Links for 12/18/1 | National Catholic Reporter

Links for 12/18/1 | National Catholic Reporter by MSW. MGB: The question on Little Sisters of the Poor is not religious freedom, its religious power. The first freedom really is to be free from religion in certain matters. Here is an interesting question - could the Little Sisters fire an employee who used birth control and they found out about it? If the answer is yes then the accommodation is not enough. If the answer is no, however, then the accommodation is just fine. Indeed, given that preventative care is provided through the offices of the state in a very real sense, to allow the Little Sisters such latitude would be to essentially overturn Griswold v. Connecticut - because it would use public force to prevent contraceptive use based on some view other than the user. That would be bad for liberty, regardless of what you feel about contraception (which I favor, by the way).



Its a shame that Congress skipped town without helping Puerto Rico more, however, changing the bankruptcy code is considered non-germaine to an appropriations bill. The act that does what is needed, both in terms of a control board (insular affairs) and bankruptcy (judiciary) has to wait. P.R. should simply default and let the other hedge funds betting on default collect their winnings.



Mark's piece is very funny.  As an ethnic norseman, I would love to see our family's lands in Greenland returned to our use as farmland.  I used to have annual thing on the war on Christmas.  First, the imperative for making the solstice celebration religious was to remove the debauchery usually associated with such celebrations and essentially co-opting the pagan light symbolism to Jesus as the light of the world.  Of course, reverse engineering the Star of Bethlehem the way the Magi Astrologers would have viewed it shows that Jesus was most likely an Aries (April 17, 6 BCE), which of course ads a reincarnation meme to Easter that no one wants to play with.   The reality is that dark makes people want to rebel against it, usually with alcoholic revelry.  Its why AA has special meetings for this time of year.  While expropriating the nativity story to the solstice (even though there were no shepherds in the field in December) is fine for the religiously minded, I think AA does a better job of meeting the needs of the season - and that the other Yule revelry is just fine where it is, thank you very much.   You can add Christ to Christmas, but he is not and should never be considered the whole show.