Bitter Pill

Okay, in light of the fact that Trump has expanded the ability of employers to deny women contraception coverage through the Affordable Care Act based on religious or moral objections, let me see if I have this straight (bear with me here):

Many Democrats, especially many female Democrats, were so insistent on making Hillary Clinton the first female President that they rigged the system to ensure her the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.  The party needed to win the 2016 election.  They needed to win to protect the advances in women's rights against misogynistic Republicans.  They wanted to ensure that contraception coverage and other women's health services would remain available to all women.  But at the same time, they were so desirous of getting a woman in the White House that they got behind Hillary Clinton, a lousy candidate whom many people suspected could not win a general election.  There were ten women that the Democrats could have nominated for President in 2016.  The first was Hillary and no one cared who the other nine were.  And they cared even less about any of the cisgendered white males who were Hillary's opponents for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016.

Moreover, Hillary partisans tried to shame women who dared to support one of said opponents, namely Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley.  Remember when Madeleine Albright said there was a special place in hell for women who didn't support Hillary?  And how about Gloria Steinem's comment that female Sanders supporters were only supporting Sanders to meet guys?  The message was clear: Hillary was going to be the Democratic presidential nominee because it was not just a woman's turn, it was this woman's turn - and cisgendered white males need not apply.  Despite everything at stake for women's rights, the Hillbots were hell-bent (Hill-bent?) on making Hillary Clinton the Democratic presidential nominee and counting on her to make history for women in America by getting elected President, even though it turned out that she could not beat Donald Trump, instead of nominating a man - Sanders or O'Malley - who could have beaten Trump and would have protected contraception access and other women's health services.  But Democrats just weren't going to bother with a cisgendered white male nominee.  Now we have a cisgendered white male Republican President taking away contraception coverage for millions of American women . . . all because the Hillbots in the Democratic Party preferred a woman who couldn't win over one of two men who could have won.

You Hillbots didn't think this thing through, did you?

I could have told you that this was too big a risk to take back in 2016, but ahh, who would listen to a cisgendered white male like me anyway?

And you really blew it by choosing not to at least consider Elizabeth Warren.

Know Your (Lack of) Rights

In staging a U.S. House hearing on the need to preserve religious freedom by giving employers the right to deny contraception and birth control coverage, and having an all-male panel of witnesses, the Republicans appear to have shot themselves in the feet. They appear to be wrecking their changes of electoral success in November, right?

Not so fast. The GOP may be driving moderates and most female voters away with their assault on women's rights, but they're energizing more Christian conservatives into showing up at the polls this fall and possibly making the difference in close congressional elections, as well as in the presidential election . . . where a few thousand or even a few hundred popular votes can swing a state's electoral college votes toward the Republicans. The strategy already seems to be working in the U.S. Senate campaign in Massachusetts, which has a large working-class Catholic population; woman of the people Elizabeth Warren seems to be in trouble in her bid to unseat incumbent Cosmo boy Scott Brown.

Oh yeah, the singling out of this particular aspect of the Affordable Care Act could attract independent and establishment Republican voters who don't care about contraceptive coverage but detest the health care law to come out and vote, because the law includes a government mandate for everyone to buy medical insurance. Such voters may see the contraceptive coverage requirement as a reminder of the idea of government intrusion into health care, not necessarily as a way to keep women down. They may vote Republican simply to get the law repealed.

Meanwhile, the Fat Man In the State House, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, vetoed a bill allowing gay marriage in the Garden State after both houses of the New Jersey legislature approved it with solid majorities. They just don't have enough votes to override it. This will help Christie shore up his bona fides with the national right-wing movement - look for lots of out-of-state money to pour into his campaign for re-election next year - and position him for a presidential run in 2016 or 2020.

Despite ample evidence that the majority of voters always reject by popular vote the extension of rights to others - in New Jersey itself, the all-male electorate voted down a referendum to grant women the vote in the state in 1915 - Christie prefers to have the gay marriage issue voted on by referendum. How many states have placed a referendum on gay marriage before the voters? 31. How many of these referenda have passed? Zero. Christie says he respects the intelligence and integrity of the voters to make the right decision on the issue. Why would they - they voted for him, didn't they?

The only people who should vote on civil rights are legislators. The Democrats in New Jersey have made it clear that they won't stand for a referendum on this issue, which would likely fail. They also plan to garner enough votes to override Christie's veto before the current legislative session ends in January 2014. Personally, I think gay marriage has a better chance of passing by referendum. :-(

To Be Blunt About It . . .

President Obama apparently didn't know how big a hornet's nest he was stirring up by advocating a contraception insurance coverage directive that required faith-based institutions to provide such coverage to their employees. Although he revised it to allow religious organizations to be exempted and have insurance companies fill the gap by mandate, and although Catholic groups are pleased with the compromise, the pro-life movement in the Republican party sees the revised version as forcing other employers to provide coverage contrary to their own moral objections.

In that spirit of ill will, Senator Roy Blunt, a Missouri Republican elected in 2010, has introduced an amendment that would allow all employers the right to refuse coverage to employees for any medical procedure they deem morally offensive. These procedures include maternity care, HIV/AIDS screenings, diabetes testing . . . any procedure involving treatment and care for a medical condition which could have been brought on by a lifestyle that the employer may find unhealthy and/or immoral. Thirty-seven Senate Republicans, including accidental senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts, have signed on to the Blunt amendment, which would likely be mated to a transportation bill - the same transportation bill ending dedicated funding to non-automotive transportation modes and initiatives - currently up for consideration in the House.

Oh yeah, don't think Brown is shooting himself in the foot with his support of this amendment as he runs for a full Senate term in liberal Massachusetts. It will likely get him more support from national Republican and pro-life groups and win him favor with Catholic Democrats and independents in his state. Brown can't fend off the challenge he faces in November from Democrat Elizabeth Warren with only Republican votes; he needs to fool enough gullible Massachusetts voters with his manly pro-life positioning. Enough Bay Staters, after all, were taken in to elect him to the Senate once - and to elect Mitt Romney as governor in 2002.

Meanwhile, the Virginia state legislature is pushing a pair of pro-life bills that could conceivably (no pun intended) become law. One would require mandatory ultrasounds for women seeking abortions. But because most abortions are performed within twelve weeks, a transvaginal ultrasound - literally inserting the instrument into a woman's body - would be required. So what, says Virginia State Delegate Todd Gilbert (Republican- male caucus) - abortion isn't really medically necessary all the time, he argues, it's mostly just a "lifestyle convenience."

The other bill would recognize fetuses as persons, similar to the bills rejected in Colorado and Mississippi. Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell, a Republican, has indicated that he will sign at least one of them, most likely to burnish his vice presidential prospects.

Apparently, it's not the American infrastructure, antiquated as it may be, that is severely outdated. It's the American political establishment. And the idea that a handful of reactionaries could win power at the ballot box and use it to deny rights to others with a technologically superior communications system and a ruthless organizational structure suggests that we're closer to fascism in America than any of us have ever imagined.

Contraceptive Confoundment

President Obama is suddenly getting applauded by Catholic Democrats and some independent Catholics who supported him in 2008 for his announcement earlier today that he would continue the policy of guaranteeing contraceptive and birth control supplies to women who work in Catholic schools or hospitals (the same guarantee to female employees in other institutions), but with the proviso that health insurance companies must provide coverage when Catholic institutions refuse to do so out of conscience. People are already talking about how he defused a political issue with this move especially by showing respect for matters of faith, but I'm not sure about that. First of all, he galvanized the right. Second of all, he made himself look foolish by doing now what he should have done a few weeks ago. And third of all, while some Catholic clergypersons such as Sister Carol Keehan, the nun who runs Catholic Health Association, is pleased with this, the bishopric is reserving judgment pending further review. And Obama's change of course may have opened a new can of worms. He's essentially telling insurance companies to issue certain policies, playing into the hands of accusations of a "government takeover of health care."

Still, this is a good plan.  Obama did the right thing by women and he did the right thing by himself; he owed up to a mistake, corrected the mistake, and now he seeks to move on. But - do you think reactionaries in the Republican party will let him? He may have lit the match, but Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich are going to fan the flame into a firestorm. in fact, at the annual Nuremberg rally - uh, Conservative Political Action Conference meeting, they're already at it. And (picking up on where I left off yesterday), while a majority of American Catholics support and use birth control, the fact that Obama had already issued a directive to put the onus on birth control coverage on the Church may have left a bad taste in people's mouths.

I hope I'm wrong about all this, and that this is the end of the issue for awhile with Obama having the advantage. But the righties going to exploit this issue for as long as they can. The Republicans were never going to support the revised version of this policy anyway. But they now have all of the media attention on the issue to milk it for all it's worth.

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