that be a great thing? I think so.

Are Abortion Advocates Helping Trump?

Michael Gerson

In Tuesday's Washington Post, middle-of-the-road opinion writer Michael Gerson suggests that the strong pro-choice advocacy coming from Democratic Party leaders today may actually help Republican President Donald Trump win a second term in 2020. In "Abortion supporters have made Trump’s reelection more likely," Gerson writes:

One of the largest obstacles to the defeat of President Trump in the 2020 election is the radicalism of the Democratic Party on the issue of abortion. By forcing Joe Biden to abandon his support for the Hyde Amendment — which currently prevents the funding of abortions through Medicaid — the abortion lobby and activist liberals have taken the first major step toward reelecting Trump.

How vastly things have changed, and quite rapidly, says Gerson. Not that long ago, many leading Democrats supported "the sanctity of human life," meaning that they opposed legalizing abortion or at least wanted to place tight restrictions on it:

Edmund Muskie

At the start of Biden’s career — about the time that Roe v. Wade was decided [in 1973] — both political parties contained diverse views on abortion. Early in 1971, for example, the front-runner for the [1972] Democratic presidential nomination, Edmund Muskie, was both Catholic and pro-life. During a television interview with David Frost, Muskie said: “I’m concerned about diluting in any way the sanctity of human life. . . . If it becomes all right to take a life in that stage, then how easy will it be to slip into the next step? Should people in old age who are senile — does it then become legitimate to take their lives?”

Later in that campaign season, after Muskie had dropped out of the race, fellow Democrat Hubert Humphrey attacked the party’s eventual nominee, George McGovern, for being too liberal on abortion. As Daniel K. Williams recounts in “Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement Before Roe v. Wade,” McGovern took the matter seriously enough to run a half-hour television broadcast dealing with issues important to Catholics. At one point, [Muskie] was shown telling a Catholic nun that abortion should be a matter for states to decide and that he supported some abortion restrictions. McGovern’s first choice to be his running mate, Thomas Eagleton, was strongly pro-life. [Eagleton had to quit the race after it was revealed that in the past he had suffered bouts of depression.] [Muskie's] second selection, Sargent Shriver, was another pro-life Catholic.

Meanwhile, many important Republicans actually supported legal abortion:

In the 1970s, there were also plenty of Republicans who were pro-choice, including Lowell Weicker, Bob Packwood, Howard Baker, John Tower and Barry Goldwater. In 1975, former first lady Betty Ford called Roe v. Wade a “great, great decision.”

*****

Robert F. Kennedy

I personally call myself "a liberal Democrat in the mold of Senator Robert F. Kennedy," the potential Chief Executive who was assassinated in 1968 during his campaign to gain the Democratic nomination to replace President Lyndon B. Johnson. RFK was a practicing Catholic, as were his wife Ethel and the whole large Kennedy clan. In 1968, legalized abortion was not yet on the political radar screen. My guess is that during those very early days of the women's liberation movement, had abortion turned into the hot issue it has now become today, RFK would have resisted it in the same way, and for the same reasons, that Muskie did in 1971.

At any rate, Gerson thinks the take-no-prisoners attitudes toward anti-abortion sentiments that Democratic hopefuls are now actively ruing may boost Trump's re-election chances:

Now, a Democratic presidential nominee is not allowed even a hint of reticence. Abortion must [in the rhetoric of the nominee, whoever he or she may turn out to be] be supported and funded as a positive good.

Joe Biden

This, despite the fact that many Americans, while they support abortion under limited conditions, also retain ethical concerns about unrestricted abortion-on-demand. With respect to Biden's flip-flop on Hyde, Gerson writes:

... opposition to federal funding of abortion was one of the last remaining ways for a Democratic politician to tell Catholics (and others) that their ethical concerns have some degree of merit. Now, a Democratic presidential nominee is not allowed even a hint of reticence. Abortion must be supported and funded as a positive good.

Gerson's reaction to Biden's flip-flop on Hyde:

The moral question is obvious: How does this allow Biden to live with his Catholic conscience? But the political implications are also relevant. Biden has made it harder — significantly harder — for cultural conservatives who are disturbed by Trump’s cruelty and prejudice to vote for Biden, should he be his party’s nominee.

*****

Note in the above quotation concerning Edmund Muskie that he advocated "letting the states decide" about legalized abortion. Today, pro-choice advocates fear — perhaps with good cause — that the Supreme Court is poised to overturn Roe, thanks to the addition oto it f Trump's two recent appointees, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.

Neil Gorsuch (left) and Brett Kavanaugh

If Roe were to be overturned, "letting the states decide" would indeed be the expected result. Roe blocks the state laws, still in place or recently passed, that contravene Roe's three-trimester rule. Roe, according to this Wikipedia article:

The Court resolved [the] balancing test [concerning abortion's legality] by tying state regulation of abortion to the three trimesters of pregnancy: the Court ruled that during the first trimester, [state] governments could not prohibit abortions at all; during the second trimester, [state] governments could require reasonable health regulations; during the third trimester, abortions could be prohibited entirely so long as the laws contained exceptions for cases when they were necessary to save the life or health of the mother.

Overturning Roe would, as I say, presumably toss out the three-trimester standard, letting states (for example) adopt "fetal heartbeat" legislation that "makes abortions illegal as soon as the embryonic or fetal heartbeat can be detected." A detectable heartbeat typically is heard at about the sixth or seventh week of pregnancy. Pro-choice advocates complain that many recently impregnated women won't yet know they're pregnant by that point, as they will have missed just one menstrual period.

I think Gerson is correct about overly-progressive-on-abortion Democratic candidates possibly hurting their chances of unseating Trump. I also think there's at least a strong likelihood — particularly if Trump gets a second term and has an opportunity to further stack the court in an anti-Roe direction — that Roe will get overturned or at least rendered irrelevant by one or more subsequent High Court decisions, thereby returning to the individual states their once-held primary responsibility of setting abortion law.

That would surely trigger pitched legislative battles in states where voters aren't solidly pro-choice, and maybe even in states whose electorate is solidly pro-choice. It could well turn out that abortion politics will be an even more dominant mode in years to come than they already are today.

Is There Still Any "Middle Ground" on Abortion?

Karen Tumulty

In yesterday's Sunday edition of The Washington Post, columnist Karen Tumulty said there's no longer any "middle ground" on the issue of abortion. She was referring to the fact that Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden last week reversed his long-standing support for the Hyde Amendment, "a provision in federal law that, since the 1970s, has banned Medicaid from paying for abortions, except in rare cases."

That amendment, says Wikipedia, "generally restricts the use of funds allocated for the Department of Health and Human Services and consequently has significant effects involving Medicaid recipients." Federal funds, according to the amendment, cannot be used to pay for abortion "except to save the life of the woman, or if the pregnancy arises from incest or rape."

Joe Biden

Joe Biden was President Barack Obama's vice president, before which he was a U.S. senator for many years, during which time he twice ran unsuccessfully for president, in 1988 and 2008. Until last week, Biden supported the Hyde Amendment.

Biden, a faithful Roman Catholic, has apparently wrestled for years with abortion as a political issue — given that his church (which is my church as well) opposes abortion. The official Catechism of the Catholic Church says:

Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception. From the first moment of his existence, a human being must be recognized as having the rights of a person — among which is the inviolable right of every innocent being to life. Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable. Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed either as an end or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law.

Karen Tumulty points out in her column that among Democrats there used to be a "middle ground" concerning abortion, which became legal in 1973 as a result of the famous Roe v. Wade decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. In the wake of Roe:

Biden’s position on the Hyde Amendment was in the mainstream, even among Democrats. With abortion opponents gaining little ground in their efforts to overturn Roe, the provision was framed as an effort against federal overreach in the other direction — taxpayers would not be required to subsidize a procedure that, while legal, was against many people’s moral principles.

But today, says Tumulty, that middle ground has disappeared:

Biden on Thursday said he changed his position in response to tough new laws that aim to virtually ban abortion in some states. “I have supported the Hyde Amendment like many, many others have,” he said, “because there were sufficient moneys and circumstances where women were able to exercise that right — women of color, poor women, women who were not able to have access — and it was not under attack as it is now. But circumstances have changed.”

One reason why circumstances have changed is that President Donald Trump has taken opportunities to appoint two new justices to the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. Gorsuch and Kavanaugh are expected by pro-choice advocates to give the court a 5-4 majority in some as-yet-unspecified upcoming case that will serve to overturn Roe.

*****

Kathleen Parker

I personally disagree with Biden's decision to drop support for the Hyde Amendment. My reasons — in addition to my purely religious objections to abortion — echo those cited by Post columnist Kathleen Parker in yesterday's paper. "We should be talking about ways to end abortion," her headline reads. She states:

Although abortion rates are down across the board over the past decade, among women aged 15 to 44 (more or less the reproductive years) in 2014, African Americans had the highest abortion rate, at 27 abortions per 1,000 women. Hispanic and white women clocked in at 18 and 10 abortions per 1,000 women, respectively. And abortion is most common among impoverished and low-income women, who accounted for 75 percent of abortion patients in 2014.

If 75 percent of 2014 abortions were obtained by impoverished and low-income women, then it seems to me that the Hyde Amendment's refusal to pay for such abortions with federal funds via Medicaid did little to lower the abortion rate. Accordingly, it seems to me that repealing Hyde — if that were even possible, given the likelihood that Republicans will continue to control the Senate after 2020 — would probably not raise abortion rates among impecunious women.

In other words, the anti-Hyde position of Joe Biden and seemingly all of the other Democrats running for president in 2020 is merely a symbolic one. Kathleen Parker is right. We need to talk less about such symbolic stances and more about practical ways to lower abortion rates.

One of the reasons we need to do so is that a disproportionate number of terminated fetuses are those of African Americans, Hispanics, and impoverished and low-income women in general. Abortion is by no means an equal opportunity way to end unwanted pregnancies. So, given that a great many Americans have religious and moral objections to using taxpayer monies to pay for abortions, why not do as Kathleen Parker recommends?

Shouldn’t we dedicate more effort to tackling unplanned pregnancy across all races and wealth levels before we mandate that Americans pay for others’ abortions?

But a ZIP code isn’t really the point, is it? It’s about whether taxpayers with a strong commitment to life at conception should be on the hook for others’ abortions. Sacrificing our nation’s long history of protecting religious freedom and freedom of conscience is a high price to pay so that strangers can abort their babies. If it’s no one’s business what women do with their bodies, then why is it anyone’s business to interfere with another’s profound religious conviction?

... The real problem with abortion, aside from its obvious complexities, is the way we talk about it. Given the more than 50 million abortions performed in the wake of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, it should be clear that we suffer a lack of imagination. Rather than arguing endlessly about choice vs. personhood, we should be talking about ways to end this primitive, barbaric procedure, which is risky, nasty and, unequivocally, life-ending.

In 21st-century America — with pills, patches, spermicides, morning-after medications, IUDs, condoms or some combination thereof — we should be well beyond all but the rare abortion. If big pharma can give men hours of sexual stamina, surely it can come up with a foolproof, fail-safe method of pregnancy prevention.

If poorer women lack sufficient access to birth control, then let’s use federal funding to get more of it to them. If boys and girls need better sex education, let’s make sure they get it. If you don’t like abstinence lessons, teach them the joys of mindfulness. You want to have sex? Make it extra-special by not creating a fertilized egg. Here’s how. There are a hundred ideas out there waiting to be implemented, if we could only stop our political posturing long enough to imagine.

I agree. I think Kathleen Parker is correct: there is still a "middle ground" on abortion.

Eugenics and Pro-Abortion Stances

Although I have long been officially pro-choice, I'm reconsidering.

One reason I'm reconsidering is a Ross Douthat column that recently appeared in The New York Times, "Clarence Thomas’s Dangerous Idea. Does anything link the eugenics of the past to abortion today?"

As can be intuited by reading my previous blog post, "Contraception, Pregnancy and Abortion," I posted it in hopes that women who might become unintentionally pregnant and consequently opt to undergo an abortion ought to instead take advantage of free contraceptives in various forms, including pills, IUDs, and implants. These forms of contraception are now available without monetary cost to almost all women who have health insurance.

Ross Douthat

Ross Douthat has changed my mind about the question of the morality of contraception. Although I am a Catholic — as is Mr. Douthat, though he's a more conservative one than I am — I had never understood why the Catholic Church proscribes contraceptives even as it also declares abortion a sin.

I don't claim to know the entire set of reasons why the Church opposes contraception, but one of the reasons seems to be the historical connection of contraception with the philosophy of eugenics.

Eugenics was a movement that proposed "a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population by excluding (through a variety of morally criticized means) certain genetic groups judged to be inferior, and promoting other genetic groups judged to be superior."

Sir Francis Galton

It began under that name in 1883 with Sir Francis Galton, "an English Victorian era statistician, progressive, polymath, sociologist, psychologist, anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, and psychometrician [who] was knighted in 1909."

The eugenics movement was co-opted in the 1930s and '40s by Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler. After the Nazis lost World War II, eugenics fell quickly out of favor in the West. But Wikipedia says:

Since the 1980s and 1990s, with new assisted reproductive technology procedures available, such as gestational surrogacy (available since 1985), preimplantation genetic diagnosis (available since 1989), and cytoplasmic transfer (first performed in 1996), fear has emerged about the possible revival of a more potent form of eugenics after decades of promoting human rights.

Clarence Thomas

Mr. Douthat alludes in his column to a recent Supreme Court dissent written by the very-right-wing justice Clarence Thomas — yet another Roman Catholic who is well known for his pro-life beliefs. Douthat writes:

Criticizing his fellow justices’ decision to block part of an Indiana law that banned abortion based on sex, race or disability, Clarence Thomas performed a public service: He brought two competing historical narratives into contact with one another, on an issue where ideological arguments often pass like trains in the night.

Margaret Sanger

The Thomas argument, common inside the pro-life movement but startling to many, is that the present “reproductive rights” regime may effectively extend older eugenic efforts to reduce populations deemed unfit. His dissent cited the eugenic inclinations of progressive icons like Margaret Sanger [founder of Planned Parenthood], while pointing out that today’s abortion rates are highest among populations — racial minorities and the disabled — that the older eugenicists hoped to cull.

Douthat extends the Thomas argument by "dividing progressive reproductive policy into three historical stages, with attitudes changing substantially but older impulses lingering in each new dispensation":

1. The eugenic period per se.
2. The population control period — with the promise that poorer communities and countries could be uplifted, not just culled, by reducing birthrates, and that such reductions would save the world from famine, plague and war.
3. The contemporary period, in which feminist arguments predominate over the male-dominated rhetoric of the previous period, and reproductive policy is understood primarily in terms of female liberty and general sexual emancipation.

Yet even in the contemporary period there is an after-image of eugenic thought, and Thomas’s point about how legal abortion appears, in the aggregate, to act in racist and eugenic ways [can] be taken as an indicator that something more than just emancipation is at work."

Says Douthat, "In practice, liberal technocracy still has a 'solve poverty by cutting birthrates' bias inherited from a population-panic age, and abortion-rights rhetoric still has a way of sliding into Malthusian fears about too many poor kids in foster care. In practice the medical system strongly encourages abortion in response to disability, with predictable results. In practice Planned Parenthood clinics are in the abortion, not the adoption business — and the disparate impact of abortion on black birthrates is shaped by that reality and others, not just by free choice.

The "disparate impact of abortion on black birthrates" is something pro-choice feminists don't have much to say about, and it's one of the reasons I'm now coming out of the closet about my true feelings about whether abortion-on-demand and, indeed, the use of contraceptives — which don't really seem to have done much to end unplanned and unwanted pregnancies — ought to be considered righteous social policy.

Contraception, Pregnancy and Abortion

Women who want to freely have sex but to avoid getting pregnant and then possibly having an abortion may find these two articles interesting:

1. "Got health insurance? Hello, birth control options!"
2. "Access to free birth control reduces abortion rates"

The first article says — with regard to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that was signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2010, sometimes referred to as "Obamacare" — that "if you have health insurance, your preferred birth control method should now be a covered benefit without any out-of-pocket expenses."

There are a couple of exceptions. Certain health insurance plans were "grandfathered in" by the terms of the ACA, such that they are allowed not to cover birth control as long as they didn't cover it before March 2010 and haven't made "significant changes" to the plan since March 2010. If you think your plan is an outdated one that might have been grandfathered in, you should call your insurance company to ask about its contraception coverage.

The other exception is that "there are special rules for employers or schools with religious objections to providing birth control coverage." Click here to find out more about that.

*****

The second article tells us that in a controlled scientific study, having access to free birth control lowered abortion rates a lot. If your health insurance pays for birth control at all — as it almost certainly does, according to the first article — it has to cover every dollar you spend on birth control, with no copays or deductibles. So, from your point of view, birth control is free.

The second article adds, "when you walk into the pharmacy to pick up a pack of pills, your receipt should say $0. Same deal when you go to a health care provider to get an IUD: $0." (An IUD is an intrauterine device that prevents pregnancy.) Also, "Plans must cover all FDA-approved birth control methods with no out-of-pocket expense. That includes implants, IUDs, the shot, the pill, the patch, the ring, diaphragms, cervical caps, and sterilization procedures."

That's of particular interest because, says the first article, IUDs and contraceptive implants are more reliable ways of preventing pregnancy than the use of birth control pills is — but if you don't have health insurance that covers them, IUDs and implants can cost you more than $800. That was then, this is now: with health insurance that covers all FDA-approved birth control methods, you can now get an IUD or a contraceptive implant at no out-of-pocket cost to you.

White Racism, Past and Present

Colbert I.
King

I for one would love to be able to say we're now living in a "post-racial" America but, alas, it just isn't so. A recent op-ed piece by Washington Post opinion writer Colbert I. King, "I used to think America would age out of racism. What was I thinking?," gives chapter and verse as to how the hope for racial equality remains unfulfilled.

King writes about:

1. The Supreme Court’s 1954 school desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education, followed five months later by protest walkouts by white students at several formerly all-white high schools and junior highs in Washington, DC.
2. White students and their families devoting the time remaining before the black students would arrive at their formerly all-white schools to finding a means to flee the city — "white flight," it was called.
3. The ill treatment suffered in 1956 by a young African American woman, Autherine Lucy, who was the first African-American student to attend the University of Alabama. Ms. Lucy was later expelled "under the guise of ensuring her personal safety."
4. The 1957 brouhaha over the admission of black students to Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, as Governor Orval Faubus declared that “blood will run in the streets” if black students attempted to enter the schoolhouse.

Back then, King, who was in his late teens, thought that such racism would "age out" over the course of time, as older whites ceded the spotlight to younger, more enlightened ones. But that's not what has happened. Instead (in King's words):

Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who shot and killed nine black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., in 2015, including the pastor and a state senator, was 21 at the time.

Holden Matthews, charged with burning three historically black churches in Louisiana a week before Easter, was 21.

John Earnest, accused of a shooting that killed one and injured three at a synagogue in Poway, Calif., a few weeks after launching an arson attack at a San Diego County mosque, was 19.

The man charged with the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh that left 11 dead was no septuagenarian; Robert Bowers was 46.

Then there are the two ninth-grade students at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda who posted an image of themselves in blackface on social media and used the n-word as they described the photo.

In an earlier op-ed, "Why is racism still thriving? Ask the enablers," King wrote about the 1984 Eastern Virginia Medical School yearbook page that showed a photo of two young men, one in blackface and the other in Ku Klux Klan garb:

The yearbook page was that of Virginia governor Ralph Northam. Northam has publicly apologized, but he has not identified either of the two men depicted, nor has he resigned from his current post as governor.

*****

Gbenga Akinnagbe

In today's Sunday edition of the Washington Post, black actor Gbenga Akinnagbe talks, in an opinion piece, "Every night, racists kill me. Then I leave the theater for a world of danger", about his experiences playing the role of Tom Robinson in the current Broadway hit adaptation of Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird. In the 1960 novel, the African American Tom Robinson is accused by Mayella Ewell, a young white woman, of having raped her. The novel's protagonist is a white attorney, Atticus Finch, who undertakes to defend Robinson at his trial. The story is narrated by the younger of the widowed Atticus's two children, nicknamed Scout, who tells the tale retrospectively, as a grown woman.

The trial of Tom Robinson is one of the central features of the story. Atticus Finch is able to demonstrate that Robinson cannot have forced himself upon Mayella, owing to the fact that he as a child lost the use of his right arm in an accident with a cotton gin. It accordingly becomes clear in the courtroom that the lonely Mayella actually was the one who made sexual advances toward Tom. Though Tom is clearly innocent of committing rape, the jury convicts him anyway. Afterward, Atticus is hopeful that he can get the verdict overturned, but the distraught Tom is shot and killed while trying to escape from prison.

A 1962 film starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch tells the same story. In both the novel and the film, Tom Robinson is portrayed as an upright-but-diffident black man. Akinnagbe's portrayal in the Broadway play, on the other hand, is of a man who "has a voice and agency that the Tom of the Harper Lee book and 1962 film did not have."

Akinnagbe loves the role, he says, finding it "often cathartic." Yet he adds that "when the play is over, I am still a black man, in this racist country, still subject to its lethal systems and structures."

*****

One of the forces driving events in our upcoming 2020 election season is indeed the fact that racist attitudes, these "lethal systems and structures," still redound to the detriment of African Americans today. As a 71-year-old white man, I know that the situation of black people in this country is hugely better today than it was when To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960. But "hugely better" is not the same as — to use the term bandied about when the first African American, Barack Obama, was elected to the presidency in 2008 — "post-racial." Since Obama finished his second (and final) term and Donald Trump was elected to replace him, we have in fact witnessed a racist backlash. White supremacy hasn't disappeared. Indeed, it is still (to borrow Colbert King's word) "thriving."

I have been watching the skirmishing among the 20-plus Democrats who are seeking their party's nomination to run against Trump in 2020. None of them has given me reason to suspect he or she is a racist. Yet none of them seems to have emphatically called forth the enthusiastic African American support that he or she may well need to defeat Trump.

One of the reasons Hillary Clinton lost to Trump in the 2016 election was that she did not do as well with black voters as Barack Obama had done in 2008 and 2012. People of color didn't come out for her in numbers as huge as those they had given to our first black president.

Almost by default, Obama's veep, Joe Biden, leads the other Democratic candidates in polls of voters of color. (The full list of candidates can be seen at "Who’s Running for President in 2020?".) According to "Black voters helped make Joe Biden the Democratic front-runner. Will they keep him there?":

In ... recent polls, Quinnipiac said Biden had 42 percent support among nonwhite Democrats. CNN put his nonwhite support at 50 percent. Biden’s closest competitor among Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters of all races, Sanders, won 14 percent of the nonwhite vote in the CNN poll and 7 percent in Quinnipiac. Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) each earned less than 10 percent of the nonwhite vote in these polls. The Hill/HarrisX and Harvard-Harris both have Biden leading Sanders by over 30 points with African American voters.

Keep in mind that Cory Booker is African American, and one of Kamala Harris's parents, her father, is a Jamaican of African descent. (Her mother is of Tamil Indian descent.) I can't really offer an explanation for why neither of those two candidates polls in the double-digit range among nonwhite voters.

It's not that I think a white Democrat, if elected to the post-2020 Oval Office, wouldn't be able to tamp down white racism at least to where it was before Trump took control. Rather, I worry that a white candidate wouldn't necessarily attract sufficient enthusiasm among people of color to amp up their voting in the November 2020 election — unless he or she makes a serious effort to call forth their support, starting now.