To every church or religious person everywhere: Just because you believe something is true does not make it true. I’m sorry to break this to you, but your faith doesn’t trump facts. If you firmly believe that the Earth is flat, it doesn’t mean the Earth is flat and that NASA is part of a government conspiracy. Yet Hobby Lobby believes that certain kinds of birth control cause abortions, and the Supreme Court agreed, even though it’s not true. The Plan B pill, intrauterine devices (IUDs) and other forms of contraception Hobby Lobby can now ban, in fact, don’t cause abortions. The science is irrefutable. Doctors, pharmacists and other experts agree. And no religious belief can ever change it.
Here is the real science behind Plan B, IUDs, and similar types of birth controls that do not abort anything.
If a corporation wants to oppose birth control because it prevents pregnancy, that’s an entirely different issue. If that’s the case, then Hobby Lobby should not pay for male employees to have vasectomies – which they currently do. But again: it should never trump someone else’s personal liberty. Or the facts.
Sunday night’s Cosmos showed an updated animation to Carl Sagan’s monologue where he reminds us how beautiful our world is and how we’re all in it together….”every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
