The Orthodox Christian writer John Couretas says what needs saying. Excerpt:

[I]s there good reason to expect that the Assembly [of Bishops] won’t become the sort of “dead body” that Abp. Iakovos feared SCOBA had become?

Nothing could reveal this more clearly than the Assembly’s non-reaction to the Jan. 20 mandate by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius that orders most employers and insurers to provide contraceptives, sterilization, and abortifacient drugs (the “morning after pill”) free of charge. In sharp contrast to the somnolent Assembly, the response from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) was swift and unequivocal.

“From a human point of view, we may be tempted to surrender, when our government places conception, pregnancy and birth under the ‘center for disease control,’ when chemically blocking conception or aborting the baby in the womb is considered a ‘right’ to be subsidized by others who abhor it,” said Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York and president of USCCB. “Not us!”

It wasn’t just a Catholic thing. Protestant and Orthodox Jewish leaders had written to the White House in late December about concerns that “the contraceptives mandate in the health insurance regulations, and about the ‘religious employer’ exemption that is so narrow that it does not protect most faith-based organizations.”

The Obama administration mandate came down just before Sanctity Sunday, on Jan. 22, and the March for Life the following day. As for these events, widely attended by Catholics, Protestants and those of other faith traditions, the “common witness” of the Assembly amounted only to silence.

That is not to say that individual hierarchs, clergy, seminarians and lay Orthodox did not turn out in numbers and show their support at the 2012 March for Life in Washington and other cities. Metropolitan Jonah of the Orthodox Church in America delivered an eloquent and Spirit-filled opening prayer in front of the U.S. Supreme Court – with Abp. Dolan at his side. On Sanctity Sunday, Bishop Demetrios of Mokissos of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Chicago, offered a thoughtful talk on the Orthodox Tradition, abortion and the death penalty at a Pan-Orthodox Sanctity of Life Vespers held in Chicago.

But:

Ultimately, what is the Assembly of Orthodox bishops communicating to our Catholic and Protestant and Jewish brothers and sisters? That their hospitals, medical clinics, schools, universities, social agencies are good enough for the Orthodox when we need them, when we want to rush a child to an emergency room. But don’t look for us when you need back up.

The Assembly of Orthodox bishops, the bearer of “unity” and “common witness” for American Orthodox Christians, simply can’t be bothered on this issue.

Read the whole thing.  Thank you, John Couretas, for this piece — and in particular, thank you for pointing out that the bishops (at least the Greek ones) are willing to be perfectly political when it comes to lobbying Washington on behalf of Greece’s interests.

UPDATE: Doug C. points out that today, the Assembly issued a statement calling on HHS to rescind this rule. Good.

Did you know you could visit the Museum of Bad Art in Boston? Lucky New Englanders! I don’t know how anything could best (worst?) “Sunday on the Pot with George,” but a friend who is a connoisseur of such things tells me that the most treasured canvas at the museum is the portrait featured in this spectacularly hathotic Rebbie Jackson video. I warn you, reader, that this video is the audiovisual equivalent of Vogon poetry. Don’t come back and tell me I didn’t prepare you people.

Ross Douthat has a good entry in our collective attempts to understand by analogy what the HHS rule would do to Catholic hospitals and institutions:

Drum asks us to envision a Muslim-run hospital that required its employees to bind themselves to Shariah law. But the analogy is hopelessly flawed, because the typical Catholic hospital doesn’t require its employees to follow Catholic doctrine in their personal lives — on sexual matters or anything else. The Church isn’t asking for the right to fire an employee for missing Mass on Sunday or for coveting his neighbor’s wife. It just doesn’t want its institutions to be legally required to pay for acts that it considers immoral, as the price of running hospitals at all. (Or to pay for them directly, since obviously an employee could use their paycheck to buy any produce or service they so chose.) This isn’t the equivalent of a hypothetical Muslim hospital demanding, say, that all its employees permanently abstain from pork and alcohol and premarital sex. It’s the equivalent of a hypothetical Muslim hospital declining to stock Playboy in its gift shop, or serve pork and alcohol in its cafeteria.

Abortion is a dirty business. Even if you believe it should be legal, it’s still a dirty business. It’s no surprise, then, that the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation, which focuses on breast cancer, backed away from its financial support of  the abortion-providing Planned Parenthood. There is no reason why breast cancer funding should be mixed up in the dirty money from the practice of extinguishing unborn human life. Abortion is legal, and will probably always be legal, but it’s becoming ever more stigmatized. Good.

But the Komen foundation is taking it on the chin. From the NYT story linked to above:

News of Komen’s decision galvanized many of Planned Parenthood’s supporters. The organization had collected $400,000 in donations by mid-afternoon on Wednesday and hoped the flow would continue long enough to replace Komen’s entire annual grants of $700,000, Ms. Laguens said. Komen supporters accuse Planned Parenthood of milking Komen’s decision to generate a fund-raising bonanza.

“Why are they going nuts?” Mr. Raffaelli [the Komen president] asked rhetorically. “And the answer is that they want to raise money, and they’re doing it at the expense of a humanitarian organization that shares their goals and has given them millions of dollars over the years.”

I don’t see what the problem is here. Komen is a breast cancer organization whose good work in that area was being sullied by its involvement with the nation’s largest abortion provider. Planned Parenthood’s supporters have stepped up to fill in the financial gap. I can understand why this ticks off Planned Parenthood’s supporters, but it seems to me that Komen can better fulfill its particular mission by disassociating itself with an abortion provider — especially as the stigma against abortion (which is not the same thing as support for outlawing it) grows.

I was listening to this story on NPR yesterday about  the current politics of abortion, and it made me rethink my position on something. A number of social conservatives, myself included, have a habit of saying that the Republican Party has done nothing for the pro-life cause except use pro-lifers as political shock troops in election years. Well, that doesn’t seem to be true. We tend to think this because abortion is still legal. But is that really a fair evaluation? If NPR’s reporting is accurate, there has been a slow but steady incremental rollback of abortion at the margins. Efforts to outlaw abortion have come to naught, but providing abortions has become more difficult because of regulatory imposition. This is because of politics. The abortion rate has been declining for some time, though it hit a plateau last year.

The point I wish to make here is that pro-choicers do have a point: electing pro-life Republicans has made a difference. We pro-lifers ought to consider the possibility that we have made the perfect the enemy of the practical good. And we should consider stepping up our support for crisis pregnancy centers and other organizations that provide real support for women who choose life. If we want them to choose life, we should make it easier for them to make that choice.

Look who’s home! Tintin is back from the dead. I bought this watch in the Netherlands in 1996. Tintin fans will recognize this as a scene from “The Blue Lotus.” When I first bought the watch, the blue tint was intense. Sunlight has washed it out over the years, but it’s still beautiful, I think. I haven’t been able to wear this watch for a couple of years, because something went wrong with it mechanically.

Ah, but I sent it recently to one of this here blog’s readers, a master horologist who own’s Anthony’s Clocks in Durham, NC. She made Tintin work again, and sent him home in fine condition. I’m so happy! And I’m very pleased indeed to recommend Anthony’s to you for your horological needs. We mail-ordered an unusual clock from Anthony’s for a Christmas gift for our son Matthew, who is going through a horology phase now, and it was his favorite present. In my experience, you can trust Anthony’s to do excellent work, quickly, and to deal with you honestly. Those people have proper theology and geometry, is what I’m saying. Sorry if this sounds like a commercial, but I’m so happy to have this watch back, and I’m always pleased to tell others when I’ve had a good experience with business.

Anthony’s Clocks, 2022 S Miami Blvd, Durham, NC 27703.  

… might be Garrison Keillor’s notorious evisceration of Bernard-Henri Levy’s Tocquevillian travelogue. But I’m putting my money on Alan Jacobs’ takedown of “The Collected Works of Kahlil Gibran.” Here’s how it starts:

Expansive and yet vacuous is the prose of Kahlil Gibran,
And weary grows the mind doomed to read it.
The hours of my penance lengthen,
The penance established for me by the editor of this magazine,
And those hours may be numbered as the sands of the desert.
And for each of them Kahlil Gibran has prepared
Another ornamental phrase,
Another faux-Biblical cadence,
Another affirmation proverbial in its intent
But alas! lacking the moral substance,
The peasant shrewdness, of the true proverb.

O Book, O Collected Works of Kahlil Gibran,
Published by Everyman’s Library on a dark day,
I lift you from the Earth to which I recently flung you
When my wrath grew too mighty for me,
I lift you from the Earth,
Noticing once more your annoying heft,
And thanking God—though such thanks are sinful—
That Kahlil Gibran died in New York in 1931
At the age of forty-eight,
So that he could write no more words,
So that this Book would not be yet larger than it is

Read the whole thing. 

Warning: this post is NSFW. This link takes you to an interview with an anonymous psychotherapist who is contributing to the Gawker site. There’s some gross stuff on there — hence the NSFW warning — but this is the part I found interesting for my readership. The therapist says he finds what follows to be a more shocking part of his work than the time he treated a sociopathic rapist, and the instance in which a patient confessed to bestial longings:

I treat many teenagers and, as a father myself, I can’t help but be appalled at the way these kids talk to their parents—and to most authority, for that matter. They have this idea that their life is not a success if it doesn’t live up to some absurd pop cultural standard. Teens today are over-sexualized and starting at a younger age and, in my opinion, the cultural obsession with substance use is out of control. I’ve seen Oxycontin and Percocet destroy so many lives with such rapidity. It is mind-boggling. And kids don’t see that it f**ked up 20 of their friends’ lives, so chances are it will grab a hold of them. I had a patient who was a football star who is now serving time for armed robbery. These drugs transcend cultural, gender, and socio-economic constructs. For the sensitive types, I want to make it clear that there are exceptions to every rule—many of them, perhaps—but it’s the enormity of this one that I always find shocking.

If you are worth $250 million, and you are likely to be the GOP’s nominee for president, you shouldn’t say things like, “I don’t care about the very poor.” Greg Forster:

Mitt Romney continues to follow his campaign strategy based on emulating Mr. Collins by once again saying the very worst thing you can say. It’s like watching ten or twenty years of hard-won progress in teaching the people who understand economics how not to talk about poverty go right down the drain in front of your eyes.

This is not really about substance, this is about language. But language matters. A lot! People use stories to organize their lives. One of their stories is that good people care about the poor and bad people don’t. It’s a good story! (In fact, you can read about it in a good book.)

From the Discovery Institute:

A bill approved today by the Indiana Senate to allow the teaching of creationism in public schools is being criticized as bad science education by Discovery Institute, the nation’s leading intelligent design think tank.

If made law, Indiana Senate Bill 89 (SB89) would allow creationism, a religious view on the origin of species, into the Hoosier state’s biology classrooms.  In 1987, the Supreme Court struck down similar legislation as an unconstitutional establishment of religion.  Instead of scrapping SB89 in deference to legal precedent, the Indiana Senate has amended the bill to allow more religious views on origins, as if more religion could cure the original problem.

“Instead of injecting religion into biology classes, legislators should be working to promote the inclusion of more science,” said Joshua Youngkin, a law and policy analyst at Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture. “There are plenty of scientific criticisms of Darwin’s theory today, and science students should be able to hear about them, not about religion.”

This story from Indiana is wild. A Democratic state senator inserted into the bill a requirement that the state’s public schools teach not only the Biblical creation story, but creation stories from other religions too. To be clear, the Democrat doesn’t really endorse this. She thinks, rightly , that the whole thing is unconstitutional, but she wanted to make a worthwhile point about the folly of teaching religious doctrine as science. Snarks Greg Laden:

So, science teachers in Indiana, I have a question for you: Which three weeks of science do you want to cut out of your syllabus to make room for a discussion of worlds built on turtles and goat herders walking down the Milky Way at the beginning of time? Oh, and don’t forget to include the origin story I found in the Congo in which the beginning of humanity is associated with a particularly ribald sex act. That would be cool.