National Review's Rich Lowry summarises the stupidity that passes for policy, and the absurd thought-processes that pass for thinking on the left. The hysteria began in response to Mike Huckabee's comment:
“If the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of the government, then so be it.”
Whatever one thinks of the content of that statement, it has to be noted that it is a complex sentence containing a sophisticated verb tense: namely, a subjunctive clause. Whatever one thinks of the war on women, it has to be noted that a more fundamental difficulty in the country seems to be a war on literacy. The response illustrates the standard ignorance:
The comedienne Sarah Silverman professed herself freaked out that Republicans like Mike Huckabee want to control her private parts. If that’s what Huckabee was getting at, he had an odd way of conveying it — by saying the opposite.
Prior to his offending sentence, Huckabee said, “Women I know are smart, educated, intelligent, capable of doing anything anyone else can do.” This was ignored, or evidently taken as a dastardly false-flag operation to conceal his hostility to women.
The Huckabee flap establishes a new standard in War on Women gaffes. The old standard was: Don’t say something outlandish, most notoriously violated by Republican representative Todd Akin during his misbegotten Senate campaign in Missouri last cycle. The new standard is: Avoid saying something that can be distorted to sound outlandish if your intent and meaning are ignored by people who make a living out of ignoring intent and meaning.
Saint Thomas Aquinas, whose feast we celebrate today, explained the three-fold effect of sin, which darkens the intellect (as well as weakening the will and distorting the senses). Or to summarise: sin makes you stupid. With grace comes prudence, and while it may not infuse the recipient with the ability to dissect sophisticated sentences, it would at least let the real meaning rest easy in the ear.
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