Rush Limbaugh, as far back as 1989, named his fans “dittoheads”, though he is the chief dittohead himself. I’ve been listening to Limbaugh since 1996, when he played a role in a book I was writing, Campaign America ‘96: The View From the Couch, a book on the Clinton-Dole presidential race, from the consumer, not the producer, side. Happily, when I finished the book, I didn’t have to listen to him anymore and I stopped, except, occasionally over the years, when I turned him on while driving through radio-deprived areas of the country, where the only thing you could find were evangelical programs or Rush. None of my cars had the new satellite connections, where all stations are possible.
I am an absolute free-speech advocate for a variety of reasons. Though there are many people I would like to be able to shut up, let them all blather on is my attitude and that includes Rush. The transactions here are complicated. I grew up with George Carlin’s “Seven Dirty Words” you couldn’t say on the radio, much less the TV. In 1978 the Supreme Court decided F.C.C. v. Pacifica Foundation in favor of censorship (aka regulation) in a 5-4 decision. Sound familiar? 5-4 is the current far-right censoring vote on the Roberts Court.
Now it’s Erectile Dysfunction ads on all the channels and what is on Cable is anyone’s delight or cause for dismay. OK, back to Rush. After my campaign book appeared I was on the Michael Feldman show, Whad’Ya Know? Feldman, a funny guy, was miffed I seemed sympathetic at times to Rush (and not to him, a misreading) and I replied, “I have a soft spot for overweight overachievers,” and Feldman shot back, “Oh, and not underweight underachievers?” Feldman is skinny. Rush, of course, is a big fat pig.
The young Rush had been the underachiever of a substantial mid-Missouri family, the almost ne’er-do-well son with successful siblings. Rush’s biggest job back then was working PR for the Kansas City Royals. He was one bloated bumpkin. Then he got on the radio and found his fortune and his shtick: finally an overachiever! When I caught up with him in 1996 he was close to the zenith of his influence. Bill Clinton had energized him, along with Newt Gingrich, the contract on America, etc., the first rising of the New Republican Party, the one that has now reached its apotheosis in 2012.
By the time I was on the Feldman show Rush had gone into eclipse and, as I told my host, that was cyclical: Rush would wax and wane. The waning included his drug scandal in 2003. A number of media figures have survived these life-style scandals (such as Bill O’Reilly), and Rush did too. His subsequent hearing problems seemed punishment enough to the general public. Now he’s been waxing again, during these crackpot months of the Republican primaries. But once again he’s gone too far.
Or so many think. I’m not for silencing people. Let Rush say what he wants. Let the people see it, hear it – judge it. Rush is listened to, mainly, by white guys who drive a lot, salesmen, truck drivers, God knows who? (And God and the ratings people do know.) Dittoheads. When Rush’s current victim, Sandra Fluke, expressed surprise that it seemed “acceptable in today’s society to say these things about women,” one wonders where’s she’s been the last twenty years.
Rush was doing his best to be clever, lecturing the “feminazis” (one of his earliest coinages which he employed during his current remarks) on the notion that free contraception was payment for having sex and he used the words “slut” and “prostitute” to insult Ms. Fluke. (Then he continued, really letting his id out, imagining videos on You Tube.) What struck me, hearing reports on what he said (I, thankfully, was not listening to Rush) was that was just what many others were calling sexually active women lately, given the debate over contraception waged by the Catholic Bishops, Virginia lawmakers, and the Republican candidates, especially Rick Santorum. Or, at least, what was implied, the unspoken words that traveled under the conversation, not above, except in the case of Limbaugh. Again, let free speech reign, let us hear what they really think.
The last First Amendment case I wrote about (in The Nation and elsewhere) was Barnes v. Glen Theatre, which was about go-go dancers in strip bars claiming that their dancing should be granted protection as speech. I agreed, but not the Rehnquist Court, which, in 1991, decided 5-4 (again!) in favor of police power, rather than artistic expression. Rehnquist wrote the majority opinion, but the swing vote then was Justice Souter, who held that Indiana’s (the case started in South Bend, of all places) statute helped prevent secondary effects, such as prostitution. Souter was more or less calling the dancers prostitutes, not to say sluts. But that was the implication. Since Ms. Fluke is a law student at Georgetown she should look up the case. If only one of the dancers had ended her routine making the black power fist, the Court would have been stymied.
Just as the public has profited from seeing the slap-stick show of the Republican primary candidates, it actually helps to see what men like Rush Limbaugh actually think – when he can be said to think. Sunlight is still the best disinfectant.
Showing posts with label Catholic Bishops. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Catholic Bishops. Show all posts
Friday, March 9, 2012
Friday, February 24, 2012
Contraception Wars and Woes
I share at least one attribute of the Catholic Bishops, now at war with the Obama administration: I don’t want to talk about contraception, either.
I’ve taught for over three decades at the university which some characterize as the place where the American Catholic Church “does it’s thinking.” Well, here are some thoughts on the matter. The first is the one above: the Catholic Bishops are really put out, miffed, because they don’t want to talk about contraception, but the Obama administration, allegedly, has forced their hands.
The Bishops don’t mind talking about abortion. They find some purchase on that topic, some sympathy with the larger American public, along with a good many of the “faithful”. Indeed, most everyone wants the number of abortions decreased to as close to zero as possible. But a debate over contraception puts the Bishops in another place altogether.
Had the Obama administration announced their “compromise” first, rather than second, after a bit of clerical harrumphing, the issue may have left the public square and gone away. Indeed, more than half the states, as it’s been pointed out, already have similar mandates, and Catholic universities and hospitals have been dispensing “birth control” for a variety of reasons for many years.
It’s not clear whether the Obama administration took this strategy – getting the Bishops all exercised – deliberately, or accidently, by mishandling the policy rollout. Regardless, it’s out there now. The Bishops don’t want to talk about contraception, because it puts a spotlight on one of the Church’s least defensible, and most paradoxical, strictures.
Oh, it can be defended alright: as a matter of faith. A show of loyalty demanded of the flock, an act of hazing and abnegation, aka sacrifice. My generation wasn’t to eat meat on Fridays, though this dietary no-no eventually just went away. But religions require this sort of thing on the part of their co-religionists; the secular version pops up in the news now and then when fraternity members die because their hazing rituals had become too intense.
And speaking against contraception in the 21st century makes the Bishops look anti-science. Catholics are not anti-science, though a number of their evangelical supporters certainly are. It puts Catholics in a crowd that they don’t necessarily want to be in: All those anti-evolutionary troglodytes scraping their knuckles on the ground, the we-don’t-descend-from-apes crowd.
Whenever the word “abortifacient” is uttered, the attack-on-science banner is raised. We’re down to molecules and bio-chemistry at that point. But, it is an attempt to drag contraception onto safer ground, or, at least, ground they have captured, the well-tilled anti-abortion fields.
But another important, but hardly mentioned, reason the Bishops don’t want to talk about contraception is it makes them talk about themselves, which highlights, in the starkest ways, the all-male hierarchy of the Catholic Church and its women problem. The control of women. And the Bishops did not want to get into any of that, since it is obvious to all that a totally male clergy, saddled with a vow of celibacy, wants its parishioners to be like them, mostly celibate, however preposterous that sounds today. Abortion, however, lets the Bishops talk about two people, one of whom might be male.
The pro-abortion movement has been saddled with a all-too-focused name. It’s actually a pro-woman movement, insofar it was always women who took the lead to change the laws of the land. The pro-“life” anti-abortion movement, began as a male-dominated movement and male figures are featured most prominently still. You should have seen the odious figures who showed up at Notre Dame when President Obama’s commencement speech was announced: Alan Keyes and Randall Terry, grubbing for attention (which they got).
Since the early 70s and the passage of Roe v. Wade the term Catholic Right has been more or less coined. Back when I originally published The Harrisburg 7 and the New Catholic Left–there is a new edition with a fresh Afterword out – what was new was the Catholic Left. There had been the old Dorothy Day Catholic Left, but the anti-war priests and nuns of the Vietnam period were the New.
They were in opposition to the Bishops back then, too; but the Catholic Church wasn’t thought of as the “Right” back then. The Bishops were, of course, that, but then there was no need for labels. But over the decades a Catholic Right was created, or, rather, more pertinently, a religious right was hatched, to try to ecumenically turn back the progressive impulses that reared their multiple heads throughout the period. The Catholic Bishops being the repository of authority does not go unchallenged, as Gary Gutting effectively points out.
Natural law, of course, is full of contraception. Garry Wills goes into the theological background of “natural law,“ but I prefer a more pragmatic approach: Fertilized eggs are lost in the thousands, if not millions, world-wide by couples trying to get pregnant. (There is always a poignance in the case of couples trying to get pregnant and the majority who are trying to avoid it, or those who become pregnant at the drop of a hat.) And Natural law also includes the ever-present, it seems, tried-and-true, centuries old, methods of birth control that include famine, pestilence, natural disasters; and, in place of abortion, we have infanticide. You see where all this sort of logic can lead.
Catholics have wrestled with contraception and the Church’s teachings on it over the decades, generation by generation. The younger generation seems to be wrestling less, given the advances in the methods of contraception now available. One of my sisters (I’m from a family of eight children) got birth control pills back in the 1960s when the doses involved would choke a horse (or, at least, make a horse infertile), because of her “irregular” periods, before she went off to a nunnery for a couple of years.
My mother, at the same time, had three painful, late miscarriages in a row, after having her eighth child, when a friendly priest finally permitted her to use birth control, saying she had brought enough Catholic children into the world. Such stories of my mother’s generation are legion – and often heartrending.
But, enough. Religion may no longer be the opiate of the people, but it is certainly the father – not the mother – of all political wedge issues.
I’ve taught for over three decades at the university which some characterize as the place where the American Catholic Church “does it’s thinking.” Well, here are some thoughts on the matter. The first is the one above: the Catholic Bishops are really put out, miffed, because they don’t want to talk about contraception, but the Obama administration, allegedly, has forced their hands.
The Bishops don’t mind talking about abortion. They find some purchase on that topic, some sympathy with the larger American public, along with a good many of the “faithful”. Indeed, most everyone wants the number of abortions decreased to as close to zero as possible. But a debate over contraception puts the Bishops in another place altogether.
Had the Obama administration announced their “compromise” first, rather than second, after a bit of clerical harrumphing, the issue may have left the public square and gone away. Indeed, more than half the states, as it’s been pointed out, already have similar mandates, and Catholic universities and hospitals have been dispensing “birth control” for a variety of reasons for many years.
It’s not clear whether the Obama administration took this strategy – getting the Bishops all exercised – deliberately, or accidently, by mishandling the policy rollout. Regardless, it’s out there now. The Bishops don’t want to talk about contraception, because it puts a spotlight on one of the Church’s least defensible, and most paradoxical, strictures.
Oh, it can be defended alright: as a matter of faith. A show of loyalty demanded of the flock, an act of hazing and abnegation, aka sacrifice. My generation wasn’t to eat meat on Fridays, though this dietary no-no eventually just went away. But religions require this sort of thing on the part of their co-religionists; the secular version pops up in the news now and then when fraternity members die because their hazing rituals had become too intense.
And speaking against contraception in the 21st century makes the Bishops look anti-science. Catholics are not anti-science, though a number of their evangelical supporters certainly are. It puts Catholics in a crowd that they don’t necessarily want to be in: All those anti-evolutionary troglodytes scraping their knuckles on the ground, the we-don’t-descend-from-apes crowd.
Whenever the word “abortifacient” is uttered, the attack-on-science banner is raised. We’re down to molecules and bio-chemistry at that point. But, it is an attempt to drag contraception onto safer ground, or, at least, ground they have captured, the well-tilled anti-abortion fields.
But another important, but hardly mentioned, reason the Bishops don’t want to talk about contraception is it makes them talk about themselves, which highlights, in the starkest ways, the all-male hierarchy of the Catholic Church and its women problem. The control of women. And the Bishops did not want to get into any of that, since it is obvious to all that a totally male clergy, saddled with a vow of celibacy, wants its parishioners to be like them, mostly celibate, however preposterous that sounds today. Abortion, however, lets the Bishops talk about two people, one of whom might be male.
The pro-abortion movement has been saddled with a all-too-focused name. It’s actually a pro-woman movement, insofar it was always women who took the lead to change the laws of the land. The pro-“life” anti-abortion movement, began as a male-dominated movement and male figures are featured most prominently still. You should have seen the odious figures who showed up at Notre Dame when President Obama’s commencement speech was announced: Alan Keyes and Randall Terry, grubbing for attention (which they got).
Since the early 70s and the passage of Roe v. Wade the term Catholic Right has been more or less coined. Back when I originally published The Harrisburg 7 and the New Catholic Left–there is a new edition with a fresh Afterword out – what was new was the Catholic Left. There had been the old Dorothy Day Catholic Left, but the anti-war priests and nuns of the Vietnam period were the New.
They were in opposition to the Bishops back then, too; but the Catholic Church wasn’t thought of as the “Right” back then. The Bishops were, of course, that, but then there was no need for labels. But over the decades a Catholic Right was created, or, rather, more pertinently, a religious right was hatched, to try to ecumenically turn back the progressive impulses that reared their multiple heads throughout the period. The Catholic Bishops being the repository of authority does not go unchallenged, as Gary Gutting effectively points out.
Natural law, of course, is full of contraception. Garry Wills goes into the theological background of “natural law,“ but I prefer a more pragmatic approach: Fertilized eggs are lost in the thousands, if not millions, world-wide by couples trying to get pregnant. (There is always a poignance in the case of couples trying to get pregnant and the majority who are trying to avoid it, or those who become pregnant at the drop of a hat.) And Natural law also includes the ever-present, it seems, tried-and-true, centuries old, methods of birth control that include famine, pestilence, natural disasters; and, in place of abortion, we have infanticide. You see where all this sort of logic can lead.
Catholics have wrestled with contraception and the Church’s teachings on it over the decades, generation by generation. The younger generation seems to be wrestling less, given the advances in the methods of contraception now available. One of my sisters (I’m from a family of eight children) got birth control pills back in the 1960s when the doses involved would choke a horse (or, at least, make a horse infertile), because of her “irregular” periods, before she went off to a nunnery for a couple of years.
My mother, at the same time, had three painful, late miscarriages in a row, after having her eighth child, when a friendly priest finally permitted her to use birth control, saying she had brought enough Catholic children into the world. Such stories of my mother’s generation are legion – and often heartrending.
But, enough. Religion may no longer be the opiate of the people, but it is certainly the father – not the mother – of all political wedge issues.
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