It has been decades since abortion and related issues have been fodder for political fisticuffs. This is why it was so surreal to watch the Susan G. Komen foundation and Planned Parenthood engaging in a cat fight over funding for abortions last week, and even more so to watch President Obama and the Catholic Church engaging in a duel over funding for contraceptives this week.
To listen to Christian conservatives, though, you’d think these two bouts were the opening salvos in the culture wars they’ve always regarded as a warm up for Armageddon. But I’m convinced that they represent little more than sound and fury signifying nothing.
My conviction is substantiated by the fact that the cat fight ended within days when indignant backlash from liberals forced the Susan G. Komen foundation to reverse its decision to defund Planned Parenthood; and the duel ended within days when equally indignant backlash from conservatives forced Obama to reach an “accommodation” with the Catholic Church.
Here is how Obama announced this accommodation at a press briefing yesterday:
Under the rule, women will still have access to free preventive care that includes contraceptive services — no matter where they work. So that core principle remains. But if a woman’s employer is a charity or a hospital that has a religious objection to providing contraceptive services as part of their health plan, the insurance company — not the hospital, not the charity — will be required to reach out and offer the woman contraceptive care free of charge, without co-pays and without hassles.
(whitehouse.gov, February 10, 2012)
Nevertheless, Republican presidential candidates are so desperate to find an issue they can tar and feather Obama with that they are refusing to accept this accommodation. Instead, they are framing Obama’s attempt to ensure that all women have access to contraceptives as “a war on religious liberty.”
Nobody made this clarion call with greater religious fervor than Republican candidate Rick Santorum, fresh off his shocking primary sweep in Minnesota, Missouri, and Colorado on Tuesday. But nothing betrays how contrived this call to arms is quite like Santorum, a devout Catholic, declaring at yesterday’s Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) convention that this war is:
…not about contraception … it’s about government control of your lives.
After all, this is a wannabe president who has vowed as an article of faith to have the government force women to have unwanted pregnancies (even in cases of incest and rape) by making not just abortions but even contraceptives illegal. Not to mention his support for laws that force a woman to get an invasive transvaginal ultrasound and require her doctor to ask if she wants to hear the heartbeat and see printed images of the fetus all before getting an abortion. No wonder he’s the poster boy for the patently hypocritical conservative cause to limit “government control of your lives?!”
Indeed, the irony should not be lost on any of us that we’ve gone from President John F. Kennedy going out of his way in 1960 to assure the American people that his Catholic Church will not dictate public policy, to the Catholic Church going out of its way today to dictate papal edicts, masquerading as public policy, to President Barack Obama.
It actually speaks volumes about how much religious dogma is shaping the platform of the Republican Party that even an erstwhile moderate like Mitt Romney is proselytizing the Humanae Vitae (i.e., the teachings of the Church on, among other things, pre-marital sex, birth control, and marriage) just to demonstrate what a “severely conservative” Republican he is these days.
In fact, the irony of ironies is that one could be forgiven for thinking that Republican politicians are more Catholic than Catholic bishops. After all, where the politicians are preparing for a holy war over birth control/abortion, the bishops have already declared a willingness to work with Obama to ensure that the accommodation he announced yesterday actually works in practice.
Another irony is that, instead of the politicians, the bishops (led by Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York) are the ones who seem politically astute enough to appreciate that if the Catholic Church can abide 99 percent of the women in its pews disobeying the its teachings on birth control, then the Church can abide the poor women who work for its charities having the access to contraceptives Obama outlined in his accommodation.
Today, nearly 99 percent of all women have used contraception at some point in their lives, but more than half of all women between the ages of 18-34 struggle to afford it.
(whitehouse.gov, February 10, 2012)
To be fair, though, I suspect the bishops are tempering their moral/conscientious objections in this case because they are all too wary of untenable comparisons being made with their failure to voice such objections when Catholic priests were sexually abusing little boys….
Which is why, no matter the fine print, this accommodation will not only work but also endear Obama even more to women voters – no matter the fatuous bitching by their spouses or boyfriends about it being his latest attempt to control their lives. By the way, the absurdity, chauvinism, and irony inherent in men attempting to deny women access to contraceptives (and abortions) is completely lost on these nincompoops.
In any event, the final irony is that by summertime the only people making abortion a “wedge issue” will be members of team Obama warning voters that these talibanic Republicans would waste no time outlawing a woman’s right to control her body if they ever regain control of Congress and the White House at the same time.
NOTE: Conservatives voicing moral/conscientious objections to Obama’s attempt to provide women access to contraceptives should beware that just as many liberals have moral/conscientious objections to his use of our tax dollars to build up the military industrial complex and wage war. So if they want to go down that road, two can play that game.