Links for Easter Sunday, although they have actually nothing to do with Easter Sunday

Digby links to a pundit (Peter Baklinski) on a right-to-life website explaining that if you’re having sex while on birth control, your love is “conditional”: You’re not willing to embrace your partner completely, including their fertility! You’re (gasp!) using them for sexual pleasure, not respecting them, which “poisons love between a husband and wife since nobody ever wants to be loved only conditionally.”
This strikes me as a variation of something I’ve blogged about before, the assumption that what’s true for Pundit X (or Religious Leader X or Politician X) is true for everyone. Rick Santorum thinks contraception is unnatural and wrong, therefore it’s objectively unnatural and wrong. Baklinski looks at birth control and recoils so he assumes it’s toxic to everyone.
That being said, his argument is well, bullshit. Baklinski references Catholics, who are allowed to use the rhythm method to avoid pregnancy—why isn’t that objectionable? It’s acceptable to the Catholic Church because it doesn’t involve artificial means, but using Baklinski’s logic, it’s just as bad. For that matter if we’re concerned about nature, preaching abstinence is preaching something unnatural, as I mention here.
And if “conditional” is so awful, what if your spouse likes making love in public places? Or doggy style? Or oral sex? Aren’t those setting conditions (“I see—so you love me, but not enough to do it behind this curtain during the big party?”). Possibly Baklinski just figures they don’t count (after all, they deviate from his concept of “normal”) but by his logic “I want to make love to you but only in private” is just as toxic as “I want to make love to you but only if you can’t conceive.”
And the usual problem, people who are too old/sick/sterile to conceive—why are they any different?
But as Digby says, the idea that sex with contraception is some kind of perverted filthy act does explain why some people are so determined to ban it.
•Cutting staff at Wal-Mart is hurting sales. But adding enough staff to fix the problem would cost almost a half-billion, which would apparently be too big a cut in Wal-Mart’s $17 billion in annual profits.
This is fairly typical (I’ll note that Wal-Mart disputes the story). A lot of companies look on staff as something to cut (at least below the management level), an inconvenient cost rather than an asset. Several years back, Circuit City announced it was going to cut costs by firing all its most experienced, best paid employees. Result: They have nobody who knows enough to help customers and sales tank (and slashing staff did not miraculously translate into higher stock prices, so it was a lose-lose). Freedom News, for which I used to work, was quite happy cutting staff and pay, but not for upper management.
•Mark Sanford (SC Repub) says his sex scandal of a few years back has given him greater empathy for people in sex scandals: “I used to open the paper and think, How did this person do that? Now it’s all, But by the grace of God go I.” As someone commenting in alicublog pointed out recently, that sounds like a guy who has nevr set a foot wrong. He did “go” that way, and the grace of God didn’t stop him.
•I’ve linked before to a recent article discussing the old chestnut that women are all giving up on jobs to get married. The women in the article say their views were distorted. One interviewee, for instance, says the article referred to her “maternal ambition” to have kids, when in reality she got pregnant when she had no intention of having kids. Oh, and here’s a parody of the original article.