Birth control; Greene and climate; domestic terror

Birth control

Sometimes the Christian right frustrates me. Sometimes they make me mad.

But more often than not, they just baffle me. And they’re doing it again.

I wish someone on the Christian right would explain to me why, if they’re so vehemently opposed to abortions, do they fight the use of contraceptives? Study after study has shown that the use of contraceptives dramatically reduces unwanted pregnancies, which is the No. 1 reason for abortions.

The Supreme Court is addressing the issue of whether a company has to provide contraceptives in its healthcare plan. I guess the Christian right would just as soon these women have the unwanted pregnancies.

In response to the Wednesday letter “Abortion prayers”:

Many people lament abortions, while at the same time resisting free contraceptives for women of child-bearing age.

I lived when abortions were not legal. However, they were still performed illegally in back alleys in unsanitary conditions that resulted in infections and, in many cases, the loss of the ability to bear children by those young women.

Other abortions were performed by individual girls and women with the aid of coat hangers, resulting in dire consequences. Thousands of children were bearing children.

In 1990, there were some 1.4 million reported abortions.

In 2012 (the latest reporting year), there were some 700,000.

Teaching sex education in schools and making contraceptives free to all who need them will do more to reduce abortions than anything else we could do. That is much of what Planned Parenthood does.

Greene and climate

Richard Greene’s March 20 column on the possible prosecution of climate change doubters provided them much needed hope.

It follows that, if the current administration can prosecute companies for voicing skepticism about our ability to change the climate, a future administration can easily prosecute citizens who have damaged our country with failed efforts to reverse global warming.

Climate change scientists could be dragged before the magistrates and confronted with hard evidence of the damage they have willfully inflicted. The evidence would include the loss of our coal industry, job losses due to canceled energy projects, taxpayer money wasted on utopian scams and the blight of ugly wind turbines marring our vistas.

These examples would provide hard evidence to support prosecution.

Their methods meet the test of the anti-racketeerring RICO law. Climate scientists win fame and fortune by falsifying data to prove their theories. Politicians abuse their power by describing climate change as settled science to funnel money to political favorites. And climate change accepters coordinate to prosecute those who disagree, as described by Greene’s column.

Those who accept climate change are playing a dangerous game.

Domestic terror

So Donald J. Trump and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz want to monitor Muslim neighborhoods to prevent radicalization and domestic terrorism.

Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people and injured hundreds more in the April 19, 1995, attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. He was raised Catholic and received last rites from a priest before his execution.

Using that line of thinking, we should monitor all Christian neighborhoods as well.

The only thing that scares me more than the prospect of having one of those two bigoted fools as our next president is that millions of Americans agree with them.

Unfortunately, the Democratic front-runner is just slightly the lesser evil.

This story was originally published March 25, 2016 at 7:47 PM with the headline "Birth control; Greene and climate; domestic terror."