Nuns Trump Bluedogs like Stupak

Here is a story worth retelling. An interesting article in Salon magazine about how women in the Catholic church in the form of nuns are a mighty force to be reckoned with these days.

Defeated and humiliated by the the hierarchy for their support of Geraldine Ferraro's Vice Presidential "Pro-Choice" bid in 1984, the women have plowed on for women's issues, pro-humanity views in the public arena.

Rep. Bart Stupak, (D- Michigan), frat house member of the “C” street fundie crowd, bellyached and threatened to sink Healthcare without an Executive Order to spell out, redundant/moot with the new law, specific continuity of the entrenched anti-abortion agenda.

Indeed the article states rightfully so that – ”Abortion has become the "evil of drink" of this century, and legal prohibitions against it always fail as dismally as the 18th amendment banning alcohol did.”

While the boy bishops keep sending out their holier than thou misogynist messages of more abortion regulations and also being against healthcare coverage for the poor and all Americans, nuns have campaigned for passage of Obama’s Healthcare reforms.

Catholic healthcare scoreboard: Nuns and laity 2, bishops 0

The healthcare reform debate in Congress has brought to the fore a sharp division within the Catholic Church. The lines are drawn by gender: Catholic bishops focused on the unborn on one side; Catholic nuns advocating for the already-born on the other…

Many nuns feel they have little to lose in challenging bishops because they have been treated so shabbily by their hierarchy. Many of America's nuns supporting Obama's healthcare initiative were, until recently, among the "uninsured" that the bill addresses. Only in the past two decades have US bishops taken up an annual collection to pay for basic health insurance for nuns, and for their decades of unpaid Social Security…

Today, as when nuns and others first challenged Rome on abortion in ‘84, too many women are dying from breast cancer, ovarian cancer, overlooked cardiac crises, ignored psychoses that may lead to suicide, domestic abuse injuries and deaths, and a host of other illnesses, injuries and fatalities a national health plan might help identify, diagnose, treat, avoid and even cure. Women are uninsured in larger numbers than men, and their children go uninsured, and untreated, with them. The already-born need care and compassion in the purest form of "respect for human life.”…

The majority of American Catholics -- often led by the nuns of their childhood -- have always chosen reasonable responses to complicated and personal life challenges, even when their clergy have seemed unable to do so. Such a rational approach is the best example of the appropriate and rightful exercise of free will and conscience. (Both of these are basic to Catholic teaching, in which they are called “the sense of the faithful.”)

There is life and morality within the RC church. The Catholic blogosphere and non-profit organizations such as the Catholic Health Association can be a force for good.

The cheerless out of touch bishops cannot rule by decree anymore. The GOP may have the bishops but Social Justice has the nuns and average Roman Catholics when it comes to everyday practical matters regarding life.

Stupak-Pitts anti-female Amendment and the Need for The Equal Rights Amendment

The House health care reform bill got narrowly passed on Saturday with one minor amendment that with all the legal jargon and loopholes would effectively ban all abortion in any health care plan nationwide that receives government subsidies.

Think of all the money Insurance Companies will save abolishing this one medical procedure used only by women. While I do not see this as passing in any final Senate House Bill, I am reminded by the indecency of this amendment of another amendment, the sleeping Equal Rights Amendment and it only needing three more states to ratify it.

It is time to stop all this medieval anti-female religious and political discrimination in this country!

It is time for equal rights in health care!

It is time to turn the table on these sniveling conspiring bunch of brain dead anti-female fundamentalists!

Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

There are various things happening with that equal rights amendment. It is not dead. It only needs a bunch of angry women and gays to push for its gender neutral language to guarantee anything having to do with SEX. I think that in today’s realistic worldview that includes sexual orientation and Gay marriage along with physical gender.

Equal Rights Amendment

An article by three law students, published in the William and Mary Journal of Women and the Law in 1997 explained a legal rationale for the "three-state strategy." It argued that:

1. The 35 ratifications from state legislatures during the 1970s remain valid;

2. Rescissions of prior ratifications are not constitutional;

3. The 1978 extension of the ERA's deadline demonstrates that Congress can amend previously established deadlines; and

4. The Twenty seventh Amendment's more than 202 year ratification period set a standard of "sufficiently contemporaneous"—a term used during the U.S. Supreme Court's 1921 ruling in Dillon v. Gloss—giving Congress the power to set time limits on constitutional amendments. Dillon v. Gloss was later modified by Coleman v. Miller, which is also a basis for the three state strategy.

The article further reasoned that because Article V of the Constitution gives the Congress the power to propose amendments to the Constitution—and including changing aspects of the ratification process itself— that if and when three additional states ratify the ERA, the Congress has the power to deem the ERA properly ratified and duly added to the Constitution.