Screw Bart and Benedict, Time for Nun-Sense

When he's penning his latest right-to-life language, Bart Stupak certainly doesn't "call up nuns" for advice—rather, he looks to bishops and anti-abortion groups. But the nuns have broken with the bishops to endorse health reform, and Maureen Dowd thinks she might have "to bang Bart’s head into a blackboard a few times" to get him to realize that in this case, "you have to go with the gals."

Dowd leaves Stupak scribbling at the blackboard, and lights right into Catholicism's patriarchal hierarchy, which "let a perverted stain spread over the entire church," rewarded decades of nuns' loyalty with a pair of Benedict-ordered inquisitions when it should have been addressing sex abuse, and now thinks "it’s better to deprive poor people of good health care than to let the church look like it’s going soft on abortion." And as the abuse scandal taints even the pope, Dowd writes, it seems that only "the nuns (have) stepped up to support true Catholic dogma." (More health care reform stories.)