Be Careful What You Wish For

Assuming I labeled my posts properly, I went the entire calendar year of 2012 without an entry on religion.  Hard to believe, because it isn't as if there weren't religious controversies worth blogging about.

Regardless, that streak is over.  Some news today pushed me over the edge, that being a new proposal from the Obama administration that would allow religious groups to opt-out (sort of) of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) mandatory contraceptive coverage.

Religiously affiliated groups, especially the Catholic Church, have been going nuts over this mandate.  When this topic was at its hottest this past summer, and preachers were crusading against the mandate during church services, an acquaintance of mine had a letter published in the Des Moines Register that complained about those tactics.  After all, she wasn't going to church to hear those white men telling her what she should believe about her reproductive health care.  The next thing you know she was getting letters from strangers, telling her how wrong she was to feel that way.

Here's the problem with all of this.  The outrage of those religious leaders and their followers over the contraceptive coverage mandate, while somewhat understandable, would have a lot more credibility it it weren't for at least two really big things:

1) Religiously affiliated groups, and here again especially the Catholic Church, completely supported the passage of Obamacare.  I'm sure much of that support was at least indirectly financial, via PAC contributions.  Then once the rules were written, and they realized the rules apply to them, snap! they suddenly wanted to be excepted from a major part of Obamacare.

2) It's laughable to see the outrage of so-called religious leaders over this issue, when it is a fact that many of the organizations they oversee have been including contraceptive coverage in their health care plans for many years.  Apparently, they think all of the young female teachers in their schools are using abstinence as their birth control method.  Classic old white men group-think.

Who knows if this new 'opt-out' rule will pacify the mandate-haters.  It probably won't.  But that has more to do with the out-of-touch religious hierarchy, and its culture of thinking they can and should govern themselves.  (Ask any former church pedophile victim how well they think that self-governance thing has worked out.)

Dumb Rules

It might take a bit to get to my point, but follow along here.....

The other day I played golf at a local course that, like many courses in my area, had some flooding damage. In this case, large portions of several fairways were comprised of compacted dirt that remained after the floodwaters receded. In the end, this meant that hitting from some fairway lies was like hitting from a mixture of dirt/sand.

This made me think of this year's PGA Championship at Whisting Straits in Wisconsin, where one of the leaders was assessed a two-stroke penalty on the final hole for grounding his club in a sand trap, which neither looked like nor was maintained as a bunker.

This made me think of a fantastic column by ESPN.com writer Rick Reilly, on what a dumb rule that was, along with many other dumb rules of golf. (Read it at this link:
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/news/story?id=5470940)

This made me think - now to the point - of a few other dumb rules (laws?) in life. To wit:

*Motorcycle helmet laws. If someone wants to crack their skull open and die - the primary outcome of a helmet-less motorcycle accident - and no one else is hurt, why should we care? It isn't like a seat belt law, because people in cars who don't wear those restraits will often still survive accidents, but then are permanently disabled, which puts on cost on society. Speaking of death and dying.....

*Bans on 'assisted' suicide. Again, if someone wants to end their own life, in this case with dignity, who else is harmed by that?

*No instant replay in baseball or soccer. We have the power of technology, but not the will to apply it. (Kind of like 'assisted' suicide.) If you have to defend something using the old 'integrity of the game' argument, consider yourself on the losing side of the argument.

*Criminalizing the possession of marijuana. Just go to the keyword 'marijuana' for this blog to find out all you'll ever need to know about why this is in the dumb rules Hall-of-Fame.

*Continued extension of unfunded unemployment benefits. Paying people to not work is not a viable or sustainable national economic policy.

*24/7 'citizenship' policies in schools. Schools have a hard enough time policing kids at school / school activities, why do they think they should also police the kids' behavior outside of school? Regardless, they don't have my permission to do it, so they need not bother.