Against the Stream

How to Be Denied Health Insurance: Donate a Kidney

Via the New York Times' Nick Kristof:

Over the last week I’ve been speaking to David Waddington, a 58-year-old wine retailer in Dallas, along with his wife and two sons. I’d love to know what the opponents of health reform think families like this should do.

Mr. Waddington has polycystic kidney disease, or PKD, a genetic disorder that leads to kidney failure. First he lost one kidney, and then the other. A year ago, he was on dialysis and desperately needed a new kidney. Doctors explained that the best match — the one least likely to be rejected — would perhaps come from Travis or Michael, his two sons, then ages 29 and 27.

Travis and Michael each had a 50 percent chance of inheriting PKD. And if pre-donation testing revealed that one of them had the disorder, that brother might never be able to get health insurance. As a result, their doctors had advised not getting tested. After all, new research suggests that lack of insurance increases a working-age person’s risk of dying in any given year by 40 percent.

“At the time David needed a transplant, the people closest to him couldn’t even offer a lifesaving donation — for insurance reasons,” said Mr. Waddington’s wife, Susan.

The Conservative Bible

Brought to you by the good folks at Conservapedia:

Liberal bias has become the single biggest distortion in modern Bible translations. There are three sources of errors in conveying biblical meaning:

• lack of precision in the original language, such as terms underdeveloped to convey new concepts of Christianity
• lack of precision in modern language
• translation bias in converting the original language to the modern one.

Of these three sources of errors, the last introduces the largest error, and the biggest component of that error is liberal bias. Large reductions in this error can be attained simply by retranslating the KJV into modern English.

Wait, it gets better! Here are examples of "liberal bias":

The earliest, most authentic manuscripts lack this verse set forth at Luke 23:34:^[7]

Jesus said, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing."

Is this a liberal corruption of the original? This does not appear in any other Gospel, and the simple fact is that some of the persecutors of Jesus did know what they were doing. This quotation is a favorite of liberals but should not appear in a conservative Bible.

Those liberals, always forgiving and such! Everyone knows that Jesus was a red-meat eatin' non-forgiver! And the red meat that he ate? That was the flesh of his enemies!

Here's another:

Socialistic terminology permeates English translations of the Bible, without justification. This improperly encourages the "social justice" movement among Christians.

For example, the conservative word "volunteer" is mentioned only once in the ESV, yet the socialistic word "comrade" is used three times, "laborer(s)" is used 13 times, "labored" 15 times, and "fellow" (as in "fellow worker") is used 55 times.

Of course, even "volunteering" may be too liberal, implying as it does that you might have an obligation, or even the desire,  to help someone. I propose that conservatives change the word "volunteer" to "Don't oppress me you socialistic commie scum! John Galt forever!"

I can't really respond better than Rod Dreher:

the insane hubris of this really staggers the mind. These right-wing ideologues know better than the early church councils that canonized Scripture? They really think it's wise to force the word of God to conform to a 21st-century American idea of what constitutes conservatism? These jokers don't worship God. They worship ideology.

Three to Five

Trying to re-emerge from my hiatus, I'm going to try and commit to posting 3-5 blog entries a day, many, if not most, of which are likely to be brief and refer to other, more substantial pieces, along with the occasional longer piece. So stay tuned.