What We're Reading This Morning -- June 11
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Good morning, everyone! Because I’m still depressed over the Boston Celtics loss in Game 7 of the NBA Eastern Conference Finals, we’re going to skip straight to the clips. Here’s what we’re reading this morning….
Planned Parenthood Action Fund President Cecile Richards says Mitt Romney is out of touch and simply dangerous to women’s health. “Planned Parenthood President: Romney ‘Off The Reservation’ On Women’s Health Issues” – “PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Planned Parenthood Action Fund President Cecile Richards on Friday unloaded on Mitt Romney, painting the GOP presidential nominee as an extremist on women’s reproductive rights.. ‘In the next five months, the offensive you should go on is Mitt Romney’s own statements about what he would do to women’s health care if he was elected president,’ Richards told a small group of progressive bloggers and activists at Netroots Nation. ‘There’s just no way to overstate how little people know what’s going on.’ Richards said that, compared to Mitt Romney, John McCain is a ‘mainstream moderate’ on women’s issues. To have the Republican presidential nominee go on record saying ‘we’re going to get rid of Planned Parenthood…is just so far off the reservation,’ she said.”
With the Supreme Court expected to make a decision on the Affordable Care Act, many are wondering what will happen to health care. “Health Care After the Supreme Court Ruling” – “Later this month, the Supreme Court will rule on the Obama administration’s health care law, the Affordable Care Act, deciding whether to uphold or strike down the entire law, or to keep some provisions… Even if the law is struck down entirely — which could happen if the court decides that the other provisions are too intertwined with the mandate — many experts say that some changes the law has already set in motion will continue, probably more slowly, but possibly at a more urgent pace in reaction to the elimination of the federal law. ‘It would have less effect in the short term than most people might think, but it would have much more of a psychological and political effect,’ said Gail Wilensky, a health economist who headed Medicare and Medicaid during the administration of the elder President Bush. She suggested that, while the individual mandate seems vulnerable to being ruled unconstitutional, striking down the entire law seems ‘highly unlikely, and to my way of thinking, highly undesirable, because I think it’s unnecessary.’”
Attacks on women’s health continue from the Catholic Church. “The Catholic Contraction” – “Sadly, it’s the church that’s looking unhinged these days. The Vatican was apparently just warming up in 2010 when it declared, astonishingly, that ordaining females into the all-male Catholic priesthood would be a ’grave sin’ on par with even pedophilia. Since then, as if scapegoating women for the escalating dissent among Catholics toward its hoary dogma, the church seems to have embarked on a misogynist’s crusade. Its legal assault on the Obama Administration’s requirement that Catholic institutions like colleges and hospitals make contraception available to female employees as part of their health coverage is, ultimately, less about religious freedom than about women’s freedom. Then there’s the U.S. bishops’ absurd probe of whether the Girl Scouts are selling feminist theology as well as fattening thin mints — and Rome’s accusation of ‘radical feminism’ within the Leadership Conference on Women Religious (LCWR), which represents most of the U.S. nuns doing genuinely Christ-inspired work with the poor and the sick.”
