Our guest columnist is Lisa Chan, who was last seen in Ersatz China, thanking America for tossing Michigan jobs over the Pacific.

I am deeply sorry for any pain that the character I portrayed brought to my communities. As a recent college grad who has spent time working to improve communities and empower those without a voice, this role is not in any way representative of who I am. It was absolutely a mistake on my part and one that, over time, I hope can be forgiven. I feel horrible about my participation and I am determined to resolve my actions.

Lisa Chan
CEO/ President, The Strive
Vice President, Sparxo Inc.

Lisa Chan [Facebook, via TPM]

At long last, here’s the line that everyone’s quoting:

Among all women who have had sex, 99% have ever used a contraceptive method other than natural family planning. This figure is virtually the same, 98%, among sexually experienced Catholic women.

The line is from a Guttmacher Institute study that draws from the same data as the CDC survey we reviewed yesterday. Apparently women in the survey were asked about their faith, but the CDC didn’t report it. And while the Guttmacher study has drawn its own attention and criticism, we just can’t find the details in its report that support its assertion.

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“We’ve got to stand up and violently oppose this,” says Walker Nickless, Bishop of the Diocese of Sioux City, Iowa, speaking about war torture the death penalty firearms economic inequality environmental degradation contraception.

Bishop Nickless: Contraception Mandate a Plot by the Devil that Must be Violently Opposed [Right Wing Watch, via ThinkProgress]

First, the news:

The last five months have been eventful for Steav Bates-Congdon.

First he got married. Then he got fired.

The popular music director at St. Gabriel Catholic Church in south Charlotte lost his job last month for marrying his longtime partner in New York, one of seven states to recognize same-sex marriages.

Yes, well, you saw that coming, even if Steav — no typo — didn’t.

But here’s the thing:

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“Gonorrhea, one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases in the United States, is increasingly showing resistance to one of the last known effective antibiotic treatments, leading researchers from the Centers for Disease Control to ‘sound the alarm’ about potentially untreatable forms of the disease.” [USNews]

While writing Monday’s Morning Blather, we considered including the statistic everyone’s been mentioning the past week: That 98 percent of American women used contraception. This, we discovered upon chasing down the source, is true.

Only it doesn’t exactly say what everyone says it says.

Andrew Sullivan, ruminating on the subject yesterday, expressed it this way:

The Bishops fail to see any difference. They want contraception, practised by 98 percent of Catholic women, and critical to preventing higher rates of abortion, kept out of any healthcare plan an employer decides.

The study we found — a 2010 CDC survey — doesn’t include the faith of respondents, but otherwise it’s in, um, broad agreement:

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“First came Spreading Santorum, Dan Savage’s crude attempt at redefining Rick Santorum’s name on Google after Santorum said some crude things about gay people. Now comes Spreading Romney, a similar attempt to redefine Mitt Romney’s name on the Internet — as a verb, meaning ‘to defecate in terror.’” [Newser, via Blogenfreude]