Unless I passed out under an enchanted tree and have been sleeping for decades without knowing, this is the year 2012, right? AD?

So why are we still fighting over contraception?

The controversy over the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation’s decision to eliminate funding to Planned Parenthood—and subsequent reversal— continues. Catholic leaders are blasting the health reform requirement that insurance plans to cover contraceptives. Commentator Mark Shields joined other liberals in blasting the provision, saying it could have “cataclysmic” fallout for President Obama come November.

Numerous pundits have predicted that the requirement —and its narrow exemption for churches — will be a political liability for Obama. But where Shields sees “cataclysmic” fallout, the White House sees something quite different: a chance to widen the reproductive health debate beyond abortion to issues like contraceptives, winning over key demographics of independent voters in the process.

And that could explain why the White House, alongside the Obama campaign, has engaged eagerly on the issues. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was in USA Today earlier this week, praising the new provision. The Obama campaign meanwhile hasn’t been shy either, drawing up an infographic praising the new regulation. While there are some signs of a potential compromise for religious groups, the White House has made it pretty clear it plans to stand firm behind the current regulation.

But while Catholic leadership has blasted the new regulation, polls show that a majority of Catholics are actually more supportive of the provision than the rest of the country. A poll out Tuesday from the Public Religion Research Institute finds 52 percent of Catholic voters agreed with the statement, “employers should be required to provide their employees with health care plans that cover contraception and birth control at no cost.” That’s pretty much in line with overall support for the provision, which hovers at 55 percent - likely because Catholics use contraceptives at rates similar to the rest of Americans.

It was bad enough when CPAC recently allowed the wacko paleo-conservative John Birch Society to have an exhibit, but this year things are exponentially worse.

This year, the Conservative Political Action Conference, at which presidential candidates Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich will appear, is having a panel discussion featuring an overt racist and white nationalist: Peter Brimelow, founder of hate site VDARE.

12:30 The Failure of Multiculturalism: How the pursuit of diversity is weakening the American Identity – Wilson C

Sponsored by: ProEnglish

Speakers: Robert Vandervoort, Executive Director, ProEnglish; John Derbyshire, contributing editor at National Review and author of We Are Doomed; Peter Brimelow, author of The Patriot Game: National Dreams and Political Realities and founder of VDARE.com; Dr. Serge Trifkovic, foreign affairs editor for Chronicles magazine; & Dr. Rosalie Porter, author of American Immigrant: My Life In Three Languages, chairwoman of the board, ProEnglish

Here’s the CPAC 2012 Schedule of Events (PDF).

I admit, this one kind of shocks me, and it’s not easy to do that any more. I knew the right wing had gone bug-eyed loony, but this is way beyond the usual xenophobia and paranoid bigotry; this is open white nationalism at the Republican right’s premier high-profile conference, in an election year. Stunning. Masks are dropping all over Wingnutland.

Here are some more details on Brimelow’s vicious racial hatred, from Right Wing Watch:

VDARE is a White Nationalist website, run by Brimelow, which frequently publishes the works of anti-Semitic and racist writers and is named after Virginia Dare, who is believed to be the first child of English parents born in the Americas. Brimelow, an immigrant from Great Britain, expresses his fear of the loss of America’s white majority, blames non-white immigrants for social and economic problems and urges the Republican Party to give up on minority voters and focus on winning the white vote. He also said that a New York City subway is the same as an Immigration and Naturalization Service waiting room, “an underworld that is not just teeming but also almost entirely colored.”

VDARE has published the work of people like Robert Weissberg, who says that black and Hispanic students are responsible for problems in the American education system, Marcus Epstein, the Youth for Western Civilization leader who karate-chopped a black woman after calling her a “n****r” (he later pled guilty to assault), and J. Philippe Rushton of the eugenicist Pioneer Fund.

The Southern Poverty Law Center lists VDARE as a White Nationalist hate group and notes that “VDARE.com’s archives contain articles like ‘Freedom vs. Diversity,’ ‘Abolishing America,’ ‘Anarcho-Tyranny — Where Multiculturalism Leads’ and ‘Why Immigrants Kill,’” compiled quotes from other VDARE writers that call the U.S. an exclusively white nation and denounce Jews for “weakening America’s historic White majority”:

“America was defined — almost explicitly, sometimes very explicitly — as a white nation, for white people, and what that means is that there is virtually no figure, no law, no policy, no event in the history of the old, white America that can survive the transition to the new and non-white version. Whether we will want to call the new updated version ‘America’ at all is another question entirely.”

— Sam Francis, VDARE.com, July 21, 2003

“Jewish activity collectively, throughout history, is best understood as an elaborate and highly successful group competitive strategy directed against neighboring peoples and host societies. The objective has been control of economic resources and political power. One example: overwhelming Jewish support for non-traditional immigration, which has the effect of weakening America’s historic white majority.”

— Kevin MacDonald, VDARE.com, Nov. 14, 2006

“What race realists find most infuriating about the liberalism of the last half century is not just that it has lost its instinctive appreciation for the culture and people of the West but actively, viciously attacks them. Whites are doing something no other people have ever done in human history. Our rulers and elites welcome replacement by aliens, they vilify our ancestors and their own, they sacrifice our interests to those of favored minorities, and they treat the entire history of the West as if it were a global plague of rapine and exploitation. This is a disease that is killing us, and we must fight it head on.”

— Jared Taylor, VDARE.com, July 4, 2008

Also see:
CPAC Won’t Renounce White Nationalist

Rick Santorum’s big wins last night in Minnesota, Colorado, and Missouri are important signs of the power of reactionary religious thinking in today’s right wing.

Of all the candidates, Santorum is by far the most fanatical; he’s absolutely opposed to all contraception, wants to see abortion made completely illegal, is anti-gay to an insane degree, and is a hard core creationist and global warming denier. He’s the poster boy for Republican atavism, an anti-science avatar for the Tea Party set.

People like Rick Santorum are one of the major reasons why I had to make a public break with the right. They make America a laughing stock to the rest of the world with their backward, deliberately ignorant ideology. And that’s why this coming Presidential election is so important. Blind fanatics like Santorum must not be allowed to gain access to the highest office in the United States.

Our new feature of the day has to do with comments; when you post a comment, your username is shown on the top line. This is how it’s been at LGF for lo, these many years.

But now, you can actually change the name that shows up in your comment, by entering a new name for your “display name” in your Account Settings.

This means that anyone with an LGF account can now use almost any name they like when posting comments.

But you can still easily find out who’s really behind that display name; just hover your mouse over it for a second or two and their real username will pop up. The real username is also shown in the Profile dialog box, when you click a user’s icon.

Note that changing your display name will change what appears in all your comments; if you’ve posted a comment previously with a different display name, it will change when you change the name.

And just in case someone decides to abuse this feature and impersonate someone for less-than-groovy reasons, I’ve coded it so that I have a simple, one-click way to completely turn it off and show only real usernames again.

Have at it. And try not to get discombobulated.

There’s a primary election in Missouri, and caucuses tonight in Minnesota and Colorado, so here’s a thread to keep up with news from the front lines; the Missouri primary just closed (at 8pm ET) so results should start to be available soon.

Birth control pills via Shutterstock

Right wing think tank the Heritage Foundation is blaring that “Obamacare” has awakened a sleeping giant:

It is a rare moment indeed when faith denominations of all stripes unite together in common cause, and it is rarer still when that cause is a political one, with a sole piece of legislation as its principal target. But when that law eviscerates the very foundation of religious liberty in America as protected under the First Amendment, it should not be surprising that Catholics and Jews, evangelical Christians, and mainline Lutherans alike find common cause in defense of their liberties.

Bill Donohue of the Catholic League is threatening fighting in the streets:

“Never before, unprecedented in American history, for the federal government to line up against the Roman Catholic Church,” said Catholic League head Bill Donohue.

Already Archbishop Timothy Dolan has spoken out against the law and priests around the country have mobilized, reading letters  from the pulpit. Donohue said Catholic officials will stop at nothing to put a stop to it.

“This is going to be fought out with lawsuits, with court decisions, and, dare I say it, maybe even in the streets,” Donohue said.

But it’s hard to picture a newly-awakened army of raging Catholics and evangelicals rioting in the streets when polls show that a Majority of Catholics Think Employers Should Be Required to Provide Health Care Plans That Cover Birth Control at No Cost.

This is rather unfortunate, but what other choice does Obama have? If he doesn’t deploy his own Super PACs (while never actually coordinating with them, wink), the gargantuan amounts of money the Republicans will throw into the race would give them an overwhelming advantage: We Will Not Play by Two Sets of Rules — Blog — Barack Obama.

The President opposed the Citizens United decision. He understood that with the dramatic growth in opportunities to raise and spend unlimited special-interest money, we would see new strategies to hide it from public view. He continues to support a law to force full disclosure of all funding intended to influence our elections, a reform that was blocked in 2010 by a unanimous Republican filibuster in the U.S. Senate. And the President favors action—by constitutional amendment, if necessary—to place reasonable limits on all such spending.

But this cycle, our campaign has to face the reality of the law as it currently stands.

Over the last few months, Super PACs affiliated with Republican presidential candidates have spent more than $40 million on television and radio, almost all of it for negative ads.

Last week, filings showed that the Super PAC affiliated with Mitt Romney’s campaign raised $30 million in 2011 from fewer than 200 contributors, most of them from the financial sector. Governor Romney personally helped raise money for this group, which is run by some of his closest allies.

Meanwhile, other Super PACs established for the sole purpose of defeating the President—along with “nonprofits” that also aren’t required to disclose the sources of their funding—have raised more than $50 million. In the aggregate, these groups are expected to spend half a billion dollars, above and beyond what the Republican nominee and party are expected to commit to try to defeat the President.

With so much at stake, we can’t allow for two sets of rules in this election whereby the Republican nominee is the beneficiary of unlimited spending and Democrats unilaterally disarm.

Therefore, the campaign has decided to do what we can, consistent with the law, to support Priorities USA in its effort to counter the weight of the GOP Super PAC. We will do so only in the knowledge and with the expectation that all of its donations will be fully disclosed as required by law to the Federal Election Commission.

There’s nothing else he can do. The Citizens United decision launched a political arms race among super-wealthy donors, to see who could control the US political system by writing the biggest check.

The Associated Press is reporting that the appeals court has ruled California’s voter-approved ban on gay marriage unconstitutional, so we know what the next big right wing freak-out will be.

Here’s a link to the court’s decision.

Also see:
Prop. 8: Gay-Marriage Ban Unconstitutional, Court Rules

Republican anti-choice activist Karen Handel is resigning from the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation, with an angry statement defending her work against Planned Parenthood: Karen Handel Resigns From Komen for the Cure.

I am deeply disappointed by the gross mischaracterizations of the strategy, its rationale, and my involvement in it. I openly acknowledge my role in the matter and continue to believe our decision was the best one for Komen’s future and the women we serve. However, the decision to update our granting model was made before I joined Komen, and the controversy related to Planned Parenthood has long been a concern to the organization. Neither the decision nor the changes themselves were based on anyone’s political beliefs or ideology. Rather, both were based on Komen’s mission and how to better serve women, as well as a realization of the need to distance Komen from controversy. I believe that Komen, like any other nonprofit organization, has the right and the responsibility to set criteria and highest standards for how and to whom it grants.

What was a thoughtful and thoroughly reviewed decision – one that would have indeed enabled Komen to deliver even greater community impact – has unfortunately been turned into something about politics. This is entirely untrue. This development should sadden us all greatly.

Please note that in her statement, Handel is openly admitting that Planned Parenthood was deliberately targeted. This comes after many days of Komen Foundation officials denying that there was any specific intent to defund Planned Parenthood. The truth will eventually out.

Meanwhile, Mitt Romney obviously understands which side his bread is buttered on: the religious right side.

When Minnesota radio host Scott Hennen asked Romney whether Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the leading U.S. anti-breast cancer charity, should continue to give Planned Parenthood grants for cancer screenings and mammogram referrals, Romney said, “I don’t think so.”

“I also feel that the government should cut off funding to Planned Parenthood,” the former Massachusetts governor added. “Look, the idea that we’re subsidizing an institution which is providing abortion, in my view, is wrong. Planned Parenthood ought to stand on their own feet, and should not get government subsidy.”