FLASHBACK: NBC's Dr. Nancy Orders Obama's IRS to Go After Catholic Bishops

The revelation that the IRS was being used by liberals as a political weapon against conservative groups like the Tea Party makes NBC's Dr. Nancy Snyderman's 2009 call on the tax agency to investigate Catholic bishops even more chilling.

During an MSNBC November 12, 2009 segment about Catholic bishops' opposition to abortion funding in ObamaCare, Snyderman joined NOW President Terry O'Neill in calling on the IRS to investigate them. (video after the jump)Snyderman first complained: "The Catholic bishops appearing and having a political voice seems to be a most fundamental violation of church and state." To which O'Neill responded: "I don't know where there Internal Revenue Service is, but I hope they're paying attention." Snyderman  agreed: "Me, too."

The following is a transcript of the November 12, 2009 MSNBC live segment as first caught by the MRC's Scott Whitlock:

NANCY SNYDERMAN: Well, the fight over abortion and health care reform is getting even hotter. Abortion rights activists are organizing dozens of groups to ban together to keep any kind of language restricting abortion access out of the Senate bill. Planned Parenthood says the House's Stupak amendment has, quote, "completely galvanized the reproductive health community and the women's community." The National Organization of [sic] Women says, "They passed health care reform for half the nation and partial health care reform for the rest of us."

Joining me now from Washington, Terry O'Neill, president of NOW. And she was among those who met with Rahm Emanuel at the White House this weekend and I should say Nancy DeParle and some other women, leading women at the White House. Thanks for being with us. Terry, let me just ask you straight off the bat, this seems to have caught you guys, and I should say the women who believe in reproductive right off guard and found you a little off balance.

TERRY O'NEILL: Oh, it definitely caught me off guard. On Saturday morning, I started getting calls and E-mails and texts saying, you know, there's a deal that's been cut and a terrible, disastrous deal. The Stupak/Pitts amendment, in fact, I believe, essentially overrules Roe v. Wade. That's the intention of the Catholic bishops who pushed it. That, I believe, is the intention Mr. Stupak and Mr. Pitts who offered it. And it's an outrage and, and we are doing everything to be sure that it does not get into the Senate bill, that it does not survive the reconciliation process, because that's not a health bill if you take- it's not acceptable to change health care for America while sending women off into the back alleys to die.

SNYDERMAN: Terry, two things have come up over the last couple days that have really sort of fascinated me. And that is, people describing the House of Representatives as no longer being pro-choice. That is quietly pro life and perhaps even in the Senate. Now, I happen to think that abortion is one of the most divisive issues and you can't get one person from one side to the other side. But I also think most of life is quite gray and we think we have adamant solutions to things until they happen to mothers and children's. And we can find ourselves changing our mind and it becomes our family. Nonetheless, this is a chip. It is an erosion. It is a very slippery slope. Seems to me, that the women of our ages have a hard time saying to the women who are 18, 28, 38 that you have a stake here. And I'm not so sure young women get that.

O'NEILL: Oh, if you listen to the young women that are calling me and that are organizing rallies all around the country even as we speak, I don't think that's really correct.

SNYDERMAN: Really?

O'NEILL: Young women are galvanized around this. Especially the young women who are able to hear the truth. There are people out there who are saying that the Stupak/Pitts amendment is no different than the status quo. Nothing could be farther from the truth. And when the young women learn the truth, they are outraged. Just as the women my age are outraged.

SNYDERMAN: This is going to be a Pollyannaish statement. The Catholic bishops appearing and having a political voice seems to be a most fundamental violation of church and state.

O'NEILL: You know, that's the first thing that I said. I don't know where the Internal Revenue Service is, but I hope they're paying attention.

SNYDERMAN: Me, too. And I just want to, sort of, say good-bye to you by pointing out that Stupak and Henry Hyde, the two amendments that restrict a woman's right to choose, are both white men telling women about reproduction. [O'Neill laughs.] So, on that happy note, I will bid you a good day and thank you for spending time with me.

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In Shift, NY Times Embraces 'Moral Dimension' Provided by Bishops -- at Least for Expanding Obama-Care

Friday's lead New York Times story celebrated "G.O.P. Governors Providing a Lift For Health Law." The most notable convert: Florida Gov. Rick Scott, who reversed his position this week and announced his support for expanding Medicaid.

The Times' Abby Goodnough and Robert Pear credited Scott for the embrace of Obama-care (via "proponents" who "say that doing so will not only save lives, but also create jobs and stimulate the economy") and also found a convenient "moral dimension" in the call by Catholic bishops to expand the Medicaid program, a dimension the paper never found when the Church was opposing the Obama-care requirement that religion institutions provide contraception coverage.

Under pressure from the health care industry and consumer advocates, seven Republican governors are cautiously moving to expand Medicaid, giving an unexpected boost to President Obama’s plan to insure some 30 million more Americans.

The Supreme Court ruled last year that expanding Medicaid to include many more low-income people was an option under the new federal health care law, not a requirement, tossing the decision to the states and touching off battles in many capitols.

The federal government will pay the entire cost of covering newly eligible beneficiaries from 2014 to 2016, and 90 percent or more later. But many Republican governors and lawmakers immediately questioned whether that commitment would last, and whether increased spending on Medicaid makes sense, given the size of the federal budget deficit. Some flatly declared they would not consider it.

In Florida, where Gov. Rick Scott reversed his position and on Wednesday announced his support for expanding Medicaid, proponents say that doing so will not only save lives, but also create jobs and stimulate the economy. Similar arguments have swayed the Republican governors of Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota and Ohio, who in recent months have announced their intention to expand Medicaid.

A left-wing supporter of Obama-care was merely titled a "consumer group."

The shift has delighted supporters of the law.

“I think this means the dominoes are falling,” said Ronald F. Pollack, the executive director of Families USA, a consumer group. “The message is, ‘Even though I may not have supported and even strongly opposed the Affordable Care Act, it would be harmful to the citizens of my state if I didn’t opt into taking these very substantial federal dollars to help people who truly need it.’ ”

And the Times conveniently discovered how the Roman Catholic bishops "have added a moral dimension to the campaign" in support of Medicaid expansion.

Religious leaders have added a moral dimension to the campaign in some states. The Roman Catholic bishops of Salt Lake City and Little Rock, Ark., for example, have urged state officials to expand Medicaid.

Oddly, the paper only finds that "moral dimension" when the bishops come out in favor of liberal causes, not when the "moral dimension" involves rejecting the administration's requirement that religion institutions provide contraception coverage.

The last use of the term in a story on Catholic bishops used it in the context of the bishops pushing left-wing issues like "economic inequality" -- "Bishops Open 'Religious Liberty' Drive" on November 15, 2011 (Note the suspicion-arousing quote marks.) Religion reporter Laurie Goodstein even took care to differentiate the "moral dimension" of left-wing causes from the Church's apparently less-admirable traditional opposition to abortion and homosexuality.

The bishops are struggling to reclaim the role they played in the 1980s and into the ’90s as a nationally recognized voice on the moral dimension of public policy issues like economic inequality, workers’ rights, immigration and nuclear weapons proliferation. Since then, however, they have reordered their priorities, with abortion and homosexuality eclipsing poverty and economic injustice.

Clay Waters is the director of Times Watch, an MRC project tracking the New York Times. Click here to follow Clay Waters on Twitter.

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WashPost On Faith Page Celebrates Muslim Modesty But Trashes Catholic Bishops As Prudish on Sex

Today's "On Faith" page in the Washington Post featured a puzzling contrast that shows the left-wing media's schizophrenia when it comes to traditional religious faith. The paper's religion section editors ran these two items side-by-side: a Religion News Service (RNS) article that was thoroughly positive about Muslim women who want to design and/or model fashionable yet modest clothing, and Post religion writer Lisa Miller's attack on Catholic bishops for their stances on Christian sexual ethics in general and opposition to the ObamaCare contraception mandate in particular.

In "A Muslim fashion statement: Agency connects modesty-minded models with designers," Omar Sacirbey of RNS opened his 23-paragraph feature with the story of Savannah Uqdah, a devout Muslim woman who at one time aspired to be a fashion model but "didn't want to violate Islam's tenets on modesty." As such, Uqdah "shelved her modeling dreams and instead expressed herself through the fashions she wore." But now that modeling agencies eye a lucrative market in fashionable yet modest attire, Sacirbey notes, women like Uqdah are excited at the potential to live out their dreams.

At no point in Sacirbey's feature did he turn to anyone to deride as outdated or retrograde the very notion of modesty as informed by traditional Muslim teaching. The next column over, however, was a far different story, with Miller waging a full-throated attack on Catholic teachings on sexual morality.

By contrast, in her B2 column headlined "Where bishops have trouble understanding young: Sex," Miller opened with an all-too-predictable line of secularist liberal attack on the Catholic Church: they're out of touch with modern times:

The headline last week in the National Catholic Reporter, the country’s go-to source for all things Catholic, might have run on the satirical news site “The Onion”: “Vatican admits it doesn’t fully understand youth culture,” it said. Next week, perhaps NCR will run a follow-up piece: “Bishops admit they have no clue about sex.”

But it's not just that the Church is out of step with modernity, in Miller's eyes at least, no, it's that they're out of step with the Obama administration and with the Washington Post:

The Obama administration has tried to be sensitive to the bishops’ claims to conscience. After much yelling about the trampling of religious liberties, most notably by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the administration last week unveiled adjustments to its health-care plan that would allow religious organizations to abstain from offering their employees contraceptive coverage under their group plans while, at the same time, requiring insurers to offer the coverage separately. The compromise is a win-win-win, the Department of Health and Human Services argues. The religious employer can follow his conscience. The woman gets the coverage, if she wants it. And the insurer doesn’t have to pay the higher costs associated with unplanned, unwanted pregnancies. In an editorial, The Washington Post supported the compromise.

Yes, those pesky bishops are belligerently seeking a fight, against both the Obama White House and the 21st century, Miller sighed (emphasis mine):

But some bishops just won’t be satisfied. Three American bishops said on Jan. 30 that they’d sooner go to jail than submit to the contraceptive mandate. The archbishop of Philadelphia, Charles Chaput, called the administration’s concessions “minimalist” and used the phrase “immoral services” as a euphemism for birth control. The spokeswoman for the USCCB, Sister Mary Ann Walsh, said the accommodations “did not completely satisfy concerns related to conscience rights,” and Cardinal Timothy Dolan’s fuller response was equally chary.

What these most conservative advocates want, it seems, is for American women to be thrust back to a time before Vatican II, when legal birth control was scarce, expensive and difficult to procure.

Miller then brought it back to the National Catholic Reporter -- which she failed to mention, by the way, is a theologically liberal Catholic publication -- to round out her column and suggest that when it comes to sexual ethics, it's the shepherds of the church who should be listening to the sheep (emphasis mine):

Which brings me back to the NCR piece, and the Vatican’s articulated lack of understanding of youth culture. The hierarchy is worried enough about its hold on the young to have held a closed-door conference in Rome from Wednesday through Saturday at which bishops listened to experts on youth in an effort to improve their messaging to the young and recapture some of the generation who — in the developed West, at least — are falling away. In preparation for the conference, the president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, said he’d been listening to Amy Winehouse.

Ravasi will probably come to this on his own, but in case he doesn’t, here’s a clue: Young people care about sex.

And it’s not just having sex that they care about. It’s how religious leaders talk about sex. In America, young people emphatically don’t like religions that preach negative messages about sex. They don’t like to be told that sex is bad or that premarital sex is a paving stone on the road to hell or that homosexuals are in any way, as the catechism says, “intrinsically disordered.” The conservative insistence on birth control as “immoral,” as Chaput would have it, is, for young Catholics, a turnoff.

Donna Freitas, a scholar of religion and a Catholic who studies college students’ attitudes toward sex, wrote as much in 2010: “Catholic students especially spoke with great sarcasm about the ‘don’ts’ with regard to sex in the Catholic tradition, which make them feel alienated, and which make them think that Catholicism is utterly out of touch.” To underscore her point: 98 percent of Catholic women have used birth control at some point in their lives, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

Social conservatives like to point to the widespread use of the pill, and the subsequent sexual revolution, as the beginning of the end of American morals, the gateway to the erosion of family and marriage, the beginning of the end of a healthy respect for sex as an act of great emotional significance, as well as the means of procreation. But recent data fail to support this thesis. Teen pregnancy rates have sunk to record lows, according to a report last year by the Guttmacher Institute. Teenagers are waiting longer than they did in the 1990s to have sex for the first time, and when they do have sex, it is usually in their later teens, with contraception and a steady boyfriend or girlfriend.

So, despite all the hysteria about the eroding effects on values of social media and YouTube and the fear that the availability of birth control will lead to a nation of hedonistic narcissists, the kids are all right. They’re sensible and self-protective. But they’re less likely than ever to take advice about personal morality from older men who think they know better.

To Miller, an atheist who affiliates on the high holy days with Reform Judaism, the bishops of the Church are just celibate old men who think they're know it alls, not men who take vows to shepherd the flock of God with care for the immortal souls in their charge.

But this sort of derision is reserved exclusively for conservative Catholics and conservative evangelicals who insist on standing by the Bible's teachings on sexual ethics and abortion. While traditional Muslim teaching on sexual ethics is equally if not more so prudish by the secularist standards of folks like Ms. Miller and the editors of the On Faith page, don't hold your breath for them to mock Muslims who are serious about living out the tenets of their faith on such matters.

When it comes to bashing conservative religious folks as backward and self-righteous simpletons, the media are not equal opportunity.

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Church Of England To Allow Gay Bishops

Church Of England To Allow Gay Bishops | The Church of England has announced that it will allow gay clergy to be promoted to the rank of bishop, provided they maintain their celibacy. Jeffrey John divided the church when he was promoted in 2003 then forced to step down after protests. LGBT advocates point out that straight clergy do not have to prove their celibacy, whereas gay clergy cannot be trusted to honor the vow. Because the UK offers civil partnerships but not marriage for same-sex couples, this also raises the question of whether a bishop could have one of those partnerships, since they do not include the same assumptions of consummation as the Church’s definition of marriage.

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