What it is and is not about

The other day I posted a picture of a bumper sticker on a car that had been photoshopped to read, I’ll pay for your contraception when you pay for my ammunition!

A reliably liberal friend of mine from high school commented on the post, “However, I don’t see this guy adopting all the unwanted children, raising and caring for them...........nice to put your will out there when you won’t back it with REAL actions.”

            So, in my own inimitable, long-winded, non-succinct way, I answered him thusly. Doubt it will change his mind, but at least it was a good exercise, not to mention I came upon some really good quotes and facts.

            See what you think: 

@[Friend], I think you’ve missed the point, old chap. After all, the obviously photoshopped bumper sticker is an attempt to make self-professed liberals see the irony in what they’re doing with the HHS mandate on several levels.

For starters, said persons preach tolerance, but increasingly demonstrate they can’t seem to tolerate opinions different than their own. Sadly, embarrassingly, this is made manifest in how they quite gleefully appears to revel in their often pathetic attempts to verbally shred those who have a different opinion.

It seems like they do this to show their putative superiority over those rubes and boobs. However, more often than not, it only ends up displaying what an amazing lack of intellectual curiosity people of such supposedly high intelligence actually have.

After all, for a belief that has been around in every part of the world since time began and for an institution that has held this belief since its founding 2,000 years ago, as did all other similar institutions until 1930, wouldn’t you think these relatively Mensa-smart folk would at least engage the argument if for no other reason than to help the rubes and boobs see the error of their ways?

              So on one hand, the message is this: You folks aren’t as tolerant as you think. Maybe (and I'm imputing here, but this would be my message) it is also, you are also not as intelligent or above us as you think, either.

On the other the message is this: Generally speaking, those who favor the HHS mandate hate the traditional interpretation of the Second Amendment. They would never countenance their tax dollars going to pay for something with which they so vehemently disagree.

This would be especially true if gun rights activists tried to couch their argument for employer-funded coverage of their ammo by insurance companies as “essential health care services” (since staying alive is arguably an essential health care service, and bullets can help keep you alive when faced with robbers, armed intruders, etc.). Liberals would rightly treat such an argument for the farcical bastardization of logic that it is. They would especially object if they had to fit a very narrow, historically unheard of definition to opt out of this requirement. The media firestorm alone would be immense, and it would be withering.

Yet forcing private employers to do the same thing with contraception is not seen as being any problem. This is probably because it’s easy to disdain those who disagree with the prevailing conventional wisdom as being, by definition, rubes and boobs. These dimwits’ protestations about freedom of conscience and/or liberty are obviously just a ruse so they can keep up their “war on women.”

Never mind that except in very rare cases, contraception is not needed to maintain one’s health. Rather, the real issue is having someone else pay for one’s own lifestyle choices.

With that understood, why should someone who disagrees in conscience with that choice be absolutely compelled to pay for it unless they fit a very narrow definition imposed by the government and not one’s conscience?

Some say it’s a matter of cost. For instance, in her testimony before Congress, the young lady from Georgetown complained about how artificial birth control costs thousands each year. To this, I would oh-so-maturely give one word with three syllables: baloney.

Roughly speaking, contraception costs the 90 percent of employers who already cover it anywhere from $240-475/year on average. That equates to $20-39/month. All but the most indigent in this country can afford that out of their own monies. Those who can’t have access to government-funded programs. Indeed, between 5 and 7.2 million receive contraceptives this way every year. Furthermore, from what I read doing a simple Bing search, they can take as many free condoms at the local welfare office as they can fit in their pockets or purse.

But cost is a smokescreen. The issue is and always has been freedom of conscience.

However, I will hand it to the President and his campaign team: They have very successfully made women think that this is about those evil, mean, bad Republicans wanting to take away their birth control and forcing upon them – Gasp! Horror! – a need to occasionally tell men, “No.” This is the great conflagration that has become the “war on women,” from which only the good President Barak Obama can protect our mothers and daughters.

It’s brilliant, really. At any given time, between 62 and 92 percent of American women of child bearing years (ages 15-44) are contracepting (that’s 38,440,000 and 57,040,000 women). Furthermore, “Virtually all women (more than 99%) aged 15–44 who have ever had sexual intercourse have used at least one contraceptive method” (cf. Mosher WD and Jones J, “Use of contraception in the United States: 1982–2008,” Vital and Health Statistics, 2010, Series 23, No. 29, cited by the Guttmacher Institute). Scare those women into believing that Rick Santorum and his evil hordes of old white men are coming after their pills, condoms, inserts, and devices, and it’s no wonder that the President has seen his support amongst women go up by 12 percent since the controversy erupted.

Hmmmm. It’s almost as though they’d planned it that way. Nah. Couldn’t be.

BTW, as reported by the Washington Post here and here, the stat about 98 percent of Catholic American women contracepting is bogus. Regardless, as one observer put it, “There is this commonsense notion that organizations that are explicitly identified as religious are allowed to uphold the actual doctrinal and behavioral standards of their respective religious bodies. Whether the rank and file membership of [a] religious body follow those standards [of the religion in question] in daily life should be irrelevant.”

To get back to the bumper sticker and thus close, I think a quote by Dr. Lydia McGrew, PhD, will do: 

“If a bunch of Quakers turn out to have gun licenses, employees of an expressly Quaker organization are not therefore entitled to have their fees paid to a shooting range or their ammo provided at no cost through an employer plan.”