Posted on

Catholics Against Ryan

From Maureen Dowd’s column this past week:

Even Catholic bishops, who had to be dragged toward compassion in the pedophilia scandal, were dismayed at how uncompassionate Ryan’s budget was.

Mitt Romney expects his running mate to help deliver the Catholic vote and smooth over any discomfort among Catholics about Mormonism. (This is the first major-party ticket to go Protestant-less.) Yet after Ryan claimed his budget was shaped by his faith, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops deemed it immoral.

“A just spending bill cannot rely on disproportionate cuts in essential services to poor and vulnerable persons,” the bishops wrote in a letter to Congress.

The Jesuits were even more tart, with one group writing to Ryan that “Your budget appears to reflect the values of your favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand, rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

The nuns-on-the-bus also rapped the knuckles of the former altar boy who now takes his three kids to Mass. As Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of the Catholic social justice group Network, told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, it’s sad that a Catholic doesn’t understand that “we need to have each other’s backs. Only wealthy people can ever begin to pretend that they can live in a gated community all by themselves.”

Even Ryan’s former parish priest in Janesville weighed in. Father Stephen Umhoefer told the Center for Media and Democracy, “You can’t tell somebody that in 10 years your economic situation is going to be just wonderful because meanwhile your kids may starve to death.”

Oh, & um, Ayn Rand was an atheist. Can we get that news out to the Christian Right, please?

Posted on

Who’s Poor? Women

With all of this blather about financial bottom lines, I’d just like to point out a small fact: the majority of the poor people in this country are women. So any budget plan that cuts funding for the poor is cutting funding for women, especially single mothers with children.

It’s embarrassing that we have the largest gap in poverty rates between men & women in the Western world.

Here are some other useful facts the next time someone starts going on about budgets and bottom lines and how there’s no need for feminism:

  • 13% of women over the age of 65 are poor; only 6% of men that age are.
  • The poverty gap between women and men widens significantly between ages 18 and 24—20.6 percent of women are poor at that age, compared to 14.0 percent of men. The gap narrows, but never closes, throughout adult life, and it more than doubles during the elderly years.

Why? Not just because of the wage gap, which is still significant – 77 cents on the dollar these days – but also because

  • women provide far more unpaid care giving than men,
  • they are still responsible for most of the unpaid childcare,
  • women still get pregnant and lose jobs as a result, and finally,
  • women lose paid work days dealing with the sexual and other violence.

So how about we actually work on a plan that eliminates sexual violence against women to balance the fucking budget, instead?

(h/t to Dylan.)