Sarah Posner reported on this back in August 2012.
Rcent disclosures by the Department of Justice reveal that the Obama administration has continued a policy, first put in place by the Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush Justice Department, of granting faith-based recipients of taxpayer dollars certificates of exemption from federal laws prohibiting religious discrimination in employment by such organizations receiving federal funds.
The Washington Post reports on That Letter. (Yes I’m going to run this to death. You bet I am. Those smug sanctimonious pieces of shit – we need to push back.)
Fourteen prominent faith leaders — including some of President Obama’s closest advisers — want the White House to create a religious exemption from his planned executive order banning federal contractors from discriminating against gays and lesbians in hiring.
A letter to the White House, sent Tuesday and made public Wednesday, includes the signatures of Michael Wear, faith director for Obama’s 2012 campaign; Stephen Schneck, a leader of Catholic outreach in 2012; and Florida megapastor Joel Hunter, whom Obama has described as a close spiritual counselor.
The letter from the “faith leaders” to Obama is full of the usual oily empty bafflegab to dress up the fact that they’re asking him to let them discriminate against a set of people for no good reason.
Americans have always disagreed on important issues, but our ability to live with our diversity is part of what makes this country great, and it continues to be essential even in this 21st century. This ability is essential in light of our national conversation on political and cultural issues related to sexuality. We have and will continue to communicate on these broader issues to our congregations, our policymakers and our nation, but we focus here on the importance of a religious exemption in your planned executive order disqualifying organizations that do not hire LGBT Americans from receiving federal contracts. This religious exemption would be comparable to what was included in the Senate version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which passed the Senate with a strong, bipartisan vote. [Read more…]
Well of course they have.
Just one day after the Supreme Court’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., 14 faith leaders have written a letter to President Obama, asking him to include a religious exemption in his planned executive order barring hiring discrimination based on sexual orientation by federal contractors.
That’s Sarah Posner at Religion Dispatches.
The Washington Post’s Michelle Boorstein reports that a group of faith leaders — including a former staffer on President Obama’s campaign and in his Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships — have asked Obama to create a religious exemption so that “an extension of protection for one group not come at the expense of faith communities whose religious identities and beliefs motivate them to serve those in need.”
Wait wait wait wait. This was two months ago.
What the hell happened to her after that??
Update: Ok well I rushed this post before watching the whole short video, bad bad me. She hasn’t changed all that much. After a surprising beginning she says
Now I know people are going to leave me comments on this video saying how men on YouTube also get a lot of hate too, and I’m not trying to be a feminist, I never have said that, but be honest, I mean when’s the last time you’ve ever seen a man accused of sleeping their way to the top or when you’ve seen a man on YouTube be told that their videos are great on mute and they make great fapping material, come on.
Now I know I probably just made this sound awful but ladies who are out there listening to this, don’t leave me alone, make videos, speak your mind, because honestly, it’ll be harder to criticize whenever an outspoken woman is not such a rarity. I will support you, tweet me your videos, I will share them.
One: she should get a clue about what feminism actually is so that she can stop saying stupid things about feminism.
Two: she should get a clue about the outspoken atheist women who already are outspokenly speaking out so that she can stop claiming to be alone. She should also get a clue that videos are not the only possible medium for being outspoken; writing is also a fine old tradition, and many of us actually prefer reading to watching videos, because it’s much quicker and we can do it at our own pace instead of the video personality’s pace. She should also think hard about what her patron has done to drive outspoken women out of atheism.
I’ve posted a lot about Irish industrial “schools” but not much about the Canadian version. That was negligent. From CTV News last January:
For the past year and a half, lawyer Fay Brunning has been fighting to get the federal government to hand over documents about the St. Anne’s residential school.
It’s a school that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and a judge described as having the worst cases of abuse out of any residential school in Canada. Brunning, who represents survivors, says they were taken away from their parents at age five or six for 10 months a year. They were forced to eat vomit, subjected to sexual and physical abuse and put in an electric chair.
Ok so sports are mostly sex-divided – women and men mostly don’t play on the same teams, and when they do the word “mixed” is attached. There are moves to erode this at least in schools, and that’s a good thing. But humans are mildly sexually dimorphic, so one can see that there are reasons for sports to be dimorphic also.
Sports, but not games. Games don’t need to be dimorphic.
A user on Reddit’s Hearthstone community yesterday shared this image—from an announcement pagefor a Hearthstone qualifier taking place during Finland’s Assembly Summer 2014. What made “Karuta’s” post notable was a single, highlighted sentence: “The participation is open only to Finnish male players.”
That is, to state the obvious, a strange requirement for a Hearthstone tournament; and it makes the qualifier’s organisers, the Finnish eSports Federation, seem like childish boys in a treehouse, hanging a “no girls allowed” sign on their front door. Only, the qualifier is for for the IeSF World Championship, and it’s this global event that has stipulated the all-male line-up.
Michael Nugent and Leah Libresco talk about the latter’s conversion from atheism to Catholicism, and what moral realism has to do with it.
More nostalgia – May 21 2012 when the bishops announced their lawsuit against the administration. Catholic News Service was there, slavering.
The Archdiocese of New York, headed by Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., headed by Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the University of Notre Dame, and 40 other Catholic dioceses and organizations around the country announced on Monday that they are suing the Obama administration for violating their freedom of religion, which is guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution.
The US Conference of Catholic Bishops – which aspires to tell the secular government what to do, and has much success in doing just that – has a campaign for religious libery, by which of course it means the USCCB’s liberty to tell everyone else what to do. It’s pushing for a “Health care conscience rights act” – and we all know what they mean by that. They want Congress to make it a law that they have a “right” to refuse to do their jobs if that involves medical treatments they choose to have “religious” objections to. They have a fact sheet on the subject.
The right of religious liberty, the First Freedom
guaranteed by our Constitution, includes a right to
provide and receive health care without being required to
violate our most fundamental beliefs.
No it does not. No no no. That is not a right. There is no “right” to practice medicine while refusing to do part of the job because of your made-up religious scruples. The right that matters here is the right to get medical treatment on equal terms with everyone else. There’s no “right” to refuse to serve people of color or LGBT people or women, for example. There’s no “right” to refuse to perform abortions or dispense contraceptives. [Read more…]