Reading Tex's link from the "Liberty & Privacy" piece, I am struck by the examples, and how different they are from the debate we have been having at such length.
We've been arguing -- and we ourselves, as well as the wider society -- as if religious conservatives were perhaps going to ban abortion or restrict birth control.
In reality, the question before the courts is whether religious conservatives will be allowed not to pay for someone else's free birth control (or, in the sense of some of these drugs, abortifacients).
The conservatives in this election had no capacity to ban or even meaningfully restrict abortion, even had they won. The law banning religious freedom and freedom of conscience is already on the books. It's already before the courts.
The administration is already arguing that individuals who have religious or conscientious objections have no such freedom as to refuse to buy something for someone else who wants it.
How did we get into this debate about banning abortion? That was never the issue at hand at all.
It was all about scaring women into not voting for the Republican on economic issues. The Democrats seem very good about the (irrational) scare tactics...
ReplyDeleteMost voters showed they either don't care or don't understand what is at stake here. If the First Amendment becomes meaningless, as far as the law goes, what next? We keep heading down this road and I fear where that takes us...
As ML points out, it was never ACTUALLY about banning abortion. It was about demonizing the position. For crying out loud, people were honestly saying they thought Romney wanted to outlaw contraception. Seriously. Back where I'm from, we have a word for folks like that. Well... two. The polite one would be "misinformed". The other is "fools".
ReplyDeleteYeah, but somehow we all got roped into this debate. Somehow the real issue before the republic dropped out of sight, and we began arguing as if there were a proposal before us to ban abortion and we just needed to sort out exactly what the proper form of that ban ought to be.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, what was really happening was just the opposite: where we really are isn't in danger of religious conservatives enacting some restrictions on abortion, but in danger of religious conservatives being forced by law to live against their conscience in their own personal lives.
"How did we get into this debate about banning abortion? "
ReplyDeleteI was going to prattle on with something about the Progressive Party knowing which buttons to push on their constituency and the Grand Old Party being ineffective and inarticulate before such an audience...
Instead I'll say, What Miss LB said.
"Back where I'm from, we have a word for folks like that. Well... two. The polite one would be "misinformed". The other is "fools"."
Misinformed in this day and age is far too charitable. So too might be a label of fool.
I think the term he's looking for is "useful idiots"...
ReplyDeleteI have a glib joke about how all the problems in the country stem from giving women the vote, paraphrasing the crack by Thackeray at the beginning of his novel "Barry Lyndon"--"...Since the days of Adam, there has been hardly a mischief done in this world but a woman has been at the bottom of it...
ReplyDeleteThe ladies ain't making it easier to dismiss such thoughts.
Thank you, Eric, for demonstrating the answer to my question in a practical fashion. I remember now: that is exactly how we got roped into this debate.
ReplyDeleteSo all our problems would be solved if troublesome womenfolk knew our place and weren't permitted to have a say at the polls? I highly doubt that...
ReplyDeleteAbortion and the phony "war on women" aren't the only issues when it comes to how/why Romney lost.
Reading elsewhere this morning, seems their GOTV plan was a collosal failure - not even beta-tested before rolling out to people who had never seen it before November 6th. I'm flabbergasted that a successful businessman such as Mr. Romney didn't know you don't do that for anything, nevermind something as complicated as what it was intended to do.
I've mostly stayed out of this debate because I don't agree with the conservative stance here.
ReplyDeleteI'm quite friendly to the argument that govt. has no business telling employers *that* they have to offer insurance (this should be a negotiation between employer and employee) or what that insurance must cover (surely the employer best knows what benefits his business can afford to offer?).
I'm afraid the religious argument leaves me completely unmoved. I find it unpersuasive.
Benefits (especially health insurance) is part of the total compensation package. At large companies, you can bargain for fewer benefits and more pay. To some extent, they're fungible assets.
The idea that an employee who uses either their salary or their insurance to get their tubes tied, use contraception, or get an abortion somehow morally implicates the employer is... well, unpersuasive. You can't keep your employees from using their paycheck to buy birth control, and if (as many studies have shown) your salary is reduced by the value of your health insurance, I fail to see the difference.
I think people really need to substitute other things you're more friendly to for the ones you disapprove of and then ask yourself if your argument still holds up?
I don't think any employer believes he is implicated if you use your salary to buy birth control. Where I think the problem lies is the requirement that you be given it free (without a co-pay) as part of any insurance plan.
ReplyDeleteNothing is actually free, of course, so someone must be paying for it. That somebody is either the employer or the insurer. (In the case of many Catholic charities, the distinction is without a difference as they are self-insured.)
So, the logic strikes me as solid in these cases. If you want to argue that 'Well, really, I'm paying for it with the value of my work,' I understand what you mean, and I don't see any reason why you shouldn't be able to do that without implicating your employer -- but the way to do it is by paying you that part of your compensation in salary, so you can spend it however you like.
What really is striking to me about the "controversy" is how artificial it is. There are so many ways to solve this particular issue -- if indeed the need for free birth control is an "issue" we need to solve, because people really need it to be free somehow -- without creating a crisis of conscience for anyone, or using the law to compel people to betray their religious values.
ReplyDeleteSomehow, though, we ended up with a law structured to create a crisis for some Americans in what is otherwise a perfectly non-crisis situation. You want birth control? OK, well, we've got (or use to have) the greatest market in the world. It's probably going to be no problem to grant that reasonably simple desire.
There's no reason to make this into an issue to fight about. Yet somehow the law has been structured so as to do exactly that.
Actually, that was always the issue the Left was pushing, even 30 years ago. The religious conservatives were fine if they didn't have to pay for PP. The Left weren't satisfied until they made PP government funded and everything else government funded, like healthcare's free abortions. Well they eventually got federal funding, but it's never enough is it.
ReplyDeleteSolving the issue would remove a power pillar from the Left. A totalitarian death cult utopian organization cannot afford to allow such useful power pillars to go away. They cannot allow the issue to be fixed.