Month: July 2014

The Satanic Temple is taking a fun,
if slightly flawed, stand for
both religious and reproductive freedom. The organization—which
claims to represent “politically aware Satanists, secularists, and
advocates for individual liberty”—is calling on women to opt out of
“informed consent” laws that require those seeking abortions to
listen to a
litany of inaccurate or irrelevant information.

In five states, such laws require telling women that the state
favors childbirth to abortion. Others inform about the disreputed
link between abortion and breast cancer or the possibility of a
nonexistent condition known as “post abortion syndrome.” 

“We believe that personal decisions should be made
with reference to only the best available, scientifically
valid information,” The Satanic Temple (TST) website states. It
urges like-minded women seeking abortions to print out a TST
template letter asserting “a religious exemption from the burden of
state ­mandated ‘informational’ abortion materials.” An excerpt
from the letter: 

As an adherent to the principles of the Satanic Temple, my
sincerely held religious beliefs are:

• My body is inviolable and subject to my will alone.
• I make any decision regarding my health based on the best
  scientific understanding of the world, even if the science does not
  comport with the religious or political beliefs of others.
• My inviolable body includes any fetal or embryonic tissue I
  carry so long as that tissue is unable to survive outside my body
  as an independent human being.

(…) My informed consent is based solely on information you
provide which, in the exercise of your independent medical
judgment, is materially relevant to my health (excluding the
present or future condition of any fetal or embryonic tissue inside
my body) and is scientifically true and accurate. My informed
consent is not based on Political Information.

This letter constitutes my acknowledgment that you have offered
Political Information to me. I reject that Political Information
because it offends my sincerely held religious beliefs. Please
attach this letter to any forms you are required to keep regarding
my informed consent.

Groups have been challenging politically-motivated abortion
consent laws for years, but TST says it is the first to suggest a
religious exemption possibility. Stunt or serious move, I think the
idea is pretty great.

The “flawed” part is TST linking its initiative to the recent
Supreme Court ruling on religious exemptions to the Obamacare
contraception mandate. “While we feel we have a strong case for an
exemption regardless of the Hobby Lobby ruling, the Supreme Court
has decided that religious beliefs are so sacrosanct that they can
even trump scientific fact,” said TST
spokesman Lucien Greaves in a press release. “This was made
clear when they allowed Hobby Lobby to claim certain contraceptives
were abortifacients, when in fact they are not.” 

Though Hobby Lobby’s opposition was based on a belief that
certain forms of contraception are abortion—an opinion contra the
wisdom of medical and scientific communities—the
abortifaciant-or-not status of these drugs wasn’t up for the
court’s consideration. And company owners against birth control
because it prevents pregnancy, even without thinking it terminates
a pregnancy, could still prevail under the Supreme Court’s
Hobby Lobby logic. The point isn’t that religious beliefs
“trump” scientific facts but that they don’t have to depend on
them—it doesn’t matter if intrauterine devices actually cause
abortions or Allah actually requires a certain amount of prayer per
day, only that religious individuals sincerely believe these things
are true. So TST’s Hobby Lobby parallels fail here, but
the larger religious freedom claim might just have merit. 

“Do You Have It Up Your Ass?” Drug Warriors in New Mexico Go
Too Far is the latest video from ReasonTV. Watch above or
click on the link below for video, full text, supporting links,
downloadable versions, and more Reason TV clips.

View this article.

“Do You Have It Up Your Ass?” Drug Warriors in New Mexico Go
Too Far is the latest video from ReasonTV. Watch above or
click on the link below for video, full text, supporting links,
downloadable versions, and more Reason TV clips.

View this article.

The
lead story in today’s New York Times provides yet
another illustration of how the paper’s support
for restrictions on political speech distorts its reporting
on the issue. Start with the headline: “Outside Money Drives a
Deluge of Political Ads.” As you might surmise, the article is
about the impact of
Citizens United v. FEC, the 2010 decision in which the
Supreme Court overturned legal limits on independent spending by
unions and corporations (including nonprofit interest groups) that
might influence elections. The headline is notably more negative
than others that would be equally descriptive, such as,
“Independent Spending Shakes Up Political Campaigns.”

By using the term outside rather than
independent (as reporter Ashley Parker does throughout the
article), the Times implies that the newly legal
advocacy represents some sort of intrusion. But in this context
“outside money” merely means speech by people who do not work
for a candidate or party, a group that includes the overwhelming
majority of Americans. Why should all of those people be considered
“outsiders” whose participation in political debates is suspect?
Should the right to praise or criticize politicians be limited to
“insiders”?

The headline also asserts that Citizens United has
produced a “deluge,” a word that likewise has a negative
connotation. Water imagery is
popular among critics of Citizens United. In the fall
of 2010, Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation,
worried that “a flood of corporate campaign cash” would sweep away
the foundations of democracy, while President Obama warned that “a
flood of attack ads run by shadowy groups with harmless-sounding
names” would drown out the voices of the disadvantaged. Parker, for
her part, reports that “viewers in Charlotte are swimming in
political ads,” while voters in various other places are “inundated
with ads.”

They may be soaking in it, but apparently they’re not soaking it
in:

Both campaigns and outside groups are worrying about how to
reach voters who, so inundated with ads already, may disengage in
the crucial months before Election Day. A premium, they said, will
be placed on creative commercials that cut through the clutter, as
well as using data and analytics to target critical voters and get
them to vote.

“The irony is that the more political ads air on TV, the more
voters tune them out,” said Mark McKinnon, a veteran Republican
strategist and ad maker. “It just becomes a white noise. The return
on investment is absurd.”

But according to Parker, the ads are worrisome even if voters
ignore them, because the “explosion of spending on political
advertising…is accelerating the rise of moneyed interests and
wresting control from the candidates’ own efforts to reach voters.”
That is bad because the “outside groups,” led by Americans for
Prosperity, the Senate Majority PAC, and the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce, “are dictating the terms and message of the 2014
contests, defining candidates long before the candidates are able
to define themselves and start reaching voters.” Worse, those
“outside groups,” a.k.a. “moneyed interests,” are more interested
in tearing candidates down than in building them up:

It is also easier for outside groups and “super PACs” to
run attack ads, leaving the positive message up to the candidates,
and the result is an increasingly negative sheen to the general
political discourse. “There’s no question that the sheer number of
ads, combined with the fact that voters don’t know who’s paying for
the ad, creates a layer of toxicity in our politics that is very
corrosive,” said Senator Michael Bennet, Democrat of Colorado and
chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

Really? No question at all? Parker does not actually provide any
evidence that political ads are more negative than they used to be
(a perennial complaint) as a result of independent spending. The
one specific example of negative advertising she mentions involves
a message that both a candidate and independent groups supporting
him are emphasizing:

Senator Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, and Democratic outside
groups there have been laserlike in their effort to paint his
opponent, Representative Cory Gardner, as “too extreme” on women’s
issues like reproductive rights. In one Senate Majority PAC ad,
images of women flash by as a narrator intones that Mr. Gardner
would push “to outlaw a women’s right to choose, even in cases of
rape and incest.”

The same race, by the way, produced this ad, in which
the League of Conservation Voters attacks Gardner for attracting
support from the “out-of-state oil billionaire Koch Brothers” in
the form of a “smear campaign” featuring “attack ads” sponsored by
Americans for Prosperity. In other words, it’s a negative ad from
an “outside group” criticizing negative ads from another “outside
group.” Apparently the First Amendment protects that sort of
headache-inducing irony.

Even if it were true that lifting restrictions on speech has
given “an increasingly negative sheen to the general political
discourse,” would that necessarily be a bad thing? In my
experience, “negative” messages tend to be more substantive than
anodyne ads assuring us of a candidate’s compassion, competence, or
patriotism.

No doubt this story, like much New York
Times coverage of campaign finance issues, will strike
many readers as fair—provided they agree that less speech is
better than more speech, that speech by insiders is better than
speech by outsiders, and that positive speech is better than
negative speech. But a more evenhanded aproach would treat these as
controversial propositions instead of background assumptions.