Five false assumptions of The New York Times

Sure, there are many more than five, but I focus on that number in a post on Insight Scoop about a recent editorial in The New York Times:

The opening Exhibit is the first paragraph of the February 10, 2012, New York Times editorial:

In response to a phony crisis over “religious liberty” engendered by the right, President Obama seems to have stood his ground on an essential principle — free access to birth control for any woman. That access, along with the ability to receive family planning and preventive health services, was at the foundation of health care reform.

Note the assumptions and perspectives, all of them faulty or disingenuous:

1. This conflict over the HHS mandate is the fault of “the right” because, don’t you know, the intelligent and compassionate among us would never, ever stand in the way of what they blithely term “reproductive justice” and “access to women’s health care”. They and all their friends know it’s good, and anyone who deigns to think or say otherwise is clearly a woman-hating cretan (more on that in a moment).

2. So how did “the right” start this kerfuffle? By wrongly insisting, in the words of one prominent pundit, that Obama’s “administration mishandled this decision not once but twice”. By getting angry over nothing. For example, another columnist, writing with obvious anger the day after the January 20th announcement, stated the “president’s decision yesterday essentially told us, as Catholics, that there is no room in this great country of ours for the institutions our Church has built over the years to be Catholic in ways that are important to us.” Well, what else do you expect from “the right”. But, of course, those remarks were made, respectively, by E. J. Dionne, Jr., of the Washington Post, and Michael Sean Winters of the National “Catholic” Reporter, two men who are only on the right when driving a car within North America.

3. “Religious liberty” is either not an issue at all, is only a tool of “the right” used to scare the mindless masses of dogmatic fundamentalists who cling desperately to their Bibles, guns, and (in the case of Catholics) their rosaries and spirits. The real liberty is the freedom of a women to do anything at all she wishes with her body (save, perhaps, pray with sincere faith or enter into holy matrimony as a virgin) and, in addition, to be free of any and all impediments to the various services, devices, and medicines that will aid her along the path to fulfillment, freedom, and feminutopia.

Read my entire post on the Insight Scoop blog.