I took this photo from Echidne's place:*
This is of course a photograph of America's Top MOPEs*, a bunch of honest, hard-working mugs who are currently getting roasted worse than anything that ever happened to Giordano Bruno, just because the Hard-Left President hates the Constitution, which of course was written by Jesus.
This is all quite wacky: "Excuse me, ladies, this is about my suffering, harrumph. Run along now, and take your vaginas with you, as they are irrelevant to this Learned Colloquy."
Steve asks some good questions:
the right seems to want to pick a fight on these issues, for reasons I can't begin to understand. Why would you want to do this when you might be about to nominate a presidential candidate whose most profound difference with swing voters is on precisely these issues? Why draw attention to that in this way?
Point taken. But I think it's important to remember that there's more than one game being played; it's not necessarily about the presidential campaign. There is another agenda.
Take it away, Heritage Foundation asshole:
the administration has attempted [to, sic] force companies and organizations that offer health insurance plans to cover the full costs of contraception. For groups that have a religious objection to doing so, the policy represents a brazen violation of their First Amendment rights.
But proponents of the policy are quick to insist that the issue is not Americans’ fundamental rights of conscience, but rather the availability of contraception. In an attempt to backstop that position, Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Del. Eleanor Holmes-Norton (D-DC) stormed out of a House Oversight and Government Reform hearing on Thursday after a Georgetown University student was prohibited from testifying about contraception.
“As the hearing is not about reproductive rights but instead about the administration’s actions as they relate to freedom of religion and conscience,” committee staff stated, Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) “believes that Ms. Fluke is not an appropriate witness.”
It stands to reason that committee liberals would attempt to shift the debate to one of “reproductive rights.” When the issue is the constitutional right to free religious practice, the American people are wholly opposed to the contraception mandate.
This is from a moral and empirical perspective gobsmacking: that "the availability of contraception" is distinct from "Americans' fundamental rights of conscience" is childish bullshit. The asshole's overall contention that the Wicked Liberals here are not acting out of conviction but from a Wicked Desire to Distract from the Constitution is silly. There are indeed perfectly reasonable grounds for assuming that the insurance mandate is constitutional, as this asshole well knows. (As there were sound reasons for Maloney [N.b.: I like Maloney] and Holmes-Norton to have been utterly pissed off. It wasn't a ploy. They were pissed off.)
But then, that's the point of this ponderous Issa exercise -- to scramble for any goddamn possible public support for making it seem like the SC just totally ought to toss Obamacare. I think it has almost squat to do with the primaries or the election.
For all the left's problems with the ACA -- and I have lots of bones to pick with it myself -- that's nothing next to the crazed incandescent rage the right feels towards it. I think it's halfassed, but they desperately want it no-assed, and they're flailing for any sort of shit they can hit it with.
Women getting the pill paid for as part of their work compensation will be astoundingly popular, and not only for women. Regular sex without condoms is one of the most wonderful selling points of hetereosexual monogamy.
I mean, love too. But the safe bareback thing, omigod.
The GOP and the churches know they're skating way out on thin ice. Notice that what they are asking for is for the right of any employer to deny insurance coverage for the pill even for their straight, married, female employees.
Their authority is profoundly threatened. Issa's theater is what they're reduced to. And also all their other hysterics. A better healthcare system will sink them, and they know it.
It's not about the election. It's about something a lot closer to the bone.
As it were.*
NOTES:
* Echidne is always right about everything. I heart Echidne.
* Most Oppressed People Ever.
* I'm not as it happens capable of ending a post without at least one dick joke. I've tried, O Lord, I've tried.*
* I haven't actually tried. I just like dick jokes.
