The brinksmanship over contraception continues. In response
to the Obama administration’s negotiated mandate that religious-affiliated
institutions cover contraception even if its violates their religious
principles, Republicans and (some) Catholic Institutions have become
apoplectic, and following the Obama Inverse Compromise Ratio™, the more he
moves toward their position, the angrier they get.
Last week, Senator Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) went for contrarian
gold by introducing legislation to allow any employer, religiously affiliated
or not, to deny coverage for any procedure to which they object.
One needn’t much imagination to conjure up potential
consequences from this legislation: if your employer doesn’t approve of pre-marital
sex, they may deny coverage of pregnancy procedures for an unmarried woman; if
your employer thinks HIV comes from a decadent lifestyle, no treatment for you;
if you’re employer is a Christian Scientist, who believes in God’s cure for
diseases, well, you’re on your own. Blunt’s bill institutionalizes
discrimination into health care, which has plenty of problems with inequity to
begin with.
Nobody expects this nonsense to pass, but Democrats sure are
eager to vote on it, with the Senate potentially voting as early as this
afternoon (though some reports have it scheduled for a couple weeks from now).
There is no
popular support for limiting contraception coverage, not even among
Catholics, who are supposed to be the sticking point in all this; Blunt’s bill,
which wildly inflates the logic of the restriction, will likely be even more of
a non-starter with the general electorate.
In all, the Republicans seem to be playing right into the
administration’s hands (that is, if you believe that Obama plotted this, of
which there’s no actual proof—lost in this fracas is the idea that the HHS
might simply be following
the IOM’s recommendation that contraception is crucial to women’s health
and lowers health care costs by preventing unwanted pregnancies). As Amanda
Marcotte prophesied,
once Obama trapped the right with his compromise on the religious exemption,
they had two options: retreat and be embarrassed, or double down on an awful
wedge issue. Blunt’s bill is the sound of someone smacking the blackjack table
and yelling “Hit me!” on a bad hand.
Which is a shame, because there’s a genuine issue of
religious liberty at the bottom of this. Whether religious-affiliated
institutions should be forced to cover a procedure to which they object is a
legitimate question, and one that, like other rights, should not be subject to
the whims of polls and politicians. Just because contraception is universally
popular doesn’t mean (necessarily) that, say, Catholic charities should be
required to provide it.
But Blunt’s bill leaps right over the religious question and
makes this purely a shoving match over a hot-button cultural issue. He’ll lose,
which is good for everybody except for those who first objected to the mandate
over religious grounds, who will find that their worst enemy was not Obama nor
the secular left but their own congressmen.
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