Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

T he birth control pill has been with us for a long time. The “morning after pill”, as it has been called, a pill designed to abort birth after conception, is readily available in Connecticut for about $25, and surgical abortion, Planned Parenthood’s money maker, is also readily available in birth control Connecticut.   When churches, synagogues and mosques make the distinctions mentioned above – for both scientific and theological reasons – it is unscientific and contrary to settled theology to accuse them of political or theological apostasy. In the imperial Roman world, the Christian Church was among the first social organizations to oppose abortion. Opposition to abortion in the year AD 70 was “cutting edge” reform.   The Didache, also known as The Lord's Teaching Through the Twelve Apostles to the Nations, parts of which constitute the oldest extant written catechism, dating from AD 70, states: “The second commandment of the teaching: You shall not murder. You sha...

States – Connecticut in particular -- should avoid deficit spending whenever possible for the same reason Mr. Micawber in Charles Dickins’ David Copperfield suffered misery because he had failed to keep his eye on personal debt.   If a man had twenty pounds a-year for his income, and spent nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and sixpence, Micawer tells us, he would be happy, but if he spent twenty pounds one he would be miserable -- and committed to a debtors’ prison. Dickens’ father was committed to such a prison. The Debtors' Act of 1869 limited the ability of the courts to sentence debtors to prison, a sign that such prisons were slated for abolition.   What we might call the Micawber principle never-the-less still stands as an ominous warning to both persons and states.   Although the state of Connecticut is sitting on a massive accumulative state pension debt of some $35 billion, most of the chatter in our media concerns the state’s biennial “surplus.” ...

Columnist for the New York Times Ross Dothat, a reliable guide in Catholic matters, tells us in a recent column – “Pope Francis and the end of the imperial papacy” -- that the late pope had unraveled “the attempted doctrinal settlements of previous popes,” thereby “unsettling conservative like me.”   The unraveling of papal authority had been hastened by “two rebellions” tolerated by Francis. The first involved a partly successful suppression of the Latin Mass. “After Vatican II in the late 1960s… Pope Paul VI “remade the church’s liturgy” The pope “commanded enough deference that he was able to swiftly consign the mass that every Catholic in the world had grown up with to the modern equivalent of the catacombs – to church basements, hotel rooms and schismatic chapels.”   When Francis later attempted a like suppression, “reversing the permissions granted by [Pope] Benedict, only his most loyal bishops really went along, and the main effect was to stir resistance and co...

Some underrepresented conservatives and libertarians in Connecticut were buoyed, momentarily, by the neo-progressive resistance to President Donald Trump’s tariff initiative.   A tariff is a tax, a political charge on incoming goods, said the anti-Trump chorus, and taxes raise the price of goods for middle class Americans and the American poor. This refreshing honesty burst several neo-progressive bubbles.   There is no essential difference between a tariff and a corporate tax. As a political Gertrude Stein mighty put it: “A tax, is a tax, is a tax,” and what can be said of tariffs may also justly be said of corporate taxes, or indeed any other taxes.   Corporations are not tax payers; they are tax collectors. A “fair” corporate tax is charged upon a company by a government; the company then collects the tax in the form of a higher price for its goods or services, shuttles the tax to the government’s receivables, and then uses the price difference to defray it...

Among Catholics, Mary Magdalene is known as “the apostle to the apostles.” The gospel of John tells us why:   Now Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot.   They asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?”   “They have taken my Lord away,” she said, “and I don’t know where they have put him.” At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus.   He asked her, “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?”   Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.”   Jesus said to her, “Mary.”   She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means “Teacher”).   At the place of burial, she recognized the risen Christ in the w...

Complexity has been added to complexity in the unfolding PURA mess. And we all know, do we not, that political fraud of every kind nests comfortably in complexity, awaiting a resolution that resolves little?   PURA is Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority. Until the elevation of Marissa Gillett to the commission’s top position, PURA was, according to statute forming it, a (six) member commission whose mission was the regulation of public utilities.   The commission was from its inception imperfectly formed. There are presently three members serving on the PURA board. Gillett, Governor Ned Lamont’s handpicked chairman is, most political watchers will agree, a disturber of the peace, but she has the unqualified support of Lamont and gatekeepers in the Democrat dominated General Assembly, chief among them Senate President Pro Tempore Martin Looney of New Haven and Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff of Norwalk. When these three work in concert, alternative voice...