The Land Ain't Got No Culture

Oh, Christ, are the culture wars starting up again?

The Obama administration has issued a directive stating that Catholic schools and hospitals have to provide coverage for contraceptives and birth control pills without co-pays in an effort to broaden health access for women. Republicans have jumped on this issue like vultures on a carcass signifying their opposition to force Catholic institutions to pay for medical practices they're philosophically opposed to, calling it an affront to religious freedom and an attack on the Catholic Church. Noted Republican Catholic lawmakers such as House Speaker John Boehner and U.S. Senators Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire and Marco Rubio of Florida vow to support legislation to overturn Obama's directive. Meanwhile, noted Democratic lawmakers such U.S. Senators Charles Schumer of New York Barbara Boxer of California and Illinois congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, along with Judith Waxman and Marcia Greenberger of the National Women's Law Center, praised the administration's efforts for expanding coverage for women.

By the way, while there are many Gentiles who back the President as well, I narrowed my examples of individuals supporting this new policy to Jews for a reason. I have long suspected that contraception opponents are as anti-Semitic as they are misogynistic, because many women's health advocates tend to be Jewish.  And, whenever Catholics and evangelicals complain about assaults on their religious liberties and their anti-contraception, pro-life beliefs by the liberal elites, it's a slippery slope to blaming the "New York" or "Hollywood" elites, which are both code phrases to refer to Jews. Catholics and evangelicals say they're defending themselves against what they call the "secular Jewish assault" on their faith, without stopping to think how a people who spend a day in early autumn atoning for their sins are a secular people.

Whether or not conservative Christians see any stand in favor of reproductive rights as being redolent of Jewishness, their stand on denying women their right to control their own bias reeks of being elitist itself - a mostly male elite telling women of different religious and economic backgrounds how to run their lives, including the non-Catholic female employees of Catholic universities and hospitals who need this coverage. Republicans think they may have found the issue to swing enough votes - Catholic votes - their way to unseat Obama in November. It's all good and fine to say that many Catholics use birth control and don't automatically subscribe to church dogma, but there are many more Catholics disgusted enough by how the GOP has framed this issue - and by the way, 335,000 houses of worship have been exempted from this directive - to desert Obama and Democratic congressional candidates at the polls. Obama can count on the support of every critical thinker in America who recognizes the value of his decision. But as Adlai Stevenson II would have said, he needs a majority to get re-elected.

And even though a poll found that a majority of Catholics support contraception coverage, many of them may be uncomfortable with the government ordering Catholic institutions to provide it. More on that later.

Activists for women's health rights, though, are on a roll. They successfully forced the Susan G. Komen Race For the Cure foundation, a leading breast cancer awareness group, to reverse its decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood due to a congressional investigation into Planned Parenthood's alleged use of taxpayer funding for abortions, and Karen Handel, a senior Komen vice president and a failed Republican candidate for governor of Georgia, was forced to resign. Although Planned Parenthood has been assured continued funding to help poor women get breast examinations they can't get anywhere else, many women's health advocates are going to have a hard time trusting the Komen foundation again. But Komen's 180 is still a victory.

And, as all this was going on, the Washington state legislature just passed a bill legalizing gay marriage, which Governor Christine Gregoire supports, even as California's anti-gay marriage law has been struck down by federal appeals court - a decision that will soon be reviewed ultimately by the Supreme Court. The trend in favor of gay marriage has pleased at least one conservative - Rick Santorum, who now has a lot of momentum from anti-gay activists to propel his presidential campaign.

With Obama trying to defuse a politically charged health issue, and a new battle over gay rights having been joined, the culture wars are on again, and Americans are fighting over how this nation's culture should be defined. The joke's on them; we Americans have no culture to fight over. The closest we come to showing any culture is that annual ritual that takes place every February, where overpaid contestants battle it out in a public arena for supremacy and glory, where the winners are lauded and the losers are ridiculed, and with a hideous musical number midway through the show - for all the world to see on television. I am, of course, talking about the Oscars. :-D