Historic Beginnings of American Culture War – Philadelphia – 1970s

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I had a nightmare last night.  I dreamt that State Senator Martin P. Mullen had come back from hell to inflict more inhumane legislation on not only the people of Pennsylvania but the whole planet. 


I don’t know how the culture war in America took shape in various other parts of the country, but like New Hampshire where the shot heard round the world that supposedly started our American Revolution, the culture war in America has no better historic model than Philadelphia and Pennsylvania in the 1970s.


I drift back forty years to the point where I, as an eighteen year old, decided that I did not want to hear anymore boiler plate sermons about Satan from the local priest in Philadelphia and I never set foot in that church again. 


All around me was a world where the War in Vietnam was wrapped in a flag.  That fucking war was so important to all the middle aged losers who hated their lives and had served so faithfully and or really had no choice but serve in World War Two.  


The basic cultural war in the minds of Philadelphians then, if you were young, was if your draft number would come up and you would have to serve, fight in a war that made absolutely no logical sense.  


On another level, there was the creeping fear that blacks would try to cross the invisible border, south on Lehigh Avenue, and try to invade your beautiful turn of the century row house paradise, built for factory workers.  


Oh there were factories in the neighborhood, and they employed blacks, but in retrospect I can remember all the blacks lined up at the 5 bus stop after work waiting to get back to wherever it was that they lived outside our perfect white lower middle class bubble existence.  In retrospect, the image of Apartheid comes to mind and is superimposed on those distant scenes. 


I have seen or heard comments from people who lived there at the same time.  The thing that destroyed Philly, they usually say, was “Section 8” housing, which is of course code talk for racism and welfare. 


In a way, the inability of people to recognize and love your neighbor is what destroyed that old Currier & Ives idealized brain image of the slums where I grew up in Kensington - Harrowgate in Philly. 


Where was I? Oh yes, the war, the blacks and yeah Vatican II.  Well Vatican II did not change anything in a neighborhood of mixed Irish and I-talian catholics.  Oh there were protestants out there.  We saw their churches dotting the landscape.  Never saw who entered those houses of worship on Sundays.  Didn’t care.  The predominant local culture was of Irish Catholic factory workers and Irish Catholic churches and schools. 



In a way, my parents were intelligent, and liberal.  They got into the ideal that blacks should have equal rights.  But somewhere along the timeline, people like my parents got scared about what they saw on the tube with black militant groups, war protestors and the rapid decline of a normal society into chaos around 1968.  They never told me directly but my so called liberal parents voted for George Wallace in 1968,  I figured that out later along the timeline. 


I guess I stayed there, going along my own liberal timeline, and did not realize how secular I was and in relation to terms of also being a Catholic from birth.  Did not feel the difference until they shot Martin Luther King. 


I can remember to this day, the priest Father Locke, freshly minted from the seminary, stumbling for words, almost apologetically, from the pulpit that next Sunday, stating something to the effect that he did not know if it would be proper but would not forbid personal prayers for a Protestant (after all, only Catholics go to heaven- your prayers are probably wasted on him), for the slain civil rights leader.  Huh?


It was there that I got the clue that maybe Catholics were not really Christians like people like MLK who called themselves Christian.  Christian was not a word I heard often in the first eighteen years of a Catholic life.  I heard the word but in conjunction with other words like Christian Doctrine etc. 


(An aside - Reminds me of my own Irish Catholic joke I told to a former boss in the 1980s, also Irish Catholic – “I was twenty-one before I realized that Protestant and bastard were two separate words.” – My boss howled in laughter.) 


Oh yeah, getting back to Vatican II, I wrote some thoughts on that in my earliest blogs here, but let me get to the point and back to my nightmare about the late great Martin Mullen of the Pennsylvania State Legislature. 


Pennsylvania on a map may look like an east coast type of place.  But like the famous political advisor said and is quoted.  “Pennsylvania isPhiladelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between.”  I have already shared a few thoughts above on my cosmopolitan cultural upbringing in Philly. There was that other thing, the sex thing and the RC church confusion about birth control. 


Paul VI brought out his Zero Tolerance document on birth control.  Like all life in general, most of us just stumbled into ways of dealing with our own individual sexuality.  (No user manual necessary.)


The cultural war in Philly and Pennsy had a pie-eyed, drunk on his own arrogance and self importance, fanatic in the form of Martin Mullen who suddenly was on the black and white TV screen, the chosen mouthpiece of John Cardinal Krol and his decision to bring Pennsylvaniaunder the recent Catholic Sharia Law (Humanae Vitae) on human sexuality. 


PENNSYLVANIA: Bitter Abortion Battle

Mullen, backed by equally conservative John Cardinal Krol and his Pennsylvania Catholic Conference, decided that the state, with its 35% Catholic population, was natural terrain to make a stand against the trend to more liberal laws on public morality. The battle was joined over the issue of abortion. To counter a liberal abortion bill, the conservatives proposed a bill of their own that outlawed abortion altogether except when a panel of three physicians certified that the mother's life was endangered. It made no allowance for victims of rape, incest or mental illness. Supporting the conservative bill, the Catholic Conference ran a long and costly campaign that included weekly pictures of truncated fetuses and aborted embryos on Page One of the Cathotic Standard &Times, the official organ of the archdiocese of Philadelphia. Last June the campaign paid off: the liberal bill was easily defeated, and the conservative bill was adopted by both houses and sent to Shapp for his signature. Mullen warned the Governor that if he attempted to stop the bill through veto or pocket veto he would run against him in the Democratic primary next year.  

While Shapp mulled over what to do, the protest and counterprotest boiled on. In an unusual turn, Patricia Arney, 32, a divorcee who is a district Democratic committeewoman, revealed to the Philadelphia Inquirer that State Senator Henry J. Cianfrani, 49, one of the conservative bill's strongest supporters, had paid for her abortion in 1970 while they were having an affair, and produced a receipt for his check to prove it. He did not deny their relationship, but said that he had given her the money to visit her family inToledo and did not know that there had been an abortion. Though the disclosure caused yowls of protest on the floor of the state senate, letters to the Inquirer ran 10 to 1 in favor of Arney's blow against hypocrites.  

Last week Shapp, calling the bill "unsound, unenforceable and totally unfair," vetoed it. Mullen failed to muster the three-fourths majority necessary to override the veto, leaving the state functionally without an abortion law of any kind, since lower courts have declared the present statute unconstitutionally vague and appeals are pending. With that, Mullen sounded the charge for his race against Shapp next spring, which could be among the bitterest elections in Pennsylvania's history: he called the Governor's veto the result of a "paganistic, atheistic philosophy."

In reality, few states had laws to deal with archaic or non-existent laws to deal with modern technology and recent developments in birth control.

Somewhere along the timeline, the culture war on birth control became the culture war on abortion.  The discussion regarding sexuality was not about choice in the form of birth control methods to prevent pregnancy, it became all about abortion and the strategy and the rhetoric of Krol’s hand puppet to the media in the 1970s has not changed much to this day IMHO.

My leaving my local church, not the People of God, when I was eighteen was also in reaction to archconservative mean spirited types shouting at you on the TV like Martin Mullen as Krol’s in front of the curtain media voice .  It was also the loss of the sermons on Satan, a chance to nod off, that got dropped on Sundays and propaganda spiels from the pulpit that you had to pick up the mimeographed letter to your state legislature in the church lobby, copy it in your own handwriting, and mail it to show that you were in favor of the most current Martin Mullen anti-sexuality law pending in Harrisburg.  Model – Modus Operandi – set for the American future landscape.  Pity.

I have read many a Catholic blog lately and the ones that aren’t praising, drooling on,  the guys in red are the ones that wonder why priests these days don’t bother to deliver a decent homily.  Considering what I know, the truth is that the thought police might hear something like love or tolerance being advocated and send off a letter to the bishop to complain about dogmatic incorrectness that would get back to the priest and rather than get slapped down, why bother to preach anymore. 

After all, isn’t it all just about the ritual and the consecrated bread? (And the collection plate?)

The American culture wars are far from over.  The best, I fear, is yet to come. 

July 23, 2011

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Vatican Victory in Supreme Court Hobby Lobby Decision - Five Catholic Justices Putting Women in Their Place

Catholic Majority Justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Roberts, Kennedy -Waiting for their next marching orders from Rome.


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He Man Women Haters' Club - SCOTUS - U S Supreme Court Catholic Boys Club - Scalia / Thomas / Alito / Roberts / Kennedy

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Clergy Child Abuse Still Under The Radar With Pope Francis Who Throws A Bone To American Bishops and Their Obsession with Abortion and Not the Welfare of Children once Born except in Rhetoric

Clergy abuse of children is still under the radar regarding Francis's thoughts and words on a throwaway culture which has its merits as a concept. 

Makes a great sound bite for the media.

But once born and not aborted, children in this world like in the church are on their own to fend for themselves against the wolves of this world.

 

Words do not change anything Francis.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/01/13/pope-francis-abortion/4459865/

 Pope Francis on Monday called abortion "horrific" and said it was part of a new "throwaway culture" he said wasted human life as easily as it wasted food — his strongest words yet on a practice that is a divisive political issue in the United States.

Until now, Francis has appeared to have stayed away from strong statements on the church's stands on moral behavior of individuals, preferring to focus on more positive messages about the teachings of Jesus Christ and the need to see to the poor.

His comments during the start of his papacy that the church need not "obsess" about abortion and gay marriage bothered conservative Catholics who see the issues as ones that the church ought to object to strongly. On Monday, Francis put his own stamp on the church's long-held opposition to abortion.

"It is frightful even to think that there are children, victims of abortion, who will never see the light of day," Francis said in what has become a traditional annual address to the Vatican diplomatic corps.

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Catholic Neo-Confederate Cultural Warrior Paul Ryan Still Attacking Humanity For The Political Right

Paul Ryan - Catholic Neo-Confederate (Tea Party)

http://www.talk2action.org/story/2013/11/24/175123/27

Now it has come to light that Doerflinger - obviously with Cardinal Dolan's approval - colluded with Tea Party darling, Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) to continue the recent  shut-down of the federal government. Doerflinger's goal was to hold up the continuing resolution (CR) legislation until the birth control benefit in the Affordable Health Care Act (ACA) was removed. 

 …This is the kind of thing we have come to expect during Dolan's tenure as president. And its not just Doerflinger. Dolan's all out culture warring was on full display this past April, for example, when the cardinal hired Kim Daniels to be his personal spokeswoman on USCCB matters. As Commonweal Magazine's Grant Gallicho pointed out, "Daniels served as Sarah Palin's "personal domestic-policy czar" in 2009 (as part of SarahPAC)." 

 …But these Catholic neo-confederates are not far from the destabilizing views of Dolan, Doerflinger and their allies -- who are willing to disrupt our ability to govern ourselves in order to establish the orthodox Catholic position on issues such as birth control as the de facto law of the land. Such strategy will endanger both the country as well as the Church.

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#teaparty= A Cult of personality draped in a #neoconfederate sheet & slathered in bullsh*t #RedNationRising #dem #ctl pic.twitter.com/VQ4YzIMVaB
— Aika Rumba (@I_Karumba) November 22, 2013

No Vision – Just Ambition – In America Today

http://www.phillyhistory.org/PhotoArchive/Detail.aspx?assetId=80779

I started writing this less than a week ago and I thought Oh No, another sour grapes thing about the RCC in the seventies in Philly that drove the masses out of the churches and schools in time or at least in the inner city as they are now calling my old neighborhood.

As some friend has described to me, with planned or likely closings of RC churches here, there actually, there will be no RC churches in the Frankford and Harrowgate sections of the city soon. 

My own grade school closed in 2003. And the economics of it all is not necessarily racist. The state and city screw things up with popular school vouchers legislation or threat of its passage which from a distance I do not know much about.  

I do know that as soon as you add money to a system with school vouchers or even employer covered health or dental care, you directly or indirectly inflate the basic cost of doing business. That is economics and some politics.

That education in America is big business with student loans, seven hundred dollar college text books etc. That is economics and politics.

The real crux of the matter was that jobs first went south and then overseas and emptied the local factories of very marginal jobs of the average factory workers when those jobs went south. That is economics.

Without a job - you and your environment become dysfunctional. Not rocket science to understand. 

The above bill board in the shabby shopping district of downtown Philly at Third Street and Market Street was where us factory workers went to find bargains that the department stores  further up the street could not offer us. We paid cash. We had no credit.

The money for that billboard came out of the archdiocese’s coffers or some non-profit organization or the obsessive compulsive wallets of Koch Brothers or Mellon Scaife types doing their social experimentation on the masses.

Like I said I started to write this a few days ago, stopped and erased it. I was inspired at first by the historic photo archives picture because of the date and the subject matter – abortion.

1971 was about the time I stopped going to church.  I was tired of the Sunday pulpit demands to write my state legislature to demand that Catholic Sharia Law on Contraception become the law in Pennsylvania.

Science had made a paradigm shift thing and the new chemistry of birth control just overwhelmed the boys in the RC clergy. They have never caught up.

It is a funny thought and I have mentioned it one way or another in the five years since I started this blog, the church left me, us behind when it abandoned spirituality and went straight for the economic and political approach to human sexuality.  

That if an ambitious Cardinal Krol was not hell bent on becoming pope, and attended his flock with some love instead of a Wharton Spreadsheet; maybe the economics and politics of the inner city and the racial divides could have been addressed.  

That some jobs in factories could have been saved, that there would have been less racial fear and less white flight to the suburbs and places like Frankford or Harrowgate would still have catholic grade schools, high schools and even churches there today.

In other words, there was no vision.  There seemed to be only ambition to achieve some corporate religious agenda.

There was no Vision.  There was only Ambition.

And that stagnation, which ignores the heart or the spirit of things and life situations that matter to us locally, could have been addressed by mature efforts and solutions. 

So it goes. 

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What is Romney Ryan's Position on "Legitimate" Rape as a Means of Birth Control?

Rep. Paul Ryan with fellow anti-choice Rep.Todd Akin

Senate candidate Todd Akin from the second district in Missouri, the show me state, assures voters in his senatorial campaign that any pregnant "rape" victims are whores and liars.

"Legitimate Rape" prevents  "legitimate rape" victims from getting pregnant because a good girl's body juices will reject the rapist's sperm. It is all very scientific he says. So he must know what he is talking bout.

Paul Ryan, also against Abortion, probably agrees with fellow house member Todd pictured above.

Akin said that even in the worst-case scenario — when the supposed natural protections against unwanted pregnancy fail — abortion should still not be a legal option for the rape victim. 

“Let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work, or something,” Akin said. “I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child.”

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Cardinal Timmy Dolan: Like Obama is like “Strangling” my Meal Ticket Fat Cat Catholic Church

Where is my free lunch, I mean tax free religious Lasagna?

Lately, most articles in the media, MSM, are censored on any news of this latest Vatican Banking, Spying or Child Abuse scandals  by having no comments following the articles on the Internet. I had to dig real hard to find comments, honest first amendment comments, against the FAT CAT CATHOLIC CHURCH. Here below is an article and some comments.

Cardinal Dolan and his Fat Cat Catholic Cronies are suppressing my “Secular Liberty” by crowding out the so-called public media space in the Virtual American Town Square with their lazy fast ass religious liberty bullshit.

http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entries/archbishop-dolan-obama-administration-strangling-catholic-church

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Another blowhard who's making the Catholic Church incredibly irrelevant to today's modern world.

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”We’re like, wait a minute, when did the government get in the business of defining for us the extent of our ministry?”. 

When you agreed to take public financing!

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The church's position that marriage and sex must be open to procreation reduces human beings to brood cattle. It demeans marriage and sex. 

The only strangler of the Catholic Church is the Catholic Church. They worry about children not yet conceived while covering up the abuse of thousands of children for centuries.

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Dolan is much, much crazier than I was expecting when he was appointed. Should have known, I guess, considering who appointed him.

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As a fallen away Catholic who left the Church nearly 30 years ago because I considered its stand on contraception then to be a fraud, I'm glad to see I've been vindicated. 

The Bishops had no Biblical evidence for their stand against birth control then or now...except that it gives women and families control over their own lives and makes faith a more personal thing to seek. It truly helps one to be Born Again as an adult. We are not children. …
It's not the President's fault but their own sin of pride that is the problem. 

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Scathing condemnation of the sexual abuse of minors by members of the Catholic clergy, and of the inadequacy, negligence, cowardice, and perhaps even criminal inaction of members of the hierarchy in response to the scandal is well deserved, and not evidence of anti-Catholic bigotry.

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No Dolan-style Charity from the Vatican to Nuns who Talk about Shhh! (sex) – Sister Margaret Farley

The Vatican is attacking a retired theologian nun, Sister Margaret Farley, for her book on human sexuality published in 2006.

At Amazon.Com: 

Just Love: a Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics," by Sister Margaret Farley

http://www.amazon.com/Just-Love-Framework-Christian-Sexual/dp/0826429246

Can’t have women let alone nuns define what the Vatican Penis Cult is only allowed to define in what to do with your naughty parts etc. 

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http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentaries/157502835.html?page=all&prepage=2&c=y#continue

Taking on the Council of Trent and a church that has taken a stand against pleasure, Farley asserts that procreation is not the only reason couples should have sex. 

Fruitfulness need not "refer only to the conceiving of children," she writes. "It can refer to multiple forms of fruitfulness in love of others, care for others, making the world a better place for others" rather than just succumbing to "an egoisme a deux." (“Love is a selfishness of two.”) 

The Vatican showed no mercy to the Sister of Mercy, proclaiming that "the deliberate use of the sexual faculty" outside of marriage or procreation, or on one's own, is wrong; that homosexual sex acts are "deviant," and that marriages are by and large indissoluble. Farley issued a statement that she did not intend for the book to be an expression or criticism of current official Catholic teaching, and academics and the head of her order rushed to her defense. 

This latest ignoble fight with a noble nun adds to the picture of a Catholic Church in a permanent defensive crouch, steeped in Borgia-like corruption and sexual scandals, lashing out at anyone who notes the obvious: They have lost track of right and wrong. 

Cardinal Timothy Dolan of the Archdiocese of New York blasted The New York Times after Laurie Goodstein wrote that, as the archbishop of Milwaukee in 2003, he authorized payments of up to $20,000 to sexually abusive priests "as an incentive for them to agree to dismissal from the priesthood." 

Dolan insisted through a spokesman that it was "charity," not "payoffs." But if you were the parent of a boy abused by a priest who went away with 20,000 bucks, maybe "charity" is not the word that would come to mind.Its crisis has made the church cruel. The hierarchy should read Farley's opprobrium against adults harming vulnerable children and adolescents by sexually exploiting them; respect for the individual and requirement of free consent, she says, mean that rape, violence and pedophilia against unwilling victims are never justified. 

"Seduction and manipulation of persons who have limited capacity for choice because of immaturity, special dependency, or loss of ordinary power, are ruled out," she writes. 

If only the church could muster that kind of clarity, rather than Dolan-style "charity." 

Fork in the Road - Secular vs. Religious Morality

The Prez and the VP came out in favor the a civil rights issue on Marriage Equality in the past few days.

The Prez did so a day after the redneck bible thumpers in North Carolina had to reinforce their own "religious" POV which goes with the Old Testmament and for lack of more civil words, the male penis right to fuck his property, whether it be woman, slaves or other "chattels".

It is amazing what I have seen in my lifetime of the far right religious nuts taking on the absolute authoritarian Roman model of the guys in silk and lace at the Vatican.  Of taking over a political party and wearing a false mask of Jesus.

That model makes no apology and exploits any human being male or female, straight or homosexual, or "priest-like" sexual (question mark ?) persons who by birth or accident wander into the precincts of religious stone age authority.

It is a day when the fundies are pushing gay hate in Africa as a means to slide into the socio-economic scheme there as a moral factor in the growing future wealth of that continent.

The old are bankrolling the current propaganda war in the west, Europe, North America and parts of South America against the idea that someone might be born with a sexual orientation different than the majority tribe POV.  The young already cherish their freedom to choose life the way they see fit and as God intended.

It is a great day when an African-American President of the United States can interject a secular moral idea based on individual introspection based on a pro-Jesus POV onto the world stage.

While traditions in Africa will not likely to change.  From this day forward another global morality base idea is brought into sharp focus to the rest of humanity.  While the Muslim world is not likely to follow on the merits of same sex marriage, the idea, the seed of change, of a diverse global POV is planted.

It is remarkable when the old men in the Vatican in the sixties put all their prestige and money so to speak on the Craps Table and based the whole future of a dying church on trying to monopolize an individual's right to choose and or to deny their right to live out freely what God has imposed on them as an individual in terms of his or her animus, animal nature.

The spiritual power, the "higher angels of out nature", is the goal, the evolution of the species to achieve over the baser forms of our shared lesser nature.

It is to be remembered that the words of the arch-villian of humanity, archbishop Wojtyla's advice and prejudice to Paul VI on birth control, took a biased view of Protestantism and the rights of individuals by stating that the "holy spirit" was exclusively with the Roman Catholic POV.

Well maybe the "holy spirit" now speaks on matters of human sexuality directly to the individual, a very Protestant concept, and the old fashioned generally corrupted religious POV is growing obsolete in the new global arena of thought.

The Enlightment, though blockaded and detoured through the recent past, is on a clear path to the future.

Human morality and human sexuality are no longer properties owned by the state and or state religion in this new dawning global age.

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Arizona is a Toxic Place to more than just Women

The toxic work environment of Arizona many times parallels and reflects a very harsh natural environment. The toxic work environment of not wanting to pay minimum age, let alone health care benefits, to employees is reflected in many of these anti-female, anti-immigrant legislative bills sponsored by low paying women’s jobs of $24,000 per year as with these female state legislators.

That women get low wages is a fact of life in America.  That many times, and from my own experience of having lived and worked in Arizona, it is the female spouse who is the primary bread winner in many Arizona households.  That and being the primary providers of Health Care coverage as well for the family.

The Arizona state legislature is far from a part time enterprise but for the time involved and the wages paid, I often wonder when I hear of anti-female laws passed or proposed by Kimberly Yee or Debbie Lesko, what is their real day job to supplement the minimum wage and per diem paid by the state to pass these draconian laws against women.

Being an anemic economic entity whereby big corporations come and go from Arizona as soon as tax breaks disappear is only part of the reason for these corporations leaving.  Cronyism is quite rampant in a thin economy.  Right to work is a means to eliminate union competition to get your son or brother in law on the payroll of whatever company happens to pull into Phoenix and Tucson for an average of two years.

That corporations see wages as less than half of what they are paying elsewhere and executives see the golf courses and the game is on.  Half the wages and one third the productivity from the average Arizona worker becomes rapidly evident and the company leaves town when the tax break runs out.  Some stay for whatever reasons, mostly poor management, or tax losses.  

The productivity issue is I think related to education issues and the inability of the state to maintain modern training or staying, building long term economic growth other than handouts from Washington that are rapidly divvied up by the McCain/Kyl Country Club crowd.

So, when I hear that a female employer or her husband holding the primary health plan has to ask permission to get Birth Control, the only thing I thought was that competition is tough and females needing Birth Control can be eliminated from the payroll in favor of your sister-in-law to get that job who is past child bearing years or a son who gets his healthcare on his spouse’s dime. 

Things are tough in Arizona.  It is more than the coyotes that eat their young there. 

Bishop “Ham Sandwich” Lori – Makes no F*cking Sense – Jon Stewart

Bishop Lori’s Kosher Deli Parable before Congress, comparing birth control to unclean Jewish food, did not hit the mark with Jon Stewart. 4:40 to 6:30 on video.

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/jon-stewart-blasts-religious-leaders-punanny-state-control-of-women/


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Neanderthal Time - Santorum and Foster Friess - Its the Sweater I think

I ain't igorant. I is a billionare.

And me and my jock supporter Rick Santorum don't know Jack Shit about women or birth control. 

Duh.  I am rich.  I am right. Right?

http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/02/santorum-backer-friess-gals-used-to-put-aspirin-between-their-knees-for-contraception.php

This whole contraception debate is just so new-fangled, says billionaire investor and mega-funder to the super PAC supporting former Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) for President, Foster Friess.

In a simpler time, there were other ways to deal with female sexual desire. “Back in my day, they used Bayer Aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn’t that costly,” he said Thursday on MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports, setting the host back for moment.

The general conversation was about Santorum’s past statements about contraception, who once said that it was “harmful to women.”

The full exchange:

Mitchell: Do you have any concerns about some of his comments on social issues, contraception, about women in combat, and whether that would hurt his general election campaign would he be the nominee?

Friess: I get such a chuckle when these things come out. Here we have millions of our fellow Americans unemployed, we have jihadist camps being set up in Latin America, which Rick has been warning about, and people seem to be so preoccupied with sex. I think it says something about our culture. We maybe need a massive therapy session so we can concentrate on what the real issues are. And this contraceptive thing, my gosh, it’s such inexpensive. Back in my day, they used Bayer aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn’t that costly.

Mitchell: Excuse me, I’m just trying to catch my breath from that, Mr. Friess, frankly.

Catholic TV - EWTN – Sues to Guarantee Medieval Woman’s Health Care Standards

EWTN Playing God Again

Catholic TV network sues US over birth control mandate

Thursday, EWTN — a Catholic television network carried on thousands of cable systems in more than 100 countries — filed suit in U.S. District Court in Birmingham, Ala.

"We had no other option," said Michael Warsaw, president of EWTN, which stands for Eternal Word Television Network.

"Under the HHS mandate, EWTN is being forced by the government to make a choice: Either we provide employees coverage for contraception, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs and violate our conscience or offer our employees and their families no health insurance coverage at all. Neither of those choices is acceptable," Warsaw said.

On at least one point, Warsaw is wrong, said Erin Shields, HHS's top spokeswoman.

While the rule covers "emergency contraceptives" like Plan B and Next Choice, it doesn't cover drugs that cause abortion, Shields told NBC station WYFF of Greenville, S.C.

Catholic Cultural War Against the Vagina – 40 Years Later

(GOP towing the Catholic Party Line - September 28, 1969, was declared Cardinal Karol Wojtyla Day in Pennsylvania at the National Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa in Doylestown.  Left to Right, Cardinal Krol of Phila., Karol Wojtyla, Gov. Ray Shafer (R) of Pennsylvania.)

The  Catholic Culture  War Against the Vagina Continues – Forty Years Later

I sat through a few minutes of the CSPAN-2 the other day with speeches from the floor of the United States Senate delivering the same crap I heard in the Catholic church in the late sixties about Birth Control that drove me forever from that church.  That Senators Roy Blunt and Kelly Ayotte sounded today like the cookie cutter no thought priests of that faith forty years ago.

Here is a repeat of my previous blog:

Historic Beginnings of American Culture War – Philadelphia – 1970s

I had a nightmare last night.  I dreamt that State Senator Martin P. Mullen had come back from hell to inflict more inhumane legislation on not only the people of Pennsylvania but the whole planet. 

I don’t know how the culture war in America took shape in various other parts of the country, but like New Hampshire where the shot heard round the world that supposedly started our American Revolution, the culture war in America has no better historic model than Philadelphia and Pennsylvania in the 1970s.

I drift back forty years to the point where I, as an eighteen year old, decided that I did not want to hear anymore boiler plate sermons about Satan from the local priest in Philadelphia and I never set foot in that church again. 

All around me was a world where the War in Vietnam was wrapped in a flag.  That fucking war was so important to all the middle aged losers who hated their lives and had served so faithfully and or really had no choice but serve in World War Two.  

The basic cultural war in the minds of Philadelphians then, if you were young, was if your draft number would come up and you would have to serve, fight in a war that made absolutely no logical sense.  

On another level, there was the creeping fear that blacks would try to cross the invisible border, south on Lehigh Avenue, and try to invade your beautiful turn of the century row house paradise, built for factory workers.  

Oh there were factories in the neighborhood, and they employed blacks, but in retrospect I can remember all the blacks lined up at the 5 bus stop after work waiting to get back to wherever it was that they lived outside our perfect white lower middle class bubble existence.  In retrospect, the image of Apartheid comes to mind and is superimposed on those distant scenes. 

I have seen or heard comments from people who lived there at the same time.  The thing that destroyed Philly, they usually say, was “Section 8” housing, which is of course code talk for racism and welfare. 

In a way, the inability of people to recognize and love your neighbor is what destroyed that old Currier & Ives idealized brain image of the slums where I grew up in Kensington - Harrowgate in Philly. 

Where was I? Oh yes, the war, the blacks and yeah Vatican II.  Well Vatican II did not change anything in a neighborhood of mixed Irish and I-talian catholics.  Oh there were protestants out there.  We saw their churches dotting the landscape.  Never saw who entered those houses of worship on Sundays.  Didn’t care.  The predominant local culture was of Irish Catholic factory workers and Irish Catholic churches and schools. 

In a way, my parents were intelligent, and liberal.  They got into the ideal that blacks should have equal rights.  But somewhere along the timeline, people like my parents got scared about what they saw on the tube with black militant groups, war protestors and the rapid decline of a normal society into chaos around 1968.  They never told me directly but my so called liberal parents voted for George Wallace in 1968,  I figured that out later along the timeline. 

I guess I stayed there, going along my own liberal timeline, and did not realize how secular I was and in relation to terms of also being a Catholic from birth.  Did not feel the difference until they shot Martin Luther King. 

I can remember to this day, the priest Father Locke, freshly minted from the seminary, stumbling for words, almost apologetically, from the pulpit that next Sunday, stating something to the effect that he did not know if it would be proper but would not forbid personal prayers for a Protestant (after all, only Catholics go to heaven- your prayers are probably wasted on him), for the slain civil rights leader.  Huh?

It was there that I got the clue that maybe Catholics were not really Christians like people like MLK who called themselves Christian.  Christian was not a word I heard often in the first eighteen years of a Catholic life.  I heard the word but in conjunction with other words like Christian Doctrine etc. 

(An aside - Reminds me of my own Irish Catholic joke I told to a former boss in the 1980s, also Irish Catholic – “I was twenty-one before I realized that Protestant and bastard were two separate words.” – My boss howled in laughter.) 

Oh yeah, getting back to Vatican II, I wrote some thoughts on that in my earliest blogs here, but let me get to the point and back to my nightmare about the late great Martin Mullen of the Pennsylvania State Legislature. 

Pennsylvania on a map may look like an east coast type of place.  But like the famous political advisor said and is quoted.  “Pennsylvania is Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between.”  I have already shared a few thoughts above on my cosmopolitan cultural upbringing in Philly. There was that other thing, the sex thing and the RC church confusion about birth control.

Paul VI brought out his Zero Tolerance document on birth control. Like all life in general, most of us just stumbled into ways of dealing with our own individual sexuality.  (No user manual necessary.)

The cultural war in Philly and Pennsy had a pie-eyed, drunk on his own arrogance and self importance, fanatic in the form of Martin Mullen who suddenly was on the black and white TV screen, the chosen mouthpiece of John Cardinal Krol and his decision to bringPennsylvania under the recent Catholic Sharia Law (Humanae Vitae) on human sexuality. 

PENNSYLVANIA: Bitter Abortion Battle

Mullen, backed by equally conservative John Cardinal Krol and his Pennsylvania Catholic Conference, decided that the state, with its 35% Catholic population, was natural terrain to make a stand against the trend to more liberal laws on public morality. The battle was joined over the issue of abortion. To counter a liberal abortion bill, the conservatives proposed a bill of their own that outlawed abortion altogether except when a panel of three physicians certified that the mother's life was endangered. It made no allowance for victims of rape, incest or mental illness. Supporting the conservative bill, the Catholic Conference ran a long and costly campaign that included weekly pictures of truncated fetuses and aborted embryos on Page One of the Cathotic Standard &Times, the official organ of the archdiocese of Philadelphia. Last June the campaign paid off: the liberal bill was easily defeated, and the conservative bill was adopted by both houses and sent to Shapp for his signature. Mullen warned the Governor that if he attempted to stop the bill through veto or pocket veto he would run against him in the Democratic primary next year.  While Shapp mulled over what to do, the protest and counterprotest boiled on. In an unusual turn, Patricia Arney, 32, a divorcee who is a district Democratic committeewoman, revealed to the Philadelphia Inquirer that State Senator Henry J. Cianfrani, 49, one of the conservative bill's strongest supporters, had paid for her abortion in 1970 while they were having an affair, and produced a receipt for his check to prove it. He did not deny their relationship, but said that he had given her the money to visit her family in Toledo and did not know that there had been an abortion. Though the disclosure caused yowls of protest on the floor of the state senate, letters to the Inquirer ran 10 to 1 in favor of Arney's blow against hypocrites. 
Last week Shapp, calling the bill "unsound, unenforceable and totally unfair," vetoed it. Mullen failed to muster the three-fourths majority necessary to override the veto, leaving the state functionally without an abortion law of any kind, since lower courts have declared the present statute unconstitutionally vague and appeals are pending. With that, Mullen sounded the charge for his race against Shapp next spring, which could be among the bitterest elections in Pennsylvania's history: he called the Governor's veto the result of a "paganistic, atheistic philosophy."

In reality, few states had laws to deal with archaic or non-existent laws to deal with modern technology and recent developments in birth control.

Somewhere along the timeline, the culture war on birth control became the culture war on abortion.  The discussion regarding sexuality was not about choice in the form of birth control methods to prevent pregnancy, it became all about abortion and the strategy and the rhetoric of Krol’s hand puppet to the media in the 1970s has not changed much to this day IMHO.

My leaving my local church, not the People of God, when I was eighteen was also in reaction to archconservative mean spirited types shouting at you on the TV like Martin Mullen as Krol’s in front of the curtain media voice.  It was also the loss of the sermons on Satan, a chance to nod off, that got dropped on Sundays and propaganda spiels from the pulpit that you had to pick up the mimeographed letter to your state legislature in the church lobby, copy it in your own handwriting, and mail it to show that you were in favor of the most current Martin Mullen anti-sexuality law pending in Harrisburg.  Model – Modus Operandi – set for the American future landscape.  Pity.

I have read many a Catholic blog lately and the ones that aren’t praising, drooling on,  the guys in red are the ones that wonder why priests these days don’t bother to deliver a decent homily.  Considering what I know, the truth is that the thought police might hear something like love or tolerance being advocated and send off a letter to the bishop to complain about dogmatic incorrectness that would get back to the priest and rather than get slapped down, why bother to preach anymore. 

After all, isn’t it all just about the ritual and the consecrated bread? (And the collection plate?)

The American culture wars are far from over.  The best, I fear, is yet to come.

http://thisculturalchristian.blogspot.com/2011/07/historic-beginnings-of-american-culture.html

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