About that Contraceptive Controversy: If it's phony and you know it, clap your hands

 (Breaking news:  President Obama just moments ago provided a brilliant compromise to the contraceptive controversy, as I mention at the end of this piece.  I wrote this before he made the announcement, but the arguments still hold and they bear remembering.  These are the kinds of battles we'll go on fighting, and a major victory such as today's doesn't mean the war is over.  Not by a long shot.) 

So today let's take a look at what some of the good people are saying about this whole Catholic Bishop's Contra Con -- that huffy-puffy outrage over a mandate forcing insurance providers to cover contraceptives for free in every workplace, including Catholic-owned institutions that hire non-Catholics and receive outside funding.  Those places that are not churches. Those places that already offer prescription birth control drug coverage, but with the usual prescription co-pays. 

John Aravosis at Americablog caught the paragraph in USA Today that clearly shows their real motive.  It is to remove all coverage of all contraceptives:  (Thank you, John, and the others who caught it and are emphasizing it.  This may be the most important revelation in this whole phony story.)

That was no consolation to Catholic leaders. The White House is "all talk, no action" on moving toward compromise, said Anthony Picarello, general counsel for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. "There has been a lot of talk in the last couple days about compromise, but it sounds to us like a way to turn down the heat, to placate people without doing anything in particular," Picarello said. "We're not going to do anything until this is fixed."

That means removing the provision from the health care law altogether, he said, not simply changing it for Catholic employers and their insurers. He cited the problem that would create for "good Catholic business people who can't in good conscience cooperate with this."

"If I quit this job and opened a Taco Bell, I'd be covered by the mandate," Picarello said.

Sarah Seltzer, in a great AlterNet piece called, "How Zealous Clergy and Their Media Enablers are Manufacturing a Controversy over Birth Control", repeated a startling quote from 2010:

"I don't want to overstate or understate our level of concern," said McQuade, the Catholic bishops' spokesperson. "We consider [birth control] an elective drug. Married women can practice periodic abstinence. Other women can abstain altogether. Not having sex doesn't make you sick."

(Can't you just see millions of men, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, going, "Hey, man, what are you doing?  Shut up!  Just shut UP!")

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones writes about his early ambivalence in "Why I'm feeling so Hard-Nosed over the Contraception Affair": 

". . .I simply don't believe that the religious objection here is nearly as strong as critics are making it out to be. As I've mentioned before, even the vast majority of Catholics don't believe that contraception is immoral. Only the formal church hierarchy does. What's more, as my colleague Nick Baumann points out, federal regulations have required religious hospitals and universities to offer health care plans that cover contraception for over a decade. (The fact that some such employers don't cover birth control is mostly the result of lax enforcement.)"

In a New York Times piece,Gail Collins, starting with a devastating admission by her mother-in-law, writes eloquently about the need for this to be a right for all women: 

We are arguing about whether women who do not agree with the church position, or who are often not even Catholic, should be denied health care coverage that everyone else gets because their employer has a religious objection to it. If so, what happens if an employer belongs to a religion that forbids certain types of blood transfusions? Or disapproves of any medical intervention to interfere with the working of God on the human body?

Organized religion thrives in this country, so the system we’ve worked out seems to be serving it pretty well. Religions don’t get to force their particular dogma on the larger public. The government, in return, protects the right of every religion to make its case heard.

Leah Berkenwald at MsBlog writes about John Boehner's promise to kill it all if the president doesn't back down:

This morning, House Speaker John Boehner vowed in a House floor speech to overturn the provision in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) that would require faith-affiliated hospitals and universities to include birth-control coverage in their employee health benefits. The provision, Boehner argued, “constitutes an unambiguous attack on religious freedom in our country.”

Igor Volsky at ThinkProgress follows Rick Santorum as he leaps at the chance to demagogue the "Religious freedom" argument:

 SANTORUM: They are taking faith and crushing it. Why? Why? When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights, then what’s left is the French Revolution. What’s left is the government that gives you right, what’s left are no unalienable rights, what’s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you’ll do and when you’ll do it. What’s left in France became the guillotine. Ladies and gentlemen, we’re a long way from that, but if we do and follow the path of President Obama and his overt hostility to faith in America, then we are headed down that road.

You can watch him in action here.
 
David Boies talks about the constitutionality on "the Last Word":

"There isn't a constitutional issue involved in this case," he told MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell on Wednesday. "You don't exempt religious employers just because of their religion. You are not asking anybody in the Catholic church or any other church to do anything other than simply comply with a normal law that every employer has to comply with."

Steve Benen, in a MaddowBlog piece called "It's about Contraception, not Religion", reminds us again why Rick Santorum should never, ever become president: 

Rick Santorum argued several months ago, "One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country.... Many of the Christian faith have said, 'Well, that's okay, contraception is okay.' It's not okay. It's a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be."

  Thank you to Jean Shaheen, Barbara Boxer and Patty Murray, good women of Congress, for spelling out why this mandate makes sense.  And to the Wall Street Journal for publishing their message.

Those now attacking the new health-coverage requirement claim it is an assault on religious liberty, but the opposite is true. Religious freedom means that Catholic women who want to follow their church's doctrine can do so, avoiding the use of contraception in any form. But the millions of American women who choose to use contraception should not be forced to follow religious doctrine, whether Catholic or non-Catholic.

Catholic hospitals and charities are woven into the fabric of our broader society. They serve the public, receive government funds, and get special tax benefits. We have a long history of asking these institutions to play by the same rules as all our other public institutions.

So let's remember who this controversy is really about—the women of America. Already too many women struggle to pay for birth control. According to the Hart Research survey cited above, more than one-third of women have reported having difficulty affording birth control. It can cost $600 a year for prescription contraceptives. That's a lot of money for a mother working as a medical technician in a Catholic hospital, or a teacher in a private religious school.

 In a move to bring some reason to this argument, 24 religious leaders; Christians, Jews, Muslims, signed a letter declaring solidarity with President Obama and the HHS:

"We stand with President Obama and Secretary Sebelius in their decision to reaffirm the importance of contraceptive services as essential preventive care for women under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and to assure access under the law to American women, regardless of religious affiliation. We respect individuals’ moral agency to make decisions about their sexuality and reproductive health without governmental interference or legal restrictions. We do not believe that specific religious doctrine belongs in health care reform – as we value our nation’s commitment to church-state separation. We believe that women and men have the right to decide whether or not to apply the principles of their faith to family planning decisions, and to do so they must have access to services. The Administration was correct in requiring institutions that do not have purely sectarian goals to offer comprehensive preventive health care. Our leaders have the responsibility to safeguard individual religious liberty and to help improve the health of women, their children, and families. Hospitals and universities across the religious spectrum have an obligation to assure that individuals’ conscience and decisions are respected and that their students and employees have access to this basic health care service.  We invite other religious leaders to speak out with us for universal coverage of contraception."

This is just a sample of the arguments for a look beyond religious objections to birth control for women.  They are the arguments that caused President Obama, just moments ago, to spell out the brilliant, elegant compromise that should address the concerns of both sides.  Any religious institution that finds objection to providing their female employees with an insurance policy that covers birth control can now opt out of paying for it.  But thanks to Barack Obama and his administration, women in America will no longer have to worry about how they'll pay for contraceptives.  They will be free to any woman who needs them.

  So let the politicizing begin --  the mewing of kittens against a lion's roar.  This is not a religious issue, it's not an Obama issue, it's not simply a women's issue.  It's a human rights issue, and what's at stake is the real definition of freedom.

Liberals for Obama: What a Concept!

 Yesterday Maureen Dowd devoted an entire column to why her Republican sister is angry that she voted for Obama:

One of the independent voters Obama will be trying to charm over the next two years is my sister, Peggy, a formerly ardent Obamican (a Republican who changed spots to vote for Obama).
Disillusioned with her beloved W. over Iraq and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and the disdain for bipartisanship, she gave her affections — and small cash infusions — to Barack Obama in 2008.
Despite being a Washington native, Peggy believed that the dazzling young newcomer could change Washington.
But she has lost a lot of faith now, saying she might vote for Mitt Romney over Obama if Romney is the Republican nominee in 2012. (Sarah Palin shouldn’t count on her vote though. In Peggy’s words, “Are you nuts?”)

 Give credit to Peggy for dismissing Palin as President, but really--what would a Republican who loved George W want from someone like Barack Obama anyway?

No credit, however, to her sister, who either panicked at deadline or thought another jab at Obama was just the ticket on 9/11.  (I would say to Mo "Are you nuts?", but I don't want to be a copycat.)

I'm watching what's happening these days, with friend and foe alike turning against the president, and I'm starting to think like a fiercely protective mother here.  Just as with my own children, when they did wrong I'd let them know, and I expected a ready fix,  but I wasn't about to go out into the neighborhood telling everybody what rotten little brats they sometimes were.  I didn't want the whole neighborhood to think they were rotten little brats.

Same with my president.  I'm not happy with the way things are going, either.  At risk of sounding like a broken record, I wanted a New Deal/WPA/CCC approach to fixing our nation. I wanted every leader in the Democratic Party to thumb their noses at the outgoing regime on Day One by coming up with creative ways of creating economy-sustaining American jobs, hang the cost or the damage to the Fat Cats.

I thought bank bailouts without gajillions of strings attached would fail almost as badly as they did.  I hate the idea of still having a military presence in both Iraq and Afghanistan.  I've never been happy about the Wall Street and Chicago guys Obama chose to help with his "Hope and Change" program.

That he reads from a teleprompter or acts "lawyerly", thus boring us to tears when he's explaining his plans to us, bothers me not, and I wish everybody would just shut up about it.  It's the actions, not the delivery, that counts.  Concentrate on the big stuff, and screw the small stuff.

Every time Obama's allies make fun or go on the attack they've put one foot  into the enemy camp.  There are enough enemies there already, but believe me, they'll welcome those they see as turncoats with open arms.   And pretty soon they've won and we've lost and we'll be on the outside looking in, bitching about our loss more than we're bitching now about how Obama has let us down.

There are enough real issues we can use against the Republicans without wasting valuable time reinforcing the prevailing opinion that Obama is the baddest of the bad guys.  Come on.  We know better.  Go on the attack against Obama's dithering and doddering and seeming bad judgment if you must, but do it as a family member--as an ally.  He may be a disappointment, but he is the least of our enemies.  Stop making him into one, even and especially from our side.

Just today Dick Armey ruffled his breast feathers and cackled to CNN's Candy Crowley about how the Democrats are "confused and demoralized" and are going to lose in November.  That's the weapon the Republicans and the new Tea Party party are going to be using against us--that we don't know what the hell we're doing and we don't like each other much--and unless we prove them wrong it's going to work.
 
I want Obama and the Democrats to do better, but they can't do better if they don't have the chance.  They have to win in November because it'll be just insane if they don't.  So, yeah, let's knock their heads together and twist their arms until they holler "uncle", and then let's get this show on the road.  But we have to get them elected first and we have less than two months to do it.

Here's a parting thought:

In the Nevada Senate race Harry Reid and Sharron Angle are running neck and neck.


Let me repeat that:  Harry Reid and Sharron Angle are running NECK AND NECK.

In the California Senate race Barbara Boxer and Carly Fiorina are running neck and neck.

Again--Boxer and Fiorina, NECK AND NECK.

And so it goes.

So unless you want the Republicans to give you something really bad to bitch about, I would suggest you tuck any gripes you have about Obama and the Dems behind your left ear (as my Aunt Ingrid used to say--meaning they'll still be there, festering), and get on with keeping in place the only party in office that has any hope of getting us out of this mess.

It's not a matter of rewarding them, it's a matter of protecting us.   All of us.  Every single one of us.

Ramona