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.

The Catholic Contraceptive Controversy: Where's the Health Care Part?

Effective August 1, thanks to a provision in the Affordable Care Act, most working women will have their contraceptives fully paid for, without a co-pay. That's the good news. The bad news (you knew there had to be bad news, right?) is that the unenlightened among us see it as nothing more than an unconscionable threat against virile manhood.  Especially Catholic virile manhood.

The U.S Conference of Catholic Bishops, all male at last count, have decided amongst themselves that they will not be pushed into reversing their age-old hoo-haw laws forcing Catholic women to have as many babies as their wholly-owned bodies can produce. (The laugh's on them:  Most Catholic women use artificial birth control.  The Guttmacher Institute says it's as high as 98%.)  When was the last time you heard a Catholic woman talking about the rhythm method, except to marvel at how crazy that whole notion was?

Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan, president of the USCCB, sharply criticized the decision by the Obama administration in which it "ordered almost every employer and insurer in the country to provide sterilization and contraceptives, including some abortion-inducing drugs, in their health plans....Never before has the federal government forced individuals and organizations to go out into the marketplace and buy a product that violates their conscience. This shouldn't happen in a land where free exercise of religion ranks first in the Bill of Rights."

We're talking about birth control here.  We're talking about a woman's right to choose when the time is right to carry and bear a child.  This is not baby-killing, it's responsibly managing an event as life-changing as it's ever going to get.  It's the smart, sane way of controlling the use of our own bodies and, oh, by the way, preventing the birth of unwanted children.

We're talking about birth control products already approved and already a part of most insurance policies. The only mandate is that insurance providers will now be required to provide those products without additional cost to all women who want to use them.  The mandate isn't for the use, it's for the availability and the cost.

This is a manufactured Right wing controversy designed to kill yet another positive outcome of "Obamacare", and the Catholic Bishops are more than happy to become the spark that creates yet another phony firestorm.

Mitt Romney, Republican candidate for President and a Mormon who, until now, apparently had no problem with that particular provision in the Affordable Care Act, has jumped on the bandwagon and is now on the side of the Catholic Bishops, taking this grand opportunity to rail against his opponent, Barack Obama. about an issue he clearly doesn't even begin to understand:

"I’m just distressed as I watch our president try and infringe upon our rights, the First Amendment of the Constitution provides the right to worship in the way of our own choice,” Romney said to nearly 3,000 people gathered in the gymnasium of Arapahoe High School, in Arapahoe County, an area known as a so-called “swing county” that Obama won in 2008.

“This same administration said that the churches and the institutions they run, such as schools and let’s say adoption agencies, hospitals, that they have to provide for their employees free of charge, contraceptives, morning after pills, in other words abortive pills, and the like at no cost,” Romney said. “Think what that does to people in faiths that do not share those views. This is a violation of conscience.

“We must have a president who is willing to protect America’s first right, our right to worship God according to the dictates of our own conscience,” he said.

 In addition to Romney, two other manly men candidates for Obama's job, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, are outraged that women should be able to get free birth control. (It only adds to their outrage that women should have the audacity to think they can control their own bodies):

Andrea Saul, a spokeswoman for Mitt Romney, said in an e-mail that he regarded the administration’s rule requiring religious employers to furnish birth control as wrong. “This is a direct attack on religious liberty and will not stand in a Romney presidency,” she said. Mr. Romney has also pledged to end a federal program, Title X, that provides family planning services to millions of women. 

Mr. Santorum has taken the position that health insurance plans should not be required to cover birth control. He also favors allowing states to decide whether to ban birth control. He and Mr. Gingrich both support “personhood” initiatives that would legally declare fertilized eggs to be persons, effectively banning not just all abortions but also certain contraceptives, including IUDs and some types of birth control pills. 

Mr. Gingrich wants to withdraw government money from Planned Parenthood because it performs abortions in addition to providing contraceptives, though the federal money cannot be used for abortion.

A lie dressed in Pink

I wonder how they feel about Viagra and other male enhancement "medications"? Say there was a group who believed with their whole entire hearts that workplace insurance coverage of male sex tool enhancement was not only outside any notion of "health care", it was maybe even "unconscionable".  Should that group be exempt from providing it?

And if those bishops had wombs would they be open to letting someone else tell them what they could do with them?  (It's a rhetorical question.  No, they wouldn't be open to letting someone else tell them anything.)

Addendum:  Catholic hospitals and universities already provide contraceptive coverage:  Here it is.  What's their excuse now?