Right-Wingers Threaten to Beat Health Teacher over "Bless You!" Ban

A health teacher wants his kids to stop saying "Bless you!" after someone sneezes. He reminds the kids that we actually learned about germs and stuff a century or two ago. A sneeze, it turns out, isn't your body's attempt to expel demons! To drive the point home, teacher Steve Cuckovich is deducting points from a student's score when the student says "Bless you!" in response to a sneeze.

Cuckovich sounds like a great teacher to me, one with a sense of humor and a way to drive a point home to the students. Maybe a bit idealistic, but his heart is in the right place. But the reader comments at the end article ... well ... I'm speechless. This has to go into the "quoted without comment" category. It speaks for itself.

redwhiteandblueuniverse: "Steve Cuckovich, Mind your own business and stop acting as though you have any authority ... Try pushing your personal beliefs on my child and I will beat your ass. Period, end of story."

rogers1756: "Amen. This teacher needs to be slapped off his mock pedestal of intellectual superiority. This is what the progressives would have if they had their way ... Typical Hillary fascist mind control ..."

Mortality Sucks

I'm in Northern California helping out an older family member who needed some "maintenance" in the surgery room to fix bones that were wearing out.

It also happens that my wife and I love hiking and usually walk twenty to thirty miles every week. But between arthritis and tendinitis, it's getting hard to keep up the pace. I'm hobbling around today on damaged feet, and I'm going to have to take a rest for a week or so. This reminds me that I used to bicycle a lot but no longer can because of the surgery I had twelve years ago to fix my knees (which I damaged by overenthusiastic pedaling). Add to that the fact that my wife's younger brother died earlier this summer.

In other words, I'm feeling very mortal today. I'm face to face with pain, infirmity and death. My once-youthful body that could take all sorts of abuse and keep going is now betraying me and paying me back for all of the excesses of the past.

We only get a short seven to ten decades on this planet, and if we're lucky we can live five or six of them in excellent health. Am I done with the pain-free part? Now that I'm fifty-seven, is life going to be a constant struggle? Is my body, now past its prime breeding time, just running on genetic momentum with no real evolutionary purpose? I've done my evolutionary job after all – three great kids each share half of my genes. Am I now evolutionarily irrelevant? Is it time to quietly curl up and die to make room for the next generation?

Nah. Wrong answer. Giving up isn't in my genes.

The problem with being an atheist is that

Lieberman is an Ass

Joe Lieberman is an ass. I can't believe I once contemplated voting for that man. He is now acting the little bully, holding the entire Democratic Party hostage for his one vote on the health-care reform bill, because if he doesn't get his way, he's going to go running to his Republican buddies and join their filibuster, which would bring the Senate to a halt and derail the entire bill.

Last week, the House and Senate worked out a compromise in a way that exemplifies good politics and government. The two sides, who had very strong opinions about the issues, took some hard choices and worked out a deal that was satisfactory. It included a semi-public option that was not the liberals' first choice, and it extended Medicare to the 55-65 crowd.

That was democracy and good politics in action, an illustration of how the country should be run.

Now Lieberman, who already abandoned the Democratic Party that put him in power in the first place, has single-handedly decided that he, not the voters who elected all the Members of Congress, should get his way. He is bullying the entire country, simply because he can. Instead of participating in the debate, and respecting the compromise worked out the men and women who were elected by the majority of voters, Lieberman is forcing his opinion on the entire country.

Lieberman has single-handedly forced the removal of the two key elements of the compromise, gutting health reform. As far as I'm concerned, without at least some public option, the whole exercise is worthless. Why bother.

I have never once seen a filibuster that was good for the country. Why hasn't the Senate ended this despicable process that lets a minority of Senators hold the whole country hostage to their demands?

Outrageous: Battered women have a "pre-existing medical condition"

I usually write about religious issues, but today's blog is from a colleague's email who found something so outrageous I couldn't ignore it.

"Sometimes I see things in the news that just seem so very, very incredible to me, although by this time I shouldn't be surprised by anything....but this morning I saw some stuff on CNN about this topic, and I couldn't believe it, until I looked it up on the 'net ... here's a link."

Eight states and the District of Columbia don't have laws that specifically bar insurance companies from using domestic violence as a pre-existing condition to deny health coverage, according to a study from the National Women's Law Center.

Got that? In other words, if a woman's husband beats her up, she can't get health insurance any more.

My colleague's email continues, "This is amazing to me, considering the fact that as many as one in three women have been the victim of domestic violence at some time in their life, either as a child, a spouse, a girlfriend, or a parent ... far more women than men ... and this stupid concept that women who have been victimized in these situations are somehow guilty of participating in risky lifestyles and are therefore subject to discrimination in eight states and by four major insurance companies. This is just one more nail in the coffin of today's problematic health care system.

"But worse than that, it's a sad, sad indicator that maybe women have not come all that far, if domestic violence can be used to bar women from getting medical help for themselves when they most need it.

"Hey, I know how we can make this all fair and square! ... why don't we exclude everyone who rides motorcycles, or who jumps out of airplanes, or who has gotten into a bar fight with his buddies, or who is a police officer, or a fireman ... all on the basis of engaging in risky lifestyles?? Oops, no that wouldn't work, particularly since most of the folks who engage in those behaviors are MEN ...... !#$^&*%!!!"

All I can add is, Amen!

Atheism's Toxic Effects in the Abortion Debate

Ok, I admit it, the headline is deliberately provocative to get your attention. Vjack over at Atheist Revolution wrote an excellent blog, Religion's Toxis Effects in the Abortion Controversy, in which he demonstrates that religion turns honest discourse about an important controversy into black-and-white good-versus-evil mudslinging.

But my provocative title is apropos to my thesis: There is a solution to the Abortion controversy, but we'll never reach it until we stop trying to debate the abortion issue. It's hopeless. Atheists tend to dismiss the legitimate and heartfelt beliefs of religious people in the abortion debate. These are not a bunch of nut cases with silly beliefs; they are our friends and neighbors, and they honestly believe that abortion is murder. As Atheists, we can see that life and the human "soul" are purely physical phenomena, and it's hard for us to take the religious position seriously. But if we aren't careful, we risk getting into a pointless debate that will distract us from real progress.

The only solution to the abortion controversy is to eliminate the need for abortion completely. Years ago, I heard Professor Carl Djerassi, inventor of the birth-control pill, interviewed on the radio, and he put it best: "Wouldn't it be better if we lived in a world where women have full access to birth control, where no woman ever needs to seek an abortion again?" (Paraphrased, it was probably 25 years ago!)

Almost everyone in the United States, Atheists, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Baha'i, you name it, agrees to a remarkable extent on one topic: Birth control is moral, and is a woman's right. Even the majority of Roman Catholics agree; they think the Pope and official Catholic ban on birth control is simply wrong, and that the Pope is out of touch with reality.

I propose that Atheists, and religious people of a more liberal nature who accept that abortion isn't murder, should stop engaging in the futile debate about when the human soul is created, and instead focus on birth control.

A tiny minority of ultra-conservative religious leaders have a monsterous influence on United States domestic and foreign policy. Their conservative views are preventing distribution of birth-control pills, condoms, medication, education and many other services that are desperately needed, here and abroad.

Right now, regions of Africa have stunnning and horrifying rates of AIDS infections, in some cases 25% of the population is infected and will die. These are poor countries to start with; the cost of caring for these people as they sicken and die, and the resulting explosion of orphans, will overwhelm all economic and social progress for decades. It is a tragedy greater than most of the greatest plagues in human history.

And it could have been prevented with an aggresive campaign that included sex education, condom distribution, and medical aid. Sociologists warned of this impending disaster years before it happened, but because the solution included birth control and abortion rights, the funds for birth control, condoms and education were withheld. This completely preventable plague was left to run wild, and will ultimately result in hundreds of millions of deaths worldwide.

So, let's start engaging our religious friends (and those we may not consider friends, too) in a debate about birth control and sex education. Let's break the stranglehold the ultraconservative churches, led by the Pope himself, have on American and world politics. Let's make it so that every woman in Africa has access to condoms, so that we can stop the AIDS epidemic. Let's give every teenager in the world a reality-based sex education (to use vjack's term), so that no girl ever has to have an abortion again. Let's teach young couples everywhere how to be responsible, and plan their families, so that every child born will be greeting by happy, excited parents who planned the event and look forward to raising a happy and healthy family.

The abortion debate is a dead end. We have to hold the line, keep abortion rights from being eroded, but that's it. But the birth-control debate can be meaningful, productive, and have a far greater impact on the health and well being of everyone in the world.

Tags: abortion birth-control aids religion christian christianity atheist atheism africa epidemic