“War on Women” wrong slogan for a glorious fight

Democrats should wait for the Harvard wordsmith in the White House to eventually come up with the right language for this new debate over equal access for American women to health care services. Mark Twain said, in effect: The difference between any word and the right word is the difference between a lightning bug and lightning.  

The Democratic National Committee’s decision to unfurl the slogan “War on Women” to describe Obama’s fight with the Council of Catholic Bishops and their Republican followers is leaden melodrama.

It’s about as helpful as Hillary Clinton’s suggestion in 1998 that there was a “vast right-wing conspiracy” to get her husband when millions of Democrats as well as Republicans had pretty well figured out what made Bill Clinton and the Republicans get up in the morning. Their conflicting ambitions were beside the point.

The issue at hand is, amazingly, not the legal or civil rights of women, but, in the first instance, the reach of the Roman Catholic Church.

The Council of Catholic Bishops—with others in tow—is saying that they should be able to use the Church’s power as a secular employer as well as its power as a spiritual force to influence the private decisions of women. They are saying that the democratic state should not be able to mitigate the Church’s influence over those women by guaranteeing their access to financial assistance that will be available to other women outside the Church’s spiritual and material reach.  

America hasn’t had a war domestically for some time. Maybe, Obama has at least restarted an old one: the Protestant Reformation.

What could be more American than to offer the Daughter’s of the Revolution an election on the right of the people’s representatives to create rights and services, and make them equally available to Americans, regardless of their race or religious beliefs?

Catholic Bishops and Republicans prepare for war

Obama being Obama, he offered, last Friday, to make peace on a liberal issue on which he enjoys wide public support—requiring Catholic hospital and university employers to provide employee health insurance for contraceptive services.

With 57% of the general public and 56% of independent Catholics already in his corner, he presented a revised plan that would allow those employers to refrain from paying directly for contraceptive coverage—their insurers would be obligated to provide the coverage instead.

Click on: www.politico.com/news/stories/0212/72751.html#ixzz1mDCqtH8A

Obama effectively gets what he wants: near universal health insurance coverage for women and the freedom to get back to work on the economy.

Being the Obama they loath, however, Republicans scorned his offer to move on. Their leaders in Congress will proceed with legislation that will allow all employers in the US to follow their religious beliefs in deciding whether their employees get access to health insurance coverage for contraceptives. 

Rather than congratulate themselves on forcing another compromise out of a president who “doesn’t know how to lead,” they’ve chosen to side with the Conference of Bishops—and their stark insistence that the federal government not assist women to make choices they oppose.

Obama insists that no woman’s health should depend on “where she works.” Mitt Romney calls the regulation to accomplish that principle an “outrageous assault on religious conscience,” and Rick Santorum divines that this fight is about both religious freedom and government “control of our lives.”


Words in politics are disposable. Yet, the Republicans seem to have tied their fortunes to the “moral analysis” of the Bishops—a conference of wordsmiths that does not answer to swing voters or have any qualms about making women uncomfortable or sounding reactionary.

Mike Huckabee declared to a cheering conservative audience that “we are all Catholics now.” That’s a great one-liner. But, is it tenable politically? Can Romney or Santorum use that line in an acceptance speech at the Republican Convention next August and in a debate with Barack Obama?

In designing health and social programs, should a good president—Catholic, Mormon, or Evangelical—respond to a lobby of Catholic Bishops as good Catholic? 

After cramming on economics for so long, Democrats may not feel up to fighting with Republicans on an issue of conscience—this is: should the government defer to the teachings of Church hierarchy or to the preferences of individual believers and non-believers? It shouldn’t take elaborate preparation to stand up for a liberal principle that inspired the constitution.

When it comes down to whether a president answers to his church or to the people, Democrats would be well served to reply: “We’re all democrats; aren’t you?”

Marco Rubio goes big on contraceptives

The junior Republican Senator from Florida, Marco Rubio, is an immensely ambitious potential president—and, as a legislator, he gambles too.

Republicans have already sided with the Catholic Church on contraceptives: President Obama, they argue, has no right to tell some 800 Catholic employers to provide insurance coverage for contraceptive prescriptions for about a million employees.

Presumably, these workers would remain free to purchase contraceptives, out of pocket—as apparently nearly 90% of fertile, sexually active American women do.

Click on: http://motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/rubio-bill-limit-birth-control-access-millions

These Catholic employers, Republican legislators believe, should continue to be free to administer billions of public dollars on behalf of essential public services and not be asked to use any of that public money to buy worker insurance that would make it financially easier for their workers to exercise their own consciences.

However, Rubio doesn’t want do the exclusive bidding of his Church.

So, yesterday, he escalated the whole issue by introducing legislation that would allow any employer in America to exclude contraception coverage for their employees. All the employer has to do is believe that contraception offends his or her religious beliefs. Whether these employers practice what they believe or not, they would be free to interfere with the rights of their workers to have the same access to contraceptives as workers generally.

Click on: http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/02/gop-bill-lets-any-employer-deny-birth-control-coverage.php?ref=fpa

Rubio claims grandly that this isn’t a social issue, it’s a constitutional issue.

It's as if the power he’d grant to employers to exercise over their employees is of no social consequence—and, indeed, over the capacity of a democratically elected government to assure the equitable delivery of a vital social service.

The US constitutional right he’s inventing is extreme, to say the least. Presumably, if the bishop, the prophet, the imam, the rabbi, or the preacher insists, the godly employer should be free to not pay taxes for government activities he doesn’t like, or, say, not hire heathens, for that matter.

There is, however, one thing Rubio, the gambler, may accomplish: inflaming divisive social issues now will probably make it almost impossible for Mitt Romney to be president—with or without Rubio on the ticket.

In 1964, private citizen Ronald Reagan gave a ripping speech endorsing Senator Barry Goldwater for president. Reagan’s speech didn’t soften or broaden Goldwater’s appeal—or save his doomed campaign. But, his uncompromising message made him a rising political star.

Have a look.

Click on:http://investmentlinebacker.blogspot.com/2009/09/ronald-reagans-speech-supporting-barry.html

You can be sure Rubio has.