Reposted from The Revealer, a daily review of religion and media.
by Andy Kopsa
Every four years the national political eye shifts to Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses. With the 2012 presidential election only 15 months away, the campaign frenzy in Iowa has already begun. Local and national media are eagerly following Republican presidential hopefuls as they glad-hand farmers, eat local delicacies and stump, flanked by American flags, through soybean fields.
In February next year, Iowans will head to their local caucus to give a traditionally coveted victory to one Republican who could go on to face President Obama in the general election. That Republican – be it Michele Bachmann, Ron Paul or Newt Gingrich – will need to secure the blessing of the radical religious-political group The Family Leader.
Bob Vander Plaats, the outspoken head of The Family Leader (TFL), is the man The Atlantichas called a Republican political “kingmaker” in Iowa – and the man who The Hill just rankedas having the ability to give one of the top 10 “endorsements the presidential candidates covet most.”
The media has documented his – and the TFL’s – statements about homosexuality (worse than second hand smoke) and women’s role in society (producing lots of babies). Last week TFL made national news again with its Marriage Pledge – already signed by Bachmann and Rick Santorum, the former senator from Pennsylvania – touting the benefits of slavery to African American families (after vocal push-back, TFL has since removed this from the pledge). None of Vander Plaats’ work would be half as interesting a story if The Family Leader, a Focus on the Family affiliate, hadn’t been built with over $3 million in federal funds.
Last week a regulation to provide Medicare coverage for advance care planning counseling—that is, offer reimbursement to doctors for time spent talking to patients about end-of-life care—was abandoned… for the second time.
Section 1233 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) died a first death in the summer of 2009 in the debate over healthcare reform, during which healthcare opponents characterized the provision as a call for government-run “death panels.” Former Lieutenant Governor of New York State Betsy McCaughey, who consulted with Philip Morris while working on the hit piece against the Clinton healthcare plan “No Exit,” coined the “death panel” moniker; Sarah Palin popularized it. Then John Boehner, at the time the House minority leader, claimed that the provision would lead the country down “a treacherous path toward government-encouraged euthanasia.” Fox & Friends repeated the “death panel” meme dozens of times, and soon, the provision was stripped from the healthcare bill. But last November, the Obama administration quietly inserted it into Medicare’s annual regulations—after the customary public review period. The New York Times’s Robert Pear broke the news on Christmas Day that end-of-life counseling was to be covered by Medicare. Immediately, right-wing think tanks, some with legal cases against the healthcare bill, leveraged the “death panel” rhetoric to bolster their arguments. While “prolife” blogs spread the news alongside accusations that the regulation would further endanger the “sanctity of life,” much of mainstream media pushed back at reemergence of what Politifact called “the biggest lie of 2009.” On Fox, guest host Tucker Carlson said that the regulation would convince Americans to “forego aggressive life-sustaining treatment,” but was challenged by another correspondent. Nonetheless, the Obama administration, blaming procedural irregularities, dropped the regulation only three days after it went into effect, but it’s clear political considerations played a role.
Opponents of the healthcare bill got the White House running scared by spreading the “death panel” meme from conservative legal groups to Fox to right-wing blogs and back again, both after the Affordable Care Act passed and after Christmas. But they weren’t building a messaging chain from scratch. Instead, they worked the same network that has been mobilized since the 1970s to fight legal abortion. For the past decade, those same religious organizations have begun working to limit treatment choices for those facing the end of their lives, a development that increasingly impedes meaningful healthcare, and resigns countless elders—including millions of aging Baby Boomers—to “healthcare” that does little for, or even damage to, their quality of life.
A host of anti-abortion groups denounced the end of life counseling regulation, including Operation Rescue’s Troy Newman and Janice Crouse of the Beverly LaHaye Institute at Concerned Women for America. Family Research Council’s director of Congressional affairs, David Christensen, told The Christian Science Monitor, “We’re concerned this [the regulation] could be misused, especially in a state like Oregon that sees mercy killing as a legitimate medical service.” Three days after Pear’s story, Mathew Staver, chairman of Liberty University’s Liberty Counsel, a conservative legal organization (think “Choose Life” license plates case), said, “When you remove the sanctity of life from the equation and place health care under the control of government bureaucrats, you end up with increased costs, decreased care, and death panels.” Judie Brown, the president of American Life League, gave a succinct summary of the “prolife” conflation of end of life care with abortion: ”Nothing good can come of this. This will affect everybody’s parents and grandparents and preborn babies, and it will not affect anybody for the good.”
About 80 percent of Americans wish to die at home, yet 80 percent die in institutions, because the default mode of medical care in the United States is to “do everything,” as Thaddeus Pope, law professor at Widener University, describes it. For the past fifty years, medicine has focused on curing illnesses and ailments but not on guiding patients through the dying process. So terminal patients are now frequently given rounds of treatment long after they’ve been found ineffective simply because doctors fear “giving up.” Aggressive intervention enables doctors and patients to deny the inevitability of death and prevents them from planning for the process of dying.
Particularly for patients over 65, aggressive treatment and their side effects can be more debilitating than what they’re intended to cure. From CPR (reliable statistics don’t exist, but most studies suggest the procedure saves lives less than a quarter of the times it is performed—and often breaks bones) to artificial nutrition and hydration (which employs a stomach tube for feeding even though loss of hunger and the inability to ingest are natural symptoms of the dying process), treatments that don’t actually improve patients’ lives but provide a significant revenue to doctors, hospitals and medical manufacturers are common practice in our medical system. Yet patients often don’t know that they can refuse treatments or decide where to die. Providing insurance coverage for discussions about end-of-life care would help restore choice to those facing a path of unwanted treatment and would reduce the cost of healthcare. It’s a win-win prospect, but that’s the rub: Republicans and their “prolife” allies have characterized any attempts to reform “aggressive care” as cost-cutting attacks on the most vulnerable.
The terms themselves are confusing. ”End-of-life care” is often referred to as advance care planning, the process by which a patient talks to their doctor and family about how they wish to die and decides which medical interventions, like CPR, they do or do not want. The advance care planning the Obama administration attempted to include in Medicare is entirely distinct from Death with Dignity (DWD), though both come from a commitment to patient choice and autonomy. State “Death with Dignity” laws allow a patient who has been diagnosed with less than six months to live to ask for lethal medicine from a doctor who cannot be prosecuted. In the United States proponents prefer the terms DWD or aid in dying, while opponents refer to “euthanasia.” Advocates for the availability of good end-of-life care and advance care planning—there is no umbrella term—argue that patients have a right to be fully informed of care options and to accept or deny treatments. End of life counseling simply involves informing patients of their care options (which, if the patient lives in Oregon, Washington or Montana includes Death with Dignity) and helping them to plan accordingly. Since the death of Terri Schiavo in 2005, antichoice groups, the Catholic Churchand their denominational and legal allies have raised alarm about “euthanasia” on their well-organized and -funded platform.
At the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation annual meeting in 2009, Bobby Schindler, brother of Terri Schiavo and head of the Terri Schindler Schiavo Foundation (recently renamed the Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network), spoke alongside other anti-abortion luminaries like former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline. Schindler has styled himself as an advocate for the disabled, reflecting a trend among “prolife” groups who have expanded their definition of “innocent life” to include the disabled, elders, the dying, as well as the “unborn” (or “pre-born,” as anti-abortion groups have begun to say). “Saying Terri was in a Persistent Vegetative State [a medical diagnosis for minimal or no brain function] was dehumanizing,” Schindler told the crowd, “like not using baby for the unborn. We’ve been primarily concerned with abortion but how many are being killed on a daily basis by euthanasia?”
The Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation is far from the only antichoice group now also fighting patients’ choice at the end of life. The National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) has taken up opposition to health care reform and advance care planning with abandon; their Robert Powell Center for Medical Ethics, named for the disabled early vice president of NRLC, “serves as NRLC’s arm in fighting to protect the vulnerable born from both direct killing and denial of lifesaving medical treatment, food and fluids.” They’ve maintained a blog about end-of-life issues and healthcare reform since June of 2009. These groups have long held that the legalization of abortion has cheapened the value of life; in their eyes Death with Dignity does the same, and legitimizes their fear that the United States is on a “slippery slope” toward state-sanctioned killing of “innocent life” among us.
A collective American reticence to frankly discuss death enables organizations like the Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network and NRLC to misinform the public about existing government programs like hospice, Medicare and other legal tools for the elderly, like advanced directives and medical proxies, which can provide more control over how they age and die. Combined with a paternalistic medical profession that’s only recently begun training new doctors on how to talk to patients about how to plan their end-of-life care and a Republican party dependent on the support of antichoice groups, “pro-life” groups have been able to fundamentally shape state and federal legislation.
Of course, even in the absence of this regulation, doctors and patients will continue to initiate conversations about end-of-life care—but not frequently enough to save uninformed seniors and terminal patients from painful and pointless treatments they don’t want. And not often enough to stem the crisis in healthcare financing aging Baby Boomers will bring.
When advocates of the Stupak-Pitts amendment to severely restrict abortion coverage took healthcare reform hostage, advocates for women’s health were reminded of the outsized ability “prolife” groups have to determine healthcare policy. The defeat of increased funding for end of life care should serve as a warning to all those concerned about autonomy over their own healthcare choices.
cross-posted from The Revealer, a daily review of religion and media
by Peter Bebergal
Despite their common, and mostly fringe area of concern, the psychedelic subculture — whose kaleidoscopic reflection includes Johns Hopkins scientists, transpersonal psychologists, dozens of independent (non-affiliated) researchers, writers, visionary artists, and the users themselves — is often at odds with itself. Above board researchers take pride in their work, adhering to the strict peer review process that all science is subject to. But to some, the work of psychedelics is the work of the spirit, of the non-rational, of connecting ourselves to something that may well not be testable or empirically verifiable. There are also clashes of personality, of ideologies, and of intention. Sometimes it’s simply a disagreement over words, what they mean, and how they should be used.
At the heart of a contest of terms within a very small subculture is another more essential divergence, one that reflects a wider cultural conflict between science and spirituality.
One of the most remarkable developments in the past ten years is the trending toward acceptance in the scientific community of research involving psychedelic drugs after an almost forty year period of disregard. But like other recent fields of research, such as work done with stem cells, DNA, and even evolutionary biology, researchers find themselves up against ideas of spirituality.
This article is cross posted from The Revealer, a publication of NYU’s Center for Religion and Media, and is part of an ongoing series about Shari’ah.
by Joshua M. Z. Stanton
When John F. Kennedy was running for president in 1960, fear-mongers raised the specter of his dual loyalty. Would he really serve American interests or merely be a pawn for the Vatican? After all, he was a Catholic. Church doctrine, it was whispered, could co-opt the person designated to uphold America’s laws and Constitution.
Similar fears have been raised about Muslim-Americans, and ironically, often in conjunction with our current Christian president. Generalizations based on religion are disturbing because they reduce rich, diverse, and complicated belief structures to monolithic and inaccurate convictions. Yet what is most galling is the fact that accusations of dual loyalty, no less to a religion other than the president’s own, have not dissipated during the course of Obama’s first term in office. If anything, they have grown more raucous and extreme.
So what exactly is the unknown that fear-mongers harp on? Among other things, it is the fear that a growing American religious community may suddenly undermine the country’s Constitutional values. Sharia, so-called Islamic law, is the new specter that fills the void left by the dissipated fear of Vatican doctrine and fear of Communism that crumbled alongside the Soviet Union. Forget the millions of Muslims in the United States who drink coffee, go to work, raise children, celebrate the Fourth of July, and pay their taxes on time. Sharia equals terrorism. “Need proof,” the fear-mongers ask? Just look at the fact that the terrorists who attacked us on September 11 observed Sharia. “Do you want to support terrorism?”
This argument not only appallingly conflates all Muslims with Muslims who observe Sharia, but Muslims who observe Sharia with terrorists. The notion that 1.4 billion people could ever be the same might seem laughable, were the decision to lump all Muslims together – and then equate them with the worst handful – not made so frequently. This false logic is at the root of much fear.
by Najam Haider
This article is part of an ongoing series at The Revealer, a publication of NYU’s Center for Religion and Media, that will examine what Shari’ah is, how the media often get it wrong, and how it’s being used to create fear of Islam and Muslims and to justify continued military defense of “American values.”
The recent Time magazine cover featuring the disfigured face of a woman identified only as Aisha and accompanied by the caption “What happens if we leave Afghanistan?” has raised a maelstrom of controversy in the blogosphere. A number of voices have criticized the article for its presentation of a false dichotomy (either we stay and women are relatively safe or we leave and they will all be horribly oppressed) while others have criticized the politicized use of the image itself. In reality, this type of argument is part and parcel of a broader discourse on women’s rights in Afghanistan (and the entire Muslim world).
Last spring, the Afghani parliament raised a similar international uproar with its passage of a personal status law governing the Shi‘i minority that contained provisions that appeared to legalize marital rape and severely restricted a married woman’s ability to leave her home. Human rights organizations and concerned political groups in Kabul organized protests against the law and accused Hamid Karzai,the president of Afghanistan, of backing it in exchange for support in the August 2009 elections. The press forwarded both instances as examples of the Taliban’s effort to enforce Shari‘a, a term vaguely but routinely translated as “Islamic law” with broad connotations of immutability and universality. The problem with such a discourse lies in its fundamental misreading of the Shari‘a which – in turn – distorts economics and social issues by framing them exclusively in terms of religion.
Daniel Schultz writes in the The Revealer:
A church down in Gainesville is planning to hold an “International Burn A Quran Day” on 9/11, part of its larger “Islam is of the Devil” campaign. The pastor talks about the point of the event in an interview with the Friendly Atheist:
Do you think Muslims will turn to Christ as a result of this?
This is our prayer and desire that they would seriously reexamine their religion. They will then come to the conclusion that Islam is of the devil and Christianity is the only true religion.…
Have any of the media reports of this event portrayed you unfairly or inaccurately? Would you like to set the record straight on any particular issue?
We have been accused of being racist. We are not attacking a race. In other words, we are not attacking the Moslem. We love the Moslems and hope that they would come to true salvation. What we are attacking is Islam, the religion, and Sharia law, the political system.This leads Cathy Lynn Grossman at USAToday’s Faith and Reason blog to ask, “Is it evangelism?”*
This article is cross-posted from The Revealer, a daily review of religion and media.
by Jeff Sharlet
The reverence with which so many upper-middle class Americans read The Economist has always puzzled me. There’s much to admire about the magazine, but it generally performs the same function as Newsweek, boiling down events into centrist conventional wisdom, facts be damned. A report in the July 3, 2010 issue, “The religious right in east Africa: Slain by the spirit,” is a case in point. I’ve been reporting on the religious right anti-gay movement in Uganda from here in the U.S. and from Kampala for nine months now, so I’m in a good position to see The Economist’s strange moves; I wonder what I’d make of the article that follows it, on Somaliand’s elections, if I were as informed on that story. But one needn’t have expertise to debunk The Economist’s report; a Google search would do it, especially if you landed, as you likely would, on the well-documented blogs of gay activist Jim Burroway or evangelical scholar Warren Throckmorton.
The biggest error is The Economist’s declaration that the bill no longer calls for the death penalty. That’s propaganda put out by the bill’s defenders. In fact, as I learned by asking the bill’s author, Ugandan Member of Parliament David Bahati, it does. (I’ll be publishing those interviews in my forthcoming book, C Street.) Bahati acknowledges that the death penalty may drop out of the final version. But it hasn’t yet, and it’s dangerous for The Economist to say as much.
By Tanya Erzen
Reposted from The Revealer, a daily review of religion and media.
Last November, I sat in a theatre in South Jordan, Utah with 4,000 Twilight Moms who had gathered for the weekend to celebrate the release of New Moon after two days of raucous pre-film festivities. As I sat watching Eclipse, the newest film adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s blockbuster Twilight series (in the six days since it opened, Eclipse has grossed $176.4 million), it wasn’t the wolves, newborn vampire army, fight sequences, love triangle or brief appearance by the Volturi that I found mesmerizing. It was the fans seated around me. They had come to watch the film after holding their own red carpet events at home, sharing Eclipse-theme dinners, exchanging flowers with one another, reciting lines from the book, donning golden vampire contact lenses, holding sleepovers, and wearing t-shirts bearing slogans with variations on favorite quotes: “Edward Cullen, I Promise to Love You Every Moment of Forever.” The women and girls in Ohio were just part of the millions in the fanpire worldwide who have built imaginative social worlds around the film premiere and the series in general.
Foreign Policy, in collaboration with The Fund for Peace, has posted their 6th annual analysis of the most vulnerable states in the world. One can’t help but cringe at the biblical/apocalyptic references: ”In the Beginning, There was Somalia,” and “Postcards from Hell.” And critics have noted that one man’s hell is another man’s donkey cart. Yet… you will “know hell when you see it.” I’ve been to more than half a dozen of the countries in the top (or bottom) 30. There’s a difference between poverty and not having a flat screen TV; between law and justice and a police state; between development and decay.
Mugabe
This article is cross-posted from The Revealer, a daily review of religion and media.
In the June 18th issue of the Catholic publication Commonweal, the magazine’s editors address a recent “remarkably defensive” letter from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), “Setting the Record Straight,” in which the directors of three of the conference’s initiatives, Pro-Life Activities, Immigration, and Justice, Peace and Human Development, chastise those who vocally dissented from the USCCB’s stand against the health care bill.
Those who broke from the USCCB included Women Religious and the Catholic Health Association, as well as a host of individual Catholic bishops and lay people and, ultimately, Representative Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) and Senator Robert Casey Jr. (D-PA); those who disagreed with the USCCB interpreted the new bill as not expanding government funding for abortion.
