Pills, the Pope, and a Barbie gone insane!!!

That’s really not a random title if you’ve been paying even a little bit of attention to headlines for the past week or so. Basically President Obama and Nicki Minaj managed to annoy the hell out of the Catholic church during Black History Month. (giggle)

“Pills”

The Obama Administration has a policy mandating that women working at religiously-affiliated institutions (schools, charities, hospitals) be provided with free access to contraceptive health care.

I like it. So did many other people. HOWEVER many affiliated with the Catholic church did not. Surprise! So Obama tweaked it.

Now the government will not force the aforementioned institutions to directly provide birth control coverage as part of their employees’ health care coverage. Instead employees of such institutions will have access to no-cost contraceptive coverage directly through the employee’s health insurer, which will be required to offer the coverage for free. NOTE:  organizations will not be required to refer women to the contraception coverage or subsidize it.

Sounds like a legit compromise to me. The key word here being “COMPROMISE” – people with opposing views should really learn what that word means.

And to the really really angry people, just a quick heads up – at no point in history was it really economically feasible to simply remain barefoot and pregnant indefinitely and it’s even less of a viable situation now so to the extent that we have rules in place to help address that issue I say BRING IT! And thank you kindly to the government for doing so.

And of course The Daily Show provided a very telling and quite amusing summary of the brouhaha.

“Barbie”

Now to Nicki. Okay Catholic leaders, now THIS you can go ‘head and be mad it. I TOTALLY see how this could have gotten just a little under your skin. Warning – if you haven’t already seen it, I’m sorry to do this to you:

Whew!

I honestly don’t have any more to say about this (reference Monday’s post) except that I was amused by the fact that I got a little insight as to what some of that was about from NYTimes’ columnist Maureen Dowd:

The rapper was debuting a song called “Roman Holiday,” featuring one of her alter-egos, Roman Zolanski. She has described Roman as her gay twin sister and a lunatic, born of rage who comes out when she’s angry (or hyping a new album).

I mean she used the word “hyped” – I just didn’t see it coming although I will admit the title of that piece – “That Old Black Magic” – did make me a little nervous. ANYway, glad she provided some insight ’cause I wasn’t planning to google that ish. AND then I stumbled across a huffpo piece:

“Sometimes I have different personalities, so I just started naming them,” Minaj told New York. “Like, there’s one that’s angry, a little more in-your-face. I named that person Roman. He guest stars on my new album. There’s also his mother, Martha. She guest stars as well. She’s from London. I also have a Barbie character that comes out every now and then. She’s soft-spoken, really sweet, and polite. She’s got a kid’s voice.”

Okay, sure. Whatever.

Wait, wait!! I’m not done yet, here is one more “groan worthy” tidbit of info for you. Perhaps you already knew this but fortunately I am out of this particular loop:

Her video for “Stupid Hoe” (we’ll refrain from commenting on the title itself) was recently banned by BET, apparently on account of a bare buttocks and its talentless refrain (“You a stupid hoe / You a stupid hoe … “).

Well good for you BET, now if we could just talk about stepping up some of your other programming choices we might be onto something.

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