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Manhattan Diary by Cahir O'Doherty

Sean Hannity's all-male Fox News contraception panel

Posted on Friday, February 17, 2012 at 08:54 AM

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Who better to tell women how to make their own reproductive choices than a room full of religious conservative elderly white men? I mean, obviously right?

Clearly that's what Fox New's Sean Hannity concluded this week when he reflexively assembled an all-male panel to discuss women's reproductive rights.

President's Obama's healthcare plan requires contraception to be included in insurance coverage, which is a reflection of the longstanding reality that 98% of Catholic women in the US already use birth control.

Not so fast, cried Hannity's panel. We don't want hospitals, colleges or other religious organizations to provide birth control because if a women doesn't become pregnant every single time she has sex God gets quite irate - and so do we, they scolded.

This is really big issue for the right they claimed. We'd go to war over this.

Sensing their resolve Hannity asked the all-male panel: 'How many of you would be willing to go to jail over this?' All but three or four raised their hands. Oh, the drama. Then to further underline their point they did something that conservatives actually do every week on Fox News, they compared the Obama administration to Nazi Germany.

It was a move that particularly nauseated the Daily Show's Jon Stewart, who takes a special kind of offense at grossly unfair comparisons to Hitler.

'First of all, when the Nazis came for people, they also left with them. It wasn't a metaphor,' Stewart said, referring to one panelists Nazi claims. 'Hitler did not 'start small.' His deliberate annihilation of a religion didn't kick off with insurance reform.'

Stewart dismissively titled Hannity's all-male panel 'The world's holiest sausage fest,' and scoffed at its claim that a healthcare mandate amounted to a war on religion.

Really, he asked, how persecuted can America's religious institutions be when they collect up to $100 billion a year in revenue without paying any taxes? 'If that's persecution, it's the kind of persecuted I'd like to be," Stewart scoffed.

Just looking at them would probably be sufficient to dampen anyone's thoughts of love, but these men want to leave nothing to chance. They want to call the shots, no need to hear from women. Now who does that remind you of?

But in a metaphor that seems apt, it looks like the conservatives forces who have carefully crafted this 'controversy' have been shooting blanks - this ginned up 'controversy' is another in a long line of overplayed hands.

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35 comments

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eiriamach | Feb 20, 2012, 01:31 PM EST

TomS, There's only a faint 'whooshing' sound each time one of GD's insults flies past, right over my head, no problem at all for me because he never gets anywhere near the truth. Happy President's Day to you and all.

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eiriamach | Feb 20, 2012, 12:57 PM EST

eirimach, I am sorry that your agreement with and support of my posts have subjected you to Dillon's outrageous abuse. On the other hand, you are more than capable of exposing this belligerent thug for what he is. And we can rejoice - at least I can - in this simple truth: Dillon must live in that very lonely, twisted and tormented mind of his. No one else does. Best Wishes and Happy President's Day.

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eiriamach | Feb 20, 2012, 09:37 AM EST

GD, with duplicity, you criticized Tom Swinford for what you called an "anti-Catholic slur" when he accurately described a Catholic ritual. Then you quoted Wikipedia on the "CHRISTIAN" ritual--that was never adopted by the Catholic Church-- of Thanksgiving after childbirth-- to "prove" your insult. We're not fools, GD. I doubt anyone fell for your Wikipedia bluff. The Christian ritual still sometimes referred to as "churching" is, as documented history clearly shows, an Anglican ritual, developed most probably in reaction against the misogynist Catholic "churching" ritual, so it's appropriate for me to summarize the history. And, yes, I'm proud of associating with it. Episcopalians are not "moderate" about working for justice, equality, an end to bigotry. You ought to be banned, GD, not for your hate speech-- generously protected by the first amendment to the US Constitution-- but for your baseless, vituperative personal attacks. They suggest a species of lunacy, and no web site ought to promote the rantings of the mentally unsound.

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ciaradexy | Feb 19, 2012, 03:01 PM EST

Eiriamach, youre right. Both my grannys told me about the purification ritual they had to go through after they had each of their babies. Women were considered tainted and dirty after giving birth pretty much like they were when they were menstruating. Up until very recently it was also legal here for a man to rape his wife. Oh the catholic church in Ireland! What a sham!

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GeorgeDillon | Feb 19, 2012, 02:43 PM EST

Eiriamach: "frith- caint"... There's no such term in Irish, please have some respect for the language and refrain from inventing inanities. And even if such a term existed, you'd have it wrong, since "frith" would lenite the first consonant of the following noun. You're not just a bigot, you're a moron.

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GeorgeDillon | Feb 19, 2012, 02:39 PM EST

eiriamach: Stop your shameless pimping for the Anglican Church. You're doing them no favors by associating your fanaticism with what is a very moderate and restrained church. I respect the Episcopalian tradition. I've admired all Episcopalians I have known--they're not bigots like you. As for your Know Nothing fellow-bigot Swinford, he;'s just an idiot, I pay him no heed. By the way eiriamach you fool, my reference to banning a poster came IN RESPONSE to your fellow-bigot and fascist Swinford, who asked that I be banned from this site. So you're a nasty hypocrite as well as a bigoted fool, eiriamach.,

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GeorgeDillon | Feb 19, 2012, 02:30 PM EST

eiriamach: I don't get my Catholic faith from Wikipedia, you stupid bigot. I got it from my Catholic education and my continued membership of the Church. I cited a quick definition from Wikipedia for the benefit of your fellow-bigot Swinford. Looks like you are too stupid to have understood that. But you're not a member of this church, so why do you obsess about it? Is is some kind of perversion on your part? Are you KKK? You're a sad hatemonger. A true Know Nothing, in a long tradition of American anti-Catholic bigotry.

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hollabackgurl | Feb 19, 2012, 10:01 AM EST

The president said: No one's going to force you to violate your doctrine. But Catholics are also Americans, and if an individual Catholic worker wants coverage, she should have access to it - just like any other American citizen. Under the new plan, she will. She can go directly to the insurer, and the religious institution is off the hook. But now the bishops are opposing any mandate to provide contraceptives even though their institutions are not required to pay for them.

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eiriamach | Feb 18, 2012, 06:38 PM EST

And GeorgeDillon calls for banning, censoring, when he reads an unpleasant truth! Censorship "appeases the anger of those who cannot abide independent minds" (Spinoza).

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eiriamach | Feb 18, 2012, 06:20 PM EST

By all the signs, Dillon's incurable. I only wish that he would not express his prejudices in the Irish language. English is the language for his sexist comment and all the rest of his frith- caint. English has a solid history of sexism that Irish cannot match.

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eiriamach | Feb 18, 2012, 05:53 PM EST

eirimach, thank you. I confess I was not aware of the purification ritual but it does lend credence to my story - the basic facts of which I learned some years ago on a trip back home, sitting around a dining room table with family and friends when the conversation turned to religion. Frankly, I was stunned and could not believe what I was hearing. It was confirmed and reconfirmed. I believed that this could not possibly be a general practice within the church. The canon of the parish during this time, which coincided with Vatican ll, was notorious for his bizarre behavior and late night boozing. He denounced Vatican ll and assured his parishioners from the pulpit that they had nothing to worry about, that the winds of change would not blow through his parish. So it wasn't unreasonable to assume that this confessional ritual might just be one canon's misguided attachment to the ancient church. If regular visitors to this website had any doubts as to Dillon's sanity, his last two posts must surely remove them. This is one truly sick man.

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eiriamach | Feb 18, 2012, 03:28 PM EST

I'm not surprised that GeorgeDillon gets his "facts" from Wikipedia. Maybe that's why he misses out on the fine points, such as the Catholic Church has never reformed its ritual for the purification of women from the sin of sex as evidenced by giving birth. But women no longer use the purification ritual. TomSwinford is right about it. As I wrote on Cahir's blog "What the Bible Says to Women," when the topic of "churching" came up: In the years following the Second Vatican Council, most Roman Catholic churches discontinued the purification ritual known as "churching" of women after childbirth. Four centuries earlier (1552), the Anglican Book of Common Prayer replaced the purification ritual with "The Thanksgiving of Women after Childbirth, commonly called the Churching of Women." This blessing has evolved into a beautiful ceremony of thanksgiving for the birth or adoption of a child. Since the 1979 edition, it has included prayers "For the Birth of a Child," For an Adoption" (the child and the parents accept each other), "Act of Thanksgiving" (the Magnificat), Psalm 116 or 23, a celebrant's prayer, then "For a safe delivery," "For the parents," "For a child not yet baptized / already baptized." The Anglican service concludes with a prayer to the Trinity, reminding the people that all are children of God.

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GeorgeDillon | Feb 18, 2012, 02:44 PM EST

Hatemongers like TompaisleySwinford seek to tarnish everything with their own bile and bigotry. In this case, Swinford turned a badly-understood memory of the Christian tradition of Churching into an opportunity to spew forth his hate. A moment's effort, if he indeed wanted to know the facts, could have yielded him many online expositions on Churching, and permitted him an understanding of something he knew nothing about. The very first one I found said the following: "In Christian tradition the Churching of Women is the ceremony wherein a blessing is given to mothers after recovery from childbirth. The ceremony includes thanksgiving for the woman's survival of childbirth, and is performed even when the child is stillborn, or has died unbaptized." Note how the hatemonger and bigot TomSwinford vilely misrepresents what is a beautiful and life-affirming tradition, and twists it for his own sinister purposes. He should be banned from this site for his pattern of lies and bigotry. Contemptible.

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GeorgeDillon | Feb 18, 2012, 02:35 PM EST

Notice how our resident liar and bigot TomSwinford backtracked when I called him on his truly absurd claim that in the 1960s married women had to tell in confession that they had had sex with their husband. This anti-Catholic slur by the bigoted buffoon TomSwinford is so atrocious that he should be kicked off this site forthwith. I don't care that now he says he only heard it third-hand. I say he's a liar and a fraud, who invented this slur from his own weird prejudices. As we say in Irish (a language unknown to Swinford) "Duirt bean liom go nduirt bean lei...". I complained about his posting but have little faith that he'll get the fate he deserves, which is permanent exile from this online group. But even now it's not too late for this bigoted jerk to apologize to Catholic readers for his effort to stir up anti-Catholicism. Maybe he would be better styling himself TomPaisley, that's another anti-Catholic nut.

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jetsnoone | Feb 18, 2012, 11:37 AM EST

The Democrats are the party of abortion....

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