Mike Pence – Page 8 – Sheila Kennedy

That Old-Time Religion…Again. And Again.

Gov. Mike Pence said his administration is looking into objections raised by religious conservatives after the Indiana State Department of Health sent letters to parents who haven’t vaccinated their children for a type of cervical cancer.

The letter was sent to about 305,000 parents of Indiana children with no record of having started the three-dose vaccine for human papilloma virus, or HPV. The letter encourages them to have their children vaccinated.

Indiana culture warrior Micah Clark received one of those letters (having evidently decided not to protect his own 14-year-old daughter against HPV) and immediately sounded the alarm–not against the disease, but against the “intrusiveness” of the Department of Health. How dare they advise about children’s health!

The vaccination prevents the most common types of HPV, a sexually transmitted virus that can cause cancer and genital warts. Indiana ranks 40th in the nation for how many girls between the ages of 13 and 16 have been vaccinated, with about 23 percent having received all three doses of the HPV vaccine.

State Department of Health spokeswoman Jennifer O’Malley said the letters were sent starting the week of Sept. 21 to parents of children with no record of having started the HPV series in the state immunization information system, which is called the Children and Hoosier Immunization Registry Program.

When the vaccine was developed, a number of fundamentalist Christians objected that it would lead young girls to become sexually promiscuous. (Don’t ask me–I don’t get it either.) Our pious Governor previously concluded that the vaccine “is a decision that’s best left to parents in consultation with their doctors.”

It’s hard to see how a reminder letter from health professionals usurps that parental prerogative, but Micah Clark sees a War on Christians behind every tree…or postage stamp.

I don’t know about others, but I am very, very tired of fundamentalists trying to impose bad history and narrow theology on the rest of America.

Recently, USA Today carried a story about something called the Congressional Prayer Caucus. Led by Rep. Randy Forbes (R-VA), the Caucus, which is taxpayer-funded, is part of a group called the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation, coincidentally headquartered in a building owned by Forbes that also houses his campaign office.

The CPC wants “In God We Trust” signs and Ten Commandments monuments in public places, they want prayer to be part of government activities, and they defend gay-bashing chaplains in the military. The CPC criticized President Obama for referring to E Pluribus Unum as the American motto, and advocates removing Establishment Clause cases from the jurisdiction of federal courts.

It isn’t a small group, either. According to David Niose, at one point the CPC had 100 members.

If that isn’t enough to terrify those of us who reside in the 21st Century, take a look at this recent poll, reported by Dailykos.

Nationwide, more than a third of Republicans say that Islam should be illegal in the United States, according to a new PPP poll provided exclusively to Daily Kos Elections. Nearly half—a 44 percent plurality—say Christianity should be our official religion.

Those are the Republicans who elected Mike Pence, and those are the voters who will cast their ballots to retain him.

The American Taliban.

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You Can’t Make This Stuff Up…

If Democrats were creating a caricature of a Republican extremist–a one-dimensional straw man to run against– it would look a lot like Mike Pence. Unfortunately, Indiana’s zealot Governor isn’t a fabrication by the opposition.

As the IBJ reported yesterday,

Gov. Mike Pence announced Monday that he will expand Indiana’s affiliation with a not-for-profit organization that counsels pregnant women against abortion and pushes abstinence as the only method of birth control.

Indiana Right to Life was reportedly gratified. A Google search confirmed the reason why–not only does “Real Alternatives” (the nonprofit in question) confine its “services” to “counseling” against abortion, it also provides “clients” with the horrifying “facts” about birth control. I found a handy little pamphlet explaining why Contraception Is Not the Answer, filled with misinformation and fear-producing “facts.” (Did you know that injectable contraceptives “drastically increase your risk of invasive breast cancer”? No, and neither do medical experts.)

A blogger in Michigan–where their anti-choice Governor has also contracted with Real Alternatives– detailed the organization’s dubious tactics, many of which were documented in an investigation conducted by a Philadelphia newspaper. The reporter visited a Real Alternative clinic, claiming to be pregnant; she was told that abortion would leave permanent psychological damage, that it often leads to depression, and could interfere with her ever having children– claims thoroughly debunked by reputable medical science.

Groups like Real Alternatives exist throughout the country, mostly funded by anti-abortion organizations like Heartbeat International and individual donations. Real Alternatives, though, is funded almost entirely by the state of Pennsylvania — financed, that is, by you, the taxpayer, and it has received tens of millions of dollars since 1997…

That money, City Paper has found, goes to pay for part of the $199,000 salary (including benefits) of the CEO of Real Alternatives, who has no medical experience. It also funds an army of hundreds of “counselors,” non-medically-qualified personnel whose job it is to dispense the organization’s (sometimes outright inaccurate) information — and who, despite lacking the credentials of nurse practitioners or psychologists, cost the state much more per hour for their services than either.

According to Cosmopolitan magazine, which conducted a year-long investigation of the organization’s operations in Pennsylvania,

Real Alternatives’ contract with the state relies on debunked studies that imply abortion leads to breast cancer and clinical depression. Centers are not allowed to advocate for birth control, much less dispense it. The contract’s directives advise pregnancy-center staff to make an “assessment of the client’s spiritual needs” by asking questions like, “How does your faith impact the choices you make?” (One quarterly report from a center to Real Alternatives refers to clients with the aliases “Mary” and “Joseph.”)

The United Nations Population Fund estimates that one in three deaths related to pregnancy and childbirth could be avoided if all women had access to contraceptive services.

Whatever one’s position on abortion, the use of tax dollars to support “clinics” that offer no medical services— clinics that exist solely to lie to women in order to convince them to forego both abortion and contraception–is immoral.

Our fundamentalist Governor is understandably frantic to mend fences with his Religious Right constituency, after reality and Hoosier businesses forced him to sign the RFRA “fix.” In the echo chamber he inhabits, this contract probably seemed like a good way to do that.

In the rest of the state–even among Republicans– not so much.

John Gregg is looking better all the time.

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Kim Davis, Mike Pence and Those Pesky Things Called Job Descriptions…

There really isn’t much more to be said about Kim Davis, the County Clerk who claims her religious beliefs should protect her against demands that she do her job. Let’s face it: when even a Fox News panel concludes that her lawyer is an idiot and her argument without legal merit, her Christian martyr days are probably limited.

As multiple observers have pointed out, if Davis can refuse to do her job because of her religious beliefs, Quaker clerks can refuse to issue gun permits, Amish clerks can deny driver’s licenses…the list goes on. Davis’ defenders seem unable to distinguish between her right to personal religious liberty and a right to use government to deny such liberty to others.

But Davis isn’t the only religious zealot who doesn’t seem to grasp that pesky “job description” concept. Indiana Governor Mike Pence just announced his opposition to the Iran agreement.

Like Davis, Pence is entitled to his views. The problem is that–also like Davis– he doesn’t seem to understand what he’s being paid (with our tax dollars) to do.

Not only does the Governor’s job not include foreign policy, it does include multiple responsibilities which the Pence Administration has consistently ignored: maintenance and repair of the state’s infrastructure, protection of the environment and public health, and day-to-day administration of the state’s bureaucracy (which has experienced unprecedented managerial turnover), to name just a few.

It also includes attention to Indiana’s worsening economy–14.6 percent of Hoosiers now live in food insecure households, up from 14.1 percent in 2013.

Instead of attending to these admittedly prosaic elements of his job description, Pence has spent his time bullying the Superintendent of Public Instruction, establishing a “News Bureau,” hectoring Planned Parenthood, and defending RFRA.

Here’s the “take away” for both of these exemplars of zealotry: if you can’t–or won’t– do your job, you need to quit.

http://www.indystar.com/story/news/politics/2015/09/08/pence-says-iran-nuclear-deal/71885290/

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Rules for Thee but Not for Me….

The two-year-olds who currently dominate America’s political landscape may be riding different hobby-horses, but the common thread that runs through their various tantrums is an assault on the rule of law.

The essential difference between regimes based upon raw power and those based on the rule of law is that in the latter, the same rules apply to everyone. No one, we like to say, is “above the law.” In democratic rule-of-law regimes, partisans may contend bitterly over the wisdom or efficacy of any particular rule, but once it is enacted, like it or not, they abide by the law unless and until it is repealed or overruled.

Adherence to the rule of law is an essential condition of government legitimacy–a point that is seemingly lost on the various county clerks refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, or police officers who believe their commands are the law, to use just a couple of contemporary examples.

Closer to home, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence says he will refuse to implement the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan. In a letter to President Obama, he wrote that he would not abide by the plan “if the final rule has not demonstrably and significantly improved.”

“Improved” evidently meaning “acceptable to Mike Pence.”

If Pence and others who object to the EPA’s rule truly believe it represents a wrongful exercise of the agency’s authority, they can litigate that issue. If they win, good for them. If they lose, they have to abide by the law.

In a country with the rule of law, none of us gets to decide for ourselves which laws we will obey.

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Pence Postures

Watching Indiana Governor Pence frantically trying to save his political skin may be the best show in town.

We’ve had the announcements spinning Indiana’s lackluster economic performance. We’ve had the new state slogan, proclaiming that Indiana is “a state that works.” (A former student asked the pertinent question: who, exactly, does it work for? Certainly not for ALICE, or for Hoosier working families.)

However, these fairly typical campaign efforts are unlikely to overcome the “Pence Must Go” sentiment that has continued to grow in the wake of the RFRA controversy.

So over the last few days, we’ve also seen determined efforts to pander to his (declining) base.

Pence has been positively salivating over the heavily doctored video attacking Planned Parenthood. (See yesterday’s post.) He immediately ordered Indiana’s Attorney General and its Department of Health to investigate, to “make sure” Planned Parenthood wasn’t “trading” in fetal tissue.

Indiana citizens will recall that the Governor spent most of his time in Congress fighting the culture wars, and especially trying to defund Planned Parenthood. (Perhaps that’s why he was responsible for passing exactly zero pieces of legislation in his eleven years in Congress.) Planned Parenthood has vehemently denied the allegations, and the Indiana Department of Health recently inspected and recertified Planned Parenthood’s facilities. Attorney General Greg Zoeller, of course, has his own culture war history….In any event, Pence clearly sees the emergence of this phony issue as a gift.

I assume the Governor also sees it as a golden opportunity to mend the rift with his Religious Right supporters, who have been angry about what they view as his “capitulation” on RFRA. (Honest, guys, I’m still the radically theocratic guy you used to love….)

Then there was his ostentatious arming of National Guard troops at recruiting centers in the wake of the tragic shooting in Tennessee. I’m sure he thinks the NRA, not to mention the anti-Muslim and/or anti-immigration members of his base, will respond positively to this display of unnecessary machismo. (He’s probably right about that.) And just in case we missed the symbolism, there was Tuesday’s order to fly flags at half-staff in Indiana, and the declaration of a period of mourning for those killed in Tennessee (a gesture of respect not accorded to the many Hoosier soldiers who died in Iraq).

Will any of this work? Will Pence be able to eke out an electoral victory now that more Hoosiers have seen the real Mike Pence? Or will Indiana’s often-feckless Democrats fail to take advantage of the political opening they’ve been handed?

Pass the popcorn. The show’s starting.

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