Toobin makes two large errors

“You’re entitled to your own opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.” This quote is attributed to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and it's true no matter who said it first. With that in mind, we have to make some corrections to Jeffrey Toobin's article praising Ruth Ginsberg for being, oh, so smart and prescient in her Hobby Lobby dissent.

There was an exemption already for religious institutions. Hobby Lobby, a closely held corporation, is a secular, for-profit business, but the Court held that because the owners of Hobby Lobby held a sincere religious belief that certain forms of birth control caused abortions, they could deny employer-paid insurance coverage for them.

Is this just bad writing? Unclear. It's not a "religious belief" at all that "certain forms of birth control caused abortions" or, I think he means to write cause abortions. But syntax errors aside, there are certain forms of birth control which cause abortions. The links here would be useful to Mr. Toobin as sort of a science primer.

One of the problems with the whole debate and discussion is that "birth control" is somewhat of a misnomer. Birth prevention is really the goal of both contraception and abortion. The latter is more morally egregious than the former, but those who approve of contraception but are against abortion may want to consider the continued use of the softer phrase "birth control" as something which dilutes the strength of pro-life/pro-child argument against the anti-child mentality, or the contraceptive mentality as it is sometimes called.

Here's the next "mistake":

What about religious individuals who say that they have sincere objections to conducting business relationships with gay people or immigrants?

Oh stop it. You obviously mean, Mr. Toobin, to indicate illegal immigrants, so why not use the word? The use of the single, neutral word "immigrants" is meant to suppress or diminish the amount of eye-roll from the general public who are tired of the gay whining.

This line should offend legal immigrants tremendously because it implicitly lumps them together with illegals. Why? Because no mainstream religious denomination objects to legal immigration. This article is obviously written from a biased point-of-view, but these errors are either due to sloppiness and laziness or malevolence and they need to be pointed out whichever is the case.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Racist?

From The Catholic League's post on Ginsberg's controversial remark about culling the human herd.

Excerpts of a New York Times Magazine interview with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which will appear on July 12, include the following quote by the Supreme Court Justice about the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion: “Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”

By contrast, consider what Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, said about this subject:

· “Eugenic sterilization is an urgent need... We must prevent Multiplication of this bad stock.”
· “Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race.”
· “Today eugenics is suggested by the most diverse minds as the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems.”
· “We are paying for, and even submitting to, the dictates of an ever-increasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.”
· “We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.”

There is another reason why Ginsburg needs to clarify her remark. Before she was seated on the Supreme Court in 1993, she hired 57 law clerks over a period of 13 years. All were white. Now if Antonin Scalia, for example, were associated with her disturbing remark, and if he had never hired a single African American, he already would have been branded a racist. At the very least, Ginsburg should be questioned about her explosive comment.

We shouldn't be too quick to call her a racist. Maybe she just doesn't like black people.