Chutzpah alert: GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum accused liberals of being the true enemies of science:

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum charged on Monday that President Barack Obama and Democrats were “anti-science” because they refused to exploit the Earth’s natural resources to the limits of technology.

Over the weekend the candidate had been criticized for saying that President Barack Obama followed a theology that was not “based on the Bible.” He later insisted that he was talking about the president siding with “radical environmentalists.” [Raw Story]

As a U.S. senator, Santorum sponsored an amendment that would have forced schools to teach the pseudoscience of intelligent design at the expense of evolution. Yet Satorum's suspicion of fossils does not extend to fossil fuels. In private life, he became a well-compensated advocate of fracking in Pennsylvania.

During the GOP primary, Santorum came out against insurance coverage for all pre-natal testing, because prenatal testing might lead to abortions. In other words he wants to force people who can't afford expensive prenatal tests to give birth to children with catastrophic disabilities. What a wise and compassionate leader.

Conservative columnist James Poulos got a lot of flack for his essay "What Are Women For?" and its equally long-winded and opaque sequel.

Poulos's main claim is that women have "privileged relationship to the natural world" through their bodies and that this has something to do with how women ought to live. He fancies himself an iconoclast, dispensing hard truths that neither liberals nor conservatives are ready to accept. So, what is this "privileged relationship" that nobody is willing to acknowledge? Do women have untapped powers to command animal familiars and sour milk at a glance? Disappointingly, Poulos just means that women can have babies.

"If my claim [that women are mostly for having babies] is doomed to be met with an avalanche of contempt, it seems likely that in our lifetimes social conservatism as we know it will be mocked, despised, and shamed right out of existence," Poulos whines.

By Jove, he's got it! If we reject the idea that biology determines a person's proper social role, then social conservatism turns out to be intellectually bankrupt and morally repugnant. Social conservatism says: i) There are exactly two genders, ii) You are biologically assigned to one of these at birth, iii) Each gender has a narrowly defined gender role that is esssential and unchanging across time and place, iv) Everyone has a duty to follow the role of the gender they were born into.

The beak of a parrot can pack 500-700 pounds of pressure per square inch. What happens if it's your finger in that vice instead of the usual Brazil nut? Hint: paperwork.

Sara Kliff of the Washington Post explains how insurance companies keep track of this kind of injury, and every other concievable mishap, using a system called the International Classification of Diseases:

That’s insurance-speak for the Tenth Edition of the International Classification of Diseases, a laundry list of thousands of billing codes that health insurance plans use to categorize various medical conditions. Get injured by a flaming water-ski? There’s an ICD-10 code for that. Have an unfortunate encounter with a parrot? ICD-10 has not one but nine codes to categorize parrot-related injuries (“W61.01” refers to being “bitten by a parrot” while W61.02 denotes being “struck by a parrot.”)

Right now, the medical billing world uses the ninth edition of the ICD, or ICD-9, which has about 18,000 codes. When it flips to ICD-10, that number will swell to 140,000 billing codes. The federal government was initially set to require the health-care industry to switch to ICD-10 by Oct. 1, 2013. But after intense lobbying, especially from the American Medical Association, Health and Human Services announced this week that it would delay implementation.

Right now, the insurance industry is using ICD-9, which has 18,000 billing codes. The federal government initially ordered the industry to upgrade to the 140,000-code ICD-10 system by October of 2013. However, the government backed off in the face of intensive lobbying from the American Medical Association and other interest groups.

Interestingly, the lobbying for ICD-10 comes from interest groups who want to use the codes for research. It would be interesting to know how their research interests influence the granularity of codes.

If there are nine codes for parrot-related injuries alone, how can everything else that could possibly go wrong with the human body fit into a mere 140,000 codes? If every animal that could injure humans gets 9 codes, won't they run out of codes before they even get around to enumerating all the different kinds asthma and arthritis?

Is the Cat Lobby pushing for extra parrot-related codes to make the avian competition look bad?

William Thierfelder, president of the private, Catholic, Belmont Abbey College, is scheduled to testify before Congress tomorrow about why Obama's compromise to provide free birth control to employees of religiously-affiliated universities and hospitals is a violation of religious freedom.

Thierfelder's goal was to repeat the words "religious freedom" as many times as possible in his interview with Sarah Kliff of the Washington Post in the hopes that readers would confuse repeated assertion with cogent argument. But the real bombshell that Kliff elicited from Thierfelder was a veiled threat:

[KLIFF] Let’s say we get to a point where your lawsuit isn’t successful and Congress doesn’t overturn this provision. What will you do then? Will Belmont Abbey comply with the mandate, drop insurance coverage or seek another option?

[THIERFELDER] We have to see what does come about. We want to take the least hurtful option for our employees and students. We obviously want to provide insurance coverage to our employees. It would be incredibly unfortunate if that wasn’t an alternative. This principle is so strong with us, it’s not really a compromising sort of thing. We can’t give in on this. So I don’t really know what happens. [Emphasis added.]

Let me get this straight: Belmont Abbey College would eliminate health insurance for all of its employees rather than allow them to accept free birth control through their insurer.

Belmont Abbey College would leave its own employees uninsured for everything from prenatal care to cancer just to make double-plus-sure that BAC isn't tainted by the contraception cooties. How pro-life!

Historian Erik Loomis profiles the crusading American prude, the self-proclaimed "weeder in God’s garden,” the founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, the anti-birth control crank, the anti-obscenity zealot, the one, the only, Anthony Comstock:

Through his powerful congressional benefactors, Comstock pushed through Congress in 1874 the notorious Comstock Law, which made illegal sending “obscene, lewd, and lascivious” material through the U.S. mail. Examples of such material included information on birth control and biology textbooks that showed accurate representations of the human body.

Comstock believed the birth control devices caused lust to rise in the human body and lewd behavior to follow. It was primarily to stop birth control from being propagated that Comstock fought for the law that bears his name. Soon after, 24 states enacted similar laws to prevent the dissemination of birth control on the state level. The worst of these laws was in Comstock’s home state of Connecticut, where even the use of birth control was a violation of the law. Married couples could be prosecuted for using birth control in the privacy of their own homes and sentenced to a year in prison.

[...]

 

Rich Yeselson argues that the media's quest for the real Mitt Romney is an ill-fated exercise in muddled, quasi-mystical thinking:

Meanwhile: most election observers aren’t like me.  They don’t think that a few words can adequately reveal the totality of Mitt Romney. It seems as if they all want to know who he really is. The authenticity obsession about Romney has become a national, wasteful pursuit like the Iraq invasion and occupation without the laughs.

I couldn't agree more. Of course, Rich is talking about the search for autobiographical Rosetta Stone that will reveal Romney's true personality. Was it a bad car crash in France? Is it Mormonism?

This kind of touchy-feely "analysis" shouldn't be confused with an assessment of Romney's record, and the ways in which it contradicts his current rhetoric. (Not that Rich is making that mistake.)

Politicians pander to the electorate all the time. We all know Romney used to be a tepidly pro-choice governor with sympathy for gay marriage. Yet, he's trying to rewrite history and paint himself as a "severely conservative" governor.

In light of this contradiction, it is fair to wonder what Romney believes about choice or gay marriage. Was he pandering then? Is he pandering now? Or both? Maybe the real Mitt Romney is a semi-liberal Republican pretending to be a conservative, or vice versa. More likely, the real Mitt Romney is a brazen opportunist who will say anything to get elected.

Ultimately, what matters is not what's in Romney's heart of hearts, but what his record predicts about how he'd be likely to govern. Someone who has a record of changing his positions based on short-term political advantage is unpredictable. You just never know what's going to be advantageous for him to say next.

As I predicted, the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops has rejected the Obama administration's compromise on contraception coverage.

In an attempt to mollify the bishops, the administration offered to let insurance companies cover the cost of free contraception to employees of religious institutions which refused to allow their insurance premiums to go towards contraception.

Remember, we're talking about a compromise that affects institutions that primarily serve the community, like hospitals and universities, not primarily religious institutions like churches. Primarily religious institutions were already exempt.

The bishops have argued, unconvincingly, that requiring institutions to pay for birth control (or have birth control paid for their employees by insurers) violates religious freedom.

Philosopher John Holbo has an excellent post at Crooked Timber arguing that religious freedom does not give institutions the right to simply opt out of provisions of laws they don't like. Fundamentally, religious freedom is about respect for individual conscience. It doesn't give religious institutions the right to usurp the powers of the state.

The Obama administration struck an elegant compromise over birth control coverage under health care reform. When religious employers refuse to pay for contraception, their insurance companies will have to step up and cover the cost of birth control for those employees.

The scheme works because birth control saves money. If you were an flinty-eyed insurer, which group would you rather insure? People with guaranteed access to free birth control, or people without? Of course, you'd rather insure the folks with birth control coverage because they're less likely to get pregnant and have babies, which would cost you a lot more than the birth control. You could give away the birth control and still come out ahead.

Of course, just because birth control is relatively cheap doesn't mean it's free. It costs about $21.40 to add birth control pills, IUDs, and other contraceptives to an insurance plan. That money is going to have to come from somewhere.

It's unlikely the insurers will simply eat the cost, and the whole point of the compromise was to avoid passing the cost on to consumers. So, the money will probably come out of premiums paid by everyone (including religious employers) or out of premiums paid by nonreligious employers only.

Do you have less artery-clogging trans fat in your bloodstream than you did twelve years ago? According to a new study, you probably do:

The amount of trans fat in the American bloodstream fell by more than half after the Food and Drug Administration required food manufacturers to label how much of the unhealthful ingredient is in their products, according to a new study.

Blood levels of trans fat declined 58 percent from 2000 to 2008. FDA began requiring trans-fat labeling in 2003. During the same period several parts of the country — New York most famously — passed laws limiting trans fats in restaurant food and cooking. The makers of processed food also voluntarily replaced trans fats with less harmful oils.

The decline, unusually big and abrupt, strongly suggests government regulation was effective in altering a risk factor for heart disease for a broad swath of the population.

Opponents of New York City's synthetic trans fat ban claimed that the measure be unenforceable. When the ban took effect 50% of restaurants were using synthetic trans-fats, two years later only 2% were.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has struck down California's gay marriage ban as unconstitutional.

The court's reasoning was simple: If everyone is equal under the law, like the Constitution says, then the law can't single out a group of people and treat them differently for no reason.

Yes, a majority of Californians voted to treat gay couples like second-class citizens when they passed Proposition 8, but that's not enough.

In California, same-sex and opposite sex-domestic partners have the same rights as married couples. So, the only purpose of Prop 8 was to symbolically dis gay couples. That, according to the 9th Circuit, was not a good enough reason:

Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples. The Constitution simply does not allow for 'laws of this sort.'

In the past, opponents of marriage equality have argued that it is necessary to discriminate against gay couples for the greater good. For example, their warped conception of the "greater good" includes keeping children away from their same-sex parents.

As Walter Sobchak might put it, "Say what you will about the tenets of heteronormativity, at least it's an ethos." This kind of argument gives opponents of marriage equality legal  cover to insist that they're doing this for the children, or the social fabric, or whatever--and not just because they dislike gay people and want them to have fewer rights.

However, opponents of marriage equality can't defend Prop 8 on "greater good" grounds because the amendment doesn't affect the legal rights of couples in California, except insofar as opposite-sex couples can get marriage licenses and same-sex couples can't.

This is a major victory for marriage equality, but the fight isn't over yet. Opponents of marriage equality have said they will fight all the way to the Supreme Court.