In which the Senator becomes a booster for the Roy Blunt wing of the national Republican Party, from rural Missouri, and reaps the whirlwind. Here is a profile of the views of Brown’s co-sponsor Senator Blunt (R-MO) from Wikipedia:
Blunt has voted pro-life in the House and has a conservative record on most other social issues. He has voted to ban partial-birth abortions and to restrict or criminalize transporting minors across state lines for the purpose of getting an abortion. He opposes federal funding for elective abortions in accordance with the Hyde Amendment. He also voted in favor of the unsuccessful Federal Marriage Amendment which sought to place a national ban on same-sex marriage, and has voted against gay adoption. He received 94 percent lifetime and 96 percent 2004 ratings from the American Conservative Union, a 14 percent rating from the American Civil Liberties Union, and a 92 percent rating from the conservative Christian Coalition.
Robert Rizzuto reports for The Republican: “Sen. Scott Brown grilled over contraception stance during campaign stop in Dracut.” MassLive has the story:
Discuss
21 Comments . Comments are closed.props to Mass Live..
For the great video…
What a sad case for a man with 2 lovely dAughters…..
Time for a Brown pledge
Because the junior senator has lost his way, can’t decide if he is a Kennedy or a Demint, has had a fundemental core meltdown, we should look for a “core values” pledge from Brown to Massachusetts voters very soon. This, of course, will clear up any confusion.
"Christian?"
How can these people, including the “Christian” coalition, continue to call themselves “Christian” when what the advocate is diametrically opposed to the teachings of Jesus, whom they claim was the son of God? I’m fed up with this hypocrisy.
I am not a Christian but I know what Jesus taught (and has been generally ignored, including by the churches) and I have tremendous respect for his teachings.
Yes, Christian
Not to repeat myself but the Gospel of John spends almost all its time emphasizing the centrality of believing in Jesus. By contrast, the passages that liberals think define Christianity are not even a majority of the teachings of the book of Matthew.
To attain coherence, Christianity requires selective reading. There is no universally mandated set of rules for what one selects and what one should weigh most heavily.
So Christianity is a religion of bigotry, hatred..
and the tolerance of the Taliban.
I don’t think so.
These “Christians” don’t even follow most of the values of the Catholic Bishops: anti death penalty, anti war, for caring for the poor and the less fortunate.
Christians
are whoever they say they are. Thinking of what it was like to be a Jew in medieval Europe, one might conclude that tolerance was a value practiced in the Ottoman Empire and, after the Enlightenment, in Europe. Before that, tolerance was thought to risk God’s wrath in the form of the plague.
It's broader than contraception---it's any service
Brown’s view is horrible, and it is not just related to contraception. It allows employers to with-hold any health care service for moral reasons.
For example, an employer can have a moral objection to surgery, and, as a result, even if an employee is injured on-the-job, there will be no coverage for surgery.
Or, an employer can have a moral objection to insertion of devices into the human body. Then, pacemakers cannot be covered.
Or, if a CEO’s religion involves faith healing, then the employees cannot get any health insurance coverage at all.
Basically, everybody is missing the boat on this discussion. It’s not about contraception. It’s not about religion. It’s about health care. It’s about giving employers the right, based upon their moral beliefs, to not offer any health insurance.
correction:
That should be: It’s about giving employers BACK the right, based upon their moral beliefs, to not offer any health insurance.
You are absolutely right that it could apply to other things too, such as surgery or pacemakers, that previously no one was forced to purchase insurance for, but now they are. We don’t know all the things that could be potentially mandated next, it’s up to HHS.
Show me one post here on BMG or anywhere from before January 2012, when Obama mandated that all employers provide free contraception, where people were outraged that employers were not required to provide free contraception coverage, or that employers were allowed to design their own plans and select what they wanted to cover.
Perhaps you have gotten used to the situation in Massachusetts, where we have had been mandated to purchase BC coverage since RomneyCare, along with IVF, sex change surgery, and all sorts of other things. I don’t think the Blunt Amendment will apply to our state mandates, which is why in New Hampshire someone has woken up and filed a similar bill there. We need one here too.
It's a Trojan Horse ...
It’s a Trojan Horse for dismantling the Affordable Care Act. A mandate means absolutely nothing if any employer can gut health insurance coverage for essentially anything based on nothing more than “moral conviction”.
This act isn’t about religion. It’s just another attempt to destroy Barack Obama — the tens of millions of Americans who will suffer as a result doesn’t matter in the slightest to these soldiers of the 1%.
Exactly righ
This entire issue is really about dismantling the Affordable Care Act. It’s not about religious freedom.
The issue is health care. Scott Brown does not want the middle class to have health insurance.
kbusch...
…there’s a reason John’s is my least favorite Gospel. The synoptics emphasize the teachings and all three have Jesus saying that the greatest commandments revolve around love. The right is at least as selective as the left, and I would argue moreso, when it comes to interpretation. The Sermon on the Mount and the parables all speak to a just society.
"the parables all speak to a just society."
What do you make of the parable of the talents? That one always seemed a bit harsh to me.
Everyone is selective...
… it’s impossible to avoid being selective given that 1) there are internal contradictions and 2) there is a lot that is morally objectionable on its face in the bible.
On the parable of talents.
I’m not a fan of how the master treated the servant who just buried the money either, but I always took the primary message as being to expand and share what you have. Here is another interpretation, which being a parable as opposed to a true story is exactly what is invited.
And Mr Lynne, you hit the nail on the head. It’s easy to forget the Bible is not one book but 66 (more for Catholics), hence the contradictions, plus the difference of time and place that leads to what we see as the morally objectionable parts.
Which makes
all of Christianity a problem, I think was his point. I highly doubt he was acting as apologist for Christianity and its selective reading of the Bible.
Once you start selecting, picking and choosing what you will and will not believe out of the Bible pretty much arbitrarily, you might as well throw out the whole thing. At least, all the magical thinking parts. (I admit there are some cool things like “do unto others as you would have done unto you” sorts of advice which can be culled out of the mysticism. But we can live by those adages quite nicely without the Bible.)
That "do unto others" part
Or “love thy neighbor as thyself” as the Bible puts it is the ESSENCE as stated BY JESUS when asked point blank what the greatest commandment is. If that’s selective interpretation then it at least as a strong argument to back it up from the Gospel texts themselves, not to mention the numerous other passages throughout the Bible that speak to a theme of social justice. Compare that to the handful of few-and-far-between verses that the Right likes to quote to prop up their worldview, but thanks to them get all the press, never mind that Jesus Himself said NOTHING about abortion or homosexuality. The great thing about the aforementioned commandment is that it is pretty much universally held and I for one never suggested (though plenty do) that Christianity has the monopoly on truth and morality. For me Christianity works and only ask that two things be acknowledged:
Christianity is not monolithic.
Many like myself are progressive precisely BECAUSE we are Christian rather than despite it.
Two parts to that ...
There were two parts, presented nearly verbatim in all three synoptics:
1. Love God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength
2. Love your neighbor as yourself
There are a great many extremists, of every persuasion, who tell themselves that they are doing part 1 when they, for example, murder those who they think besmirch their god by despoiling a holy book. Rick Santorum uses part 1 to buttress the argument he now makes against the separation of church and state.
These same extremists easily mold part 2 into their worldview by asking (along with Luke) “who is my neighbor” — they of course immediately skip over the parable of the Good Samaritan that follow in Luke.
Instead, they conclude (in not so many words) that the scapegoat(s) of the day is NOT their neighbor — whether that be (pick any of the above) (a) Muslim terrorists, (b) Jews, (c) gays, (d) liberals, (e) immigrants, (f) non-believers, (g) feminists/women, (h) blacks, (g) intellectuals, (i) Harvard professors, …
Please bear in mind that virtually every word and meme of these passages is subject to uniquely personal definition. The “God” that you love with all your … is not the same as whatever it is that others pursue. The behaviors that constitute “love” for you are not the same as the behaviors that others choose.
When a particular force can be and is used for destructive as well as instructive purposes, it is not helpful to cite that force as motivation for action — no matter what the force. With all due respect, Pascal Boyer (cultural anthropologist) argues persuasively in his “Religion Explained” that for most people and cultures, your causality is precisely backwards: Cultures and people embrace a religion because it reinforces their moral and social attitudes, not vice-versa. I’m not disputing that you may be different; I’m suggesting that it is risky to jump from the personal experience to large-scale generalization.
When a believer sincerely attempts to follow directives like these, the role of religious belief is all too often to separate that believer from the consequences of his or her actions — consequences that seem totally obvious to an outsider are sincerely opaque to the believer, because to see them is tantamount to questioning his or her own faith.
This willful decision to plunge into the world of denial and delusion, leaving reality and many would say sanity behind, is (in my view) a driving force for the motivation for the wall of separation between church and state. Rick Santorum now calls for the destruction of that wall — he literally seeks to return us to the world-view of the dark ages.
Have the Bishops of the Catholic Church announced their rejection of such lunacy? Does the religious right wing agree that Mr. Santorum is talking extremist lunacy?
I don’t argue that Christianity is monolithic and never have. I argue that the lunatics like Rick Santorum and the mob he panders to are just as representative of Christianity as you (and I, for that matter). I argue that in practice, in today’s world, extremists like Rick Santorum are what we get when we allow the camel’s nose of religion into the tent of government.
Am I the only one who is struck by the irony of simultaneous news of senior NATO officials killed for not sufficiently respecting the Koran on the same weekend that leading GOP candidate Rick Santorum says that JFK’s famous speech about the separation of church and state “makes you throw up”.
Surely we should spend rather more time focusing on the actual here-and-now realities of what religion is causing in this campaign, and rather less in abstract theological distractions about religion itself.
I, frankly, care far more about the reality that Rick Santorum is calling for the destruction of the separation of church and state, is making his own brand of religious lunacy a central part of his campaign, and is supported by the majority of self-professed GOP voters than I care about your religious beliefs or mine. We are not candidates, he is.
This delusional religious nonsense is destroying the world and destroying America. It’s time to stop the intrusion of this garbage, just like it is time to stop the class warfare that has been waged against us for decades. It is no accident that the two happen simultaneously and are practiced by the same political forces and in many cases the same individuals.
It has to stop.
I obviously reject Santorum's form of Christianity....
…and agree that his views on church/state relations are dangerous. I can’t explain how Christianity became synonymous with 1% (actually I probably could with careful analysis of the history, but doesn’t make it right), but I distinctly recall something about it being easier for a camel to get through the eye of the needle than for a rich man to enter Heavan (hyperbolic of course, but the point is made). The Good Samaritan is most obviously about comparing the actions of supposedly holy people to those of someone without such pretense (Don’t we still have “Pharisees” with us today?), but the subtext is Jesus’ deliberate choice of a Samaritan (the “other” of that time and place) as the story’s hero. The teachers of the law realized who was more neighborly; would that their modern counterparts would do likewise.
Let's not forget ...
Let’s not forget that, whether or not it’s “history”, the character who taught those parables was executed by those in power because his message was deemed too dangerous to those in power. His execution was a Roman (not Jewish) act (Romans used crucifixion; Jews used stoning). More than one scholar has observed that the movement he was creating among the Jews threatened the relatively stable accommodation Rome had made with Jerusalem. The anti-Semitic passion narratives were written decades later, when the early Christians were seeking to differentiate themselves from the Jews in order to avoid the oncoming swords of Rome.
The energy of “The Way” was radical and threatening to the 1% that held power and wealth then as now. The unholy alliance between today’s American Catholic church officials and today’s extremist GOP strikes me as similar to the similarly unholy alliance between the Rabbis of the New Testament period and Rome.
I leave it to the reader to draw conclusions or inferences about what that says about the nature of whatever religion is on display in today’s political climate.
The attempt to meld religion and state has never worked. Hence, in my opinion, the admonishment (again, repeated in all three synoptics) to “give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and give to God what belongs to God.”
Religion has no place in government.
Some thoughts...
… here:
Tom - exactly right...
…and Mr. Lynne, that is certainly some, shall we say, interesting logic, but definitely at odds with the Christianity I embrace. We can never be perfect, but if we don’t even try to follow His teachings and example, then what’s the point?
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