Why Women Aren't People (But Corporations Are)

Accused Child Molester

Look at what Obama is accused of.

Can you say coldjoint, coldjoint?

Yes, I can. You are a Marxist troll.

Howard Zinn was born in August 1922 to Jewish immigrant parents (both factory workers) in Brooklyn, New York. He joined the Army Air Force during World War II and was assigned as a bombardier in the 490th Bombardment Group, which targeted sites in Berlin, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. After the war, Zinn attended New York University on the GI Bill, graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1951.


Member of the Communist Party

In the late 1940s, Zinn served as vice-chairman for a Brooklyn branch of the American Labor Party (ALP), an organization run and dominated by Communists. As historian Ronald Radosh writes, "The ALP was but the first of many Communist-led groups with which Zinn would lend both his name and his active participation." Among these were the American Veterans Committee, the American Peace Mobilization, and the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee.

In 1949, the FBI opened a domestic security investigation on Zinn (the 423-page FBI File #100-360217) because of his involvement with Communist front groups like ALP and his status as an active member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). (Zinn's membership in the party lasted from 1948 until at least 1953, and perhaps as late as 1956; he was known to attend party meetings as often as five times per week.) Notably, however, he never acknowledged his Communist Party membership, and whenever he was asked about it, he denied it.

In 1951 Zinn taught a “Basic Marxism” class at the CPUSA's Brooklyn, New York headquarters, where he emphasized that “the basic teachings of Marx and Lenin were sound and should be adhered to by those present.”

The FBI again scrutinized Zinn's activities in the 1960s on account of his criticism of the Bureau's civil-rights investigations. At that time, Zinn was a pro-Castro activist and a supporter of such organizations as the Black Panther Party, the Progressive Labor Party, the Socialist Workers Party, and the Students for a Democratic Society. A 1964 FBI memorandum says that in 1962, Zinn “publicly protested United States demand for withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba”; i.e., he was in favor of the U.S. being vulnerable to a Soviet nuclear attack. Moreover, Zinn was named on the FBI's “Security Index” and “Communist Index”; the former included individuals who were judged to represent a high enough risk that they could be detained by the government in the event of a national emergency.

In 1966, Zinn co-sponsored a testimonial dinner in honor of Herbert Aptheker of the American Institute for Marxist Studies and the CPUSA.

In February 1969, Zinn was listed as a sponsor of the Massachusetts Committee to Abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee, a Communist Party front group.

The FBI investigated Zinn still further in 1974 when he traveled to North Vietnam with Daniel Berrigan to publicize his anti-war positions and his desire to see America's Communist enemies win the Vietnam War. That same year, the Bureau ended all its investigations of Zinn.

Quote:

A true conservative would notice that all businesses pass their costs onto the consumer so Hobby Lobby would simply have its rates raised to pay for the coverage they don't want to pay for but the insurance company will pay for.

What does that have to do with the outright lies from Democrats?

It shows you are so full of **** you don't recognize lies when you see them.

Earlier today, five men agreed that closely held corporations with anti-birth control religious beliefs cannot be required to provide contraceptive coverage to female employees. Corporations are people, my friend. Women? Not so much.

So why all the vitriol? Why all the talk of coercion? In a very insightful post at Bloomberg View, blogger Megan McArdle explains the situation. In fact, it’s one of the better posts I’ve seen on the controversy.

McArdle says three factors are involved. First, the left cannot understand why religion should merit this sort of deference. Although “the religious right views religion as a fundamental, and indeed essential, part of the human experience,” she writes, “the secular left views it as something more like a hobby.” For the left, therefore, “it’s as if a major administrative rule was struck down because it unduly burdened model-train enthusiasts.” In fact, although McArdle doesn’t put it this way, the Court has allowed religion to interfere with sex, which really is “a fundamental, and indeed essential, part of the human experience.” It just seems crazy.

Second, about coercion. From the classical liberal perspective, in which rights are principally negative rights, the Hobby Lobby case does not involve coercion. As McArdle writes, “How is not buying you something equivalent to ‘imposing’ on you”? But if we consider that our society confers many positive rights as well as negative ones, the situation becomes much more complicated:

“Do what you want, as long as you don’t try to force me to do it, too” works very well, which is why this verbal formula has had such a long life. But when you introduce positive rights into the picture, this abruptly stops working. You have a negative right not to have your religious practice interfered with, and say your church forbids the purchase or use of certain forms of birth control. If I have a negative right not to have my purchase of birth control interfered with, we can reach a perhaps uneasy truce where you don’t buy it and I do. But if I have a positive right to have birth control purchased for me, then suddenly our rights are directly opposed: You have a right not to buy birth control, and I have a right to have it bought for me, by you.

Third, she writes, the classically liberal distinction between the state and civil society has broken down. Classical liberalism accepted a large public space that did not belong to the government. Now, however,

For many people, this massive public territory is all the legitimate province of the state. Institutions within that sphere are subject to close regulation by the government, including regulations that turn those institutions into agents of state goals—for example, by making them buy birth control for anyone they choose to employ. It is not a totalitarian view of government, but it is a totalizing view of government; almost everything we do ends up being shaped by the law and the bureaucrats appointed to enforce it. We resolve the conflict between negative and positive rights by restricting many negative rights to a shrunken private sphere where they cannot get much purchase.

In this context, it’s possible to believe that Hobby Lobby’s founders are imposing their beliefs on others, because they’re bringing private beliefs into the government sphere—and religion is not supposed to be in the government sphere. It belongs over there with whatever it was you and your significant other chose to do on date night last Wednesday. In that sphere, my positive right to birth control obviously trumps your negative right to free exercise of religion, because religion isn’t supposed to be out here at all. It’s certainly not supposed to be poking around in what’s happening between me and my doctor, which is private, and therefore ought to operate with negative-right reciprocity: I can’t tell you what birth control to take, and you can’t tell me.

McArdle agrees with the Hobby Lobby decision, by the way (as do I), which makes her willingness to see things from the opposite perspective all the more welcome. Read the whole thing.