Too fast, and for me that’s saying something, because I like my presto PRESTO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2uCBg7hNO4

“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:

Read more »

“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:

Read more »

“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]

“Gov. Chris Gregoire signed a measure legalizing gay marriage in a ceremony in Olympia on Monday. It made Washington the seventh state to legalize same-sex marriage.” [AP/Seattle PI]