Think Humanely

Chris Mooney is co-author of the 2009 book Unscientific America: How Scientific Literacy Threatens Our Future. Below is an excerpt from the first chapter, followed by the first in a series of clips featuring a discussion with Mooney. To watch the entire lecture, click on the “Watch Full Program” icon in the bottom right corner of the video.

“The United States features a massive infrastructure for science, supported by well over $100 billion annually in federal funding and sporting a vast network of government laboratories and agencies, the finest universities in the world, and innovative corporations that conduct extensive research. Thanks to such investments, Americans built the bomb, reached the moon, decoded the genome, and created the Internet. And yet today this country is also home to a populace that, to an alarming extent, ignores scientific advances or outright rejects scientific principles. A distressingly large number of Americans refuse to accept either the fact or the theory of evolution, the scientifically undisputed explanation of the origin of our species and the diversity of life on Earth. An influential sector of the populace is in dangerous retreat from the standard use of childhood vaccinations, one of medicine’s greatest and most successful advances […] The nation itself has become politically divided over the nature of reality, such that college-educated Democrats are now more than twice as likely as college-educated Republicans to believe that global warming is real and is caused by human activities. Meanwhile, the United States stands on the verge of falling behind other nations such as India and China in the race to lead the world in scientific endeavor in the twenty-first century.”

I previously wrote about the equally gynophobic and misogynistc Stupak-Pitts Amendment here and here. Today came news of an analysis of the amendment by the George Washington School of Public Health and Health Services. A brief overview, quoted word for word from the George Washington news release, can be found below. For the entire analysis, click here.

An analysis conducted by the GW School of Public Health and Health Services’ Department of Health Policy, concludes that the Amendment would produce industry-wide effects, leading to the elimination of health plan coverage for nearly all medically indicated abortions. Although the Amendment appears to address only plans that receive federal exchange subsidies, even health plans sold to private, large employers that purchase outside the exchange ultimately are likely to be affected, the analysis concludes. These findings are based on an assessment of the extent to which the health benefits services industry adjusts its products over time to conform to the regulatory environment in which it operates.

“Under national health reform, millions of women, including women who are covered by small employers (as employees or spouses or dependents of employees) as well as those who are currently uninsured, will receive their coverage through health insurance exchanges. By barring the sale of subsidized products that cover medically indicated abortions as part of a broader package of benefits, the Amendment can be expected to cause the industry to re-design its offerings in order to avoid violating the legal restrictions on abortion applicable to exchange products that receive subsidies,” said Professor Sara Rosenbaum, JD, lead author and Chair of the Department of Health Policy. “The Amendment also can be expected to chill efforts to develop supplemental coverage for medically indicated abortions, because it appears to prohibit the joint administration of both a basic and supplemental product,” Rosenbaum noted.

The analysis also concludes that, based on past experiences with claim administration decisions involving treatment exclusions, insurers can be expected to interpret the exclusion broadly, excluding coverage of not only most medically indicated abortion procedures but also treatments for serious illnesses, injuries, and medical conditions that include an abortion undertaken for health reasons.

Yesterday I wrote about the callous Stupak-Pitts Amendment to the health care reform bill that was passed by the Democratically controlled House of Representatives. Here is a video from the Center for Reproductive Rights that helps underscore some of the incoherent tragedy of the legislation:

Let us not forget some of the other procedures, conditions, and medications that will and will not be covered by the bill. Birth control pills? Not included. So not only will it be made dramatically more difficult for women to find funding for an abortion, the easiest, most efficient, and safest method for preventing a situation that could possibly lead to an abortion – birth control – will not be covered either. The people over at DoubleX note that “Women who use it have lower rates of infant and child mortality, more time to nurse their children, and a smaller likelihood of high-risk pregnancies and anemia.” It’s as if all these men in Congress have some Machiavellian plan to increase the number of unwanted, diseased newborns.

This would certainly explain why one of the medications that this horrible bill does cover is Viagra. Fuck you, ladies! – figuratively and literally. You may not be able to protect yourself from unwanted pregnancies or do anything about one, but any and all males can still ensure that they’re hard enough to inseminate you. All the unsatisfied wives of Stupak, Pitts, and their equally filthy ilk are sure to rejoice at this news, as are the remaining 160 million women in this country.

Obama and the Democratic Party have once again shown themselves to be incompetent legislators that are perfectly okay with being held hostage by the private insurance industry and religious assholes. Everyone knew that the health care “reform” bill that was going to the floor of the House was a watered down, unethical, and undeniably corrupt piece of legislation. It was as if the Democrat-crafted bill had been birthed out of the diseased canal of an insurance lobbyist. What wasn’t nearly as expected, however, was that the bill would be made significantly worse due to one amendment, an amendment named in part after a Democrat.

Adele Stan notes that the Stupak-Pitts Amendment would accomplish the following:

* Prohibit individuals who receive the affordability tax credits from purchasing a private insurance plan that covers abortion, despite the fact that a majority of health insurance plans currently cover abortion.
* Result in a de facto ban on private insurance companies providing abortion coverage in the health insurance exchange, since the vast majority of participants would receive affordability tax credits.
* Prohibit the public option from providing abortion care, despite the fact that it would be funded through private premium dollars.

[. . .]

The Hill reports that:

Liberals on the committee threatened to vote against the final healthcare bill if it included Stupak’s language, warning that it would be a return to the days of back-alley abortions.

“I forsee a return to the dark ages,” Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., told The Hill. “I’m 73, I’ve seen these dark things, they use these coat hangers and die.”

“I used to think that life was black or white, but the older I get the most gray it becomes,” liberal Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., told the panelists of the House Rules committee as they debated whether to allow the amendment. “I find this amendment very, very uncomfortable.”

I know that this is Change I Can Believe In™! After all, there’s no way such a discriminatory, misogynistic, theocratic amendment would ever have been passed when those GOP assholes were in control of the Executive and Legislative branches. Wait…what?

Adele Stan http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/143811/anti-woman_amendment_to_health_care_passes_house/

Below you’ll find a speech by Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist who, because he is logically consistent, is also an atheist. He is the director of the Hayden Planetarium, and he was appointed by President Bush in 2001 and 2004 to commissions on the Future of the US Aerospace Industry and the Implementation of the United States Space Exploration Policy, respectively.

The speech, which is split into two separate segments, was given in 2006 at the Beyond Belief conference. Tyson addresses the role that religion plays in not only obfuscating the truth but in completely retarding the progress of humanity and its understanding of the universe:

“Some of our greatest minds have done just this.” Imagine if Newton didn’t have the lazy construct that is god to fall back on. Imagine if he didn’t have the option of solving a problem by invoking the grand magician. Where could we be? Historians, philosophers, and scientists sometimes speculate how much more advanced we would be as a people if it weren’t for such destructive acts and periods as the burning of the great library in Alexandria and the Dark Ages. The better question is this: How much more advanced would we be, how much more enlightened, if religion were never allowed to infect society ab ovo?

Pharmacists are allowed to refuse to fulfill prescriptions for birth control pills because it offends their sexist, arcane belief system. Stem cell research was significantly held back after President Bush “prayed” on it and came to the belief that this scientific pursuit would offend his god. Members of the ultra-secretive religious group, The Family, stripped away funding for legal medical procedures in the House health care reform bill because their pastor, priest, etc. told them that a few cells are more important than a woman’s health and rights.

Religion and faith, by their very nature, look backwards. They are restrictive, regressive, and stagnant. Science, inquiry, and critical thought are a means of looking forward, a means of discovering new possibilities and truths, of coming to a better, more honest, and more useful understanding of reality. And religion, especially in America, does everything it can to molest these goals. We are not better off for it and we never will be. To the contrary, religion has only made life dramatically worse.