Jonathan Zasloff

The cardinal mocked a secular culture that “seems to discover new rights every day.” “I don’t recall a right to marriage,” he said, describing marriage, instead, as a “call.” —Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, 2012 Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival.” —Loving v. Virginia, 1967 […]

Listen up, class! In the last 48 hours: 1) Rick Santorum has compared Barack Obama to Hitler while comparing prenatal testing to eugenics; 2) Mitt Romney has warned that cutting government spending could hurt the economy. Two questions, class: Which one will be a more controversial statement within the Republican Party? Which candidate will reverse […]

All the press coverage over Rick Santorum’s idiotic suggestions that mainline Protestants aren’t Christians, or that President Obama isn’t a Christian, or that prenatal care increases abortion rates, or that people who favor prenatal care favor eugenics, have obscured his equally idiotic attacks on environmentalism: Santorum said that he was referring not to the president’s […]

The Obama Administration hasn’t even promulgated its new compromise contraception rule, and already plaintiffs are rushing in to challenge it. Since the regulation isn’t even out yet, these challenges will fail (because the litigation is not “ripe”), but eventually that will occur, and some court might have to look at the issue on the merits. […]

Here’s a truly odd observation from the usually-excellent Marc Ambinder. Writing about Jeremy Lin, Asian-Americans, and the Republican Party, Ambinder argues: If Republicans were to rid themselves of their anti-immigrant wing, or if they choose not allow their primaries to be controlled by it, there is no real reason why Asian-Americans can’t become a true […]

House Republicans looked pretty bad yesterday when their morning panel about the Affordable Care Act’s contraception regulations failed to include a single woman. But then Republicans argued that it really had nothing whatsoever to do with contraception. Representative and Deadbeat Dad Joe Walsh of Illinois, who speaks for most of the House Republican Conference, insisted, […]

Sarah Kliff thinks so, reporting in the Washington Post that the health care expansion envisioned in the Affordable Care Act will require an expansion of doctor supply as well. She outlines quite well the economic statistics involved and the currently-overwhelming incentives for young physicians to go into lucrative specialities. But there’s a 900-pound gorilla stomping […]

Death panels are fine, as long as employers control them. [Cross-posted at The Reality-Based Community]

At the end of a superb take-down of the Catholic bishops’ hypocrisy on social and economic issues, Andrew Sullivan notes, They have become the Pharisees. And we need Jesus. Foul! 15 yards, unsportsmanlike ignorance of religious history! The real Pharisees were not the crimped, hyper-legalistic pedants that the New Testament describes. They were, instead, a […]

From Andrew Sullivan: The untimely death of the great Whitney Houston cannot but provoke intense sadness. No. The deaths of more than 25,000 children in the Somalian famine and brutality cannot but provoke intense sadness. The ongoing enslavement of 27 million people worldwide, many of them women and girls in sexual bondage, cannot but provoke […]