Mark Litke hyped the "population explosion – what some are calling a crisis" in the Philippines on Sunday's PBS NewsHour Weekend, and played up how poor "families in Asia's most Catholic country...have had little or no access to contraception or family planning advice." Litke confronted a retired Catholic archbishop on his Church's teaching against birth control: "If the people of the Philippines are in support of...contraception...why would the Church oppose any of that?"
The former ABC correspondent later lamented how the Supreme Court of the Philippines protected the religious liberties of Catholic institutions in the country as it upheld a "new reproductive health care law" that subsidizes birth control: [video below the jump]
Birth Control
By Matthew Balan | August 27, 2014 | 3:20 PM EDT
By Clay Waters | August 5, 2014 | 5:43 PM EDT
The Supreme Court is still not moving fast enough to the left on social issues to please some liberals, and New York Times Supreme Court reporter Adam Liptak is on it. His latest front-page report, "Justices’ Rulings Advance Gays; Women Less So," used a speech by liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as his launch point. Not once did he question Ginsburg's liberal reasoning in his front-page article.
Liptak has previously described the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision as a defeat for women's rights, without specifying what right was being taken from women. He has also suggested the U.S. Constitution as old and outdated for failing to guarantee entitlements and health care for its citizenry.
Couric Baits Justice Ginsburg: Could Male Justices ‘Truly Understand’ ‘What It’s Like To Be a Woman?’
By Kristine Marsh | July 31, 2014 | 2:13 PM EDT Former anchor Katie Couric has a long history of not just floating between networks and sinking ratings but also adding left-wing rhetoric wherever she can. Granted an exclusive interview with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg for Yahoo! News July 30, Couric couldn’t help but ask the liberal justice if there was sexism behind the Hobby Lobby decision.
Couric prodded Ginsburg into conceding that the male justices on the Court were essentially incapable of making a fair judgement because…. they were men. Couric dramaticized, “Do you believe that the five male justices truly understood the ramifications of their decision?”
By Tim Graham | July 24, 2014 | 4:54 PM EDT
On his MSNBC show The Daily Rundown, Chuck Todd interviewed Stephanie Schriock of Emily’s List, a narrowly tailored PAC for female pro-abortion Democrats. Todd began with a typical tutorial on how Democrats are substantially ahead of Republicans in the polls among women in some midterm elections.
But after asking if the Hobby Lobby decision was energizing her supporters and opening a "gender gap," Todd took an interesting turn away from the usual MSNBC pattern on abortion advocates (see Andrea Mitchell helping advertise with Cecile Richards for the norm.) He asked Schriock if she was encouraging the candidates they endorsed in the South to de-emphasize abortion:
By Tim Graham | July 20, 2014 | 8:21 PM EDT
Liberal Washington Post humorist Alexandra Petri did one of those modernist superiority dances on Saturday’s op-ed page. She started from the news that the Pew Research Center found we’re now choosing to live near people who share our beliefs, “enclaves of shared ideology.”
So when time travel comes online, conservatives will surely take the hint and move severely back into the B.C. time frame:
By Tim Graham | July 20, 2014 | 6:43 AM EDT
Gay playwright and screenwriter Paul Rudnick was assigned by The New Yorker to mock the Hobby Lobby decision and those religious freaks who support it. This came naturally, since Rudnick wrote the satire “The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told,” in which God makes Adam and Steve, along with the first lesbians, Jane and Mabel. In the script’s introduction, he writes “I believe in what human beings can do when you give them fifty bucks to guy some cheap red polyester velvet. Some people need more, something with vengeance and commandments and jihads.”
In a perfectly arrogant example of the self-congratulating secular superiority of The New Yorker and its readership, Rudnick apparently found it hilarious to merge tacky crafting with tacky religious metaphors:
By Tom Blumer | July 18, 2014 | 3:38 PM EDT
The Obama administration is probably wondering why so many people of all political stripes don't believe that they take foreign policy seriously, up to and including charges that the president and his minions are doing the equivalent of fiddling as some parts of the world burn, and others threaten to.
I don't see why would anyone think that (in case it's not obvious, that's sarcasm). After all, wasn't Bush 43 press secretary Ari Fleischer linking to a friend's column on men's suits after the Bali bombings in 2002? And didn't the London bombings in 2005 lead the otherwise hapless Scott McClellan to wax eloquent on the importance of tie-shirt coordination? The answer to both of those questions is, "Of course not." But yesterday, on a day when Israel invaded Gaza, pro-Russian forces shot down a passenger airliner with almost 300 aboard, and diseases this country hasn't seen in decades continued to be carried over the U.S. Mexican border by "Unaccompanied Alien Children" (that DHS's term), State Department spokesman Jen Psaki tweeted on the dreadfully important topic of how you can be "informed" and fashionable (HT The Blaze):
By Matthew Balan | July 15, 2014 | 6:28 PM EDT
Michelle Andrews spotlighted the silver lining for social liberals in a Tuesday item for NPR.org about the aftermath of the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby ruling. Andrews underlined that "women in most health plans will still be able to get their birth control covered with no out-of-pocket expenses," even after the five to four decision.
The writer turned to a policy expert at the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, which she merely labeled a "research and policy organization that focuses on reproductive health," but failed to cite any pro-lifers for their take on the issue:
Jon Stewart Viciously Mocks Hobby Lobby Decision: ‘Hobby Lobby v. Dirty, Dirty Contraception Whores’
By Jeffrey Meyer | July 15, 2014 | 1:05 AM EDT Jon Stewart has been on vacation for the past two weeks and he used his return on Monday, July 14 to mock the Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of craft store Hobby Lobby.
Appearing on The Daily Show, Stewart slammed the Supreme Court ruling and declared the “final score Hobby Lobby 5, whores 4. Sorry whores.” [See video below.]
By Kristine Marsh | July 10, 2014 | 3:36 PM EDT
It doesn’t take much to make “news” in The Washington Post these days.
Upset at the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby ruling, last Thursday 29-year-old feminist New Yorker Jasmine Shea decided it would be a great idea to leave condoms randomly around a Latham, New York, Hobby Lobby store and spell out the phrase “Pro-Choice” with block letters in various places. Of course she took lots of selfies posing next to her artwork to post to Instagram and Twitter. For that she made a national story in The Washington Post July 9.
It’s a mystery how Shea, who has a mere 286 followers on Instagram, and about 800 on Twitter, which is small beans compared to the typical popular user, somehow managed to get her “activism” noticed by a leading national newspaper. Shea herself even tweeted, “I’m still in disbelief I’m newsworthy.” (Hint for Shea: your ideological conferes at The Post really, really want to see a popular feminist backlash to Hobby Lobby, and they’re not above manufacturing one.)
By Kristine Marsh | July 10, 2014 | 10:59 AM EDT
Editor’s Note: this story contains offensive language.
A violent encounter between a young pro-life protestor and an adult abortion activist in downtown Columbus, OH was caught on camera and published late July 9 on Youtube. Students from the pro-life group “Created Equal” were standing on the street corner holding anti-abortion signs and talking with passers by when an infuriated pro-abortion woman approached one young man.
“That’s absolute f***ing lying there, you f***ing dipshit!,” she screamed. “That is not what a fetus looks like, okay? It’s a clump of cells at twelve weeks.” In the rest of the two-minute encounter, she shoved her finger in the man’s face and screamed 20 more f**ks in her incoherent “argument.” Her hysterical rant was peppered with typical liberal condescension about “white male privilege” and claims of “racism” numerous times. The infuriated woman, apparently didn’t think of how her behavior would look like for the company she works for, as she was still wearing her Burger King uniform.
Continues after the video.
By Ken Shepherd | July 9, 2014 | 9:36 PM EDT
Miracles do happen.
On his July 9 Hardball program, MSNBC's Chris Matthews actually pressed abortion-rights absolutist Stephanie Schriock about the implications of her support for Democratic legislation to overturn the Supreme Court's ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. But Matthews put the EMILY's List president on the spot by asking if her position amounted to telling religious employers that they simply have to swallow their religious scruples in order to not run afoul of the law. Bullying religious Americans over their sincere beliefs is hardly a picture one wants painted of one's self, so Schriock sought to avoid the questions and double down on talking points. Here's the relevant transcript (MP3 audio here; video embedded below page break; emphases mine):