Of Course They Want More; They're Winning

by: Yellow Dog

Sun Feb 12, 2012 at 17:00:00 PM CST

In the course of a week, birth control has gone from a non-issue as acceptably mainstream as rock'n'roll to An Existential Threat to Our Most Basic Liberties.

And not by accident.

David Atkins asks When Will They Ever Learn?:

From the "nobody could have predicted" files:

The nation's Roman Catholic bishops have rejected a compromise on birth control coverage that President Obama offered on Friday and said they would continue to fight the president's plan to find a way for employees of Catholic hospitals, universities and service agencies to receive free contraceptive coverage in their health insurance plans, without direct involvement or financing from the institutions.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops - which has led the opposition to the plan - said in a statement late Friday that the solution offered by the White House to quell a political furor was "unacceptable and must be corrected" because it still infringed on the religious liberty and conscience of Catholics.

The bishops' decision to rebuff the compromise means that "religious freedom" will continue to be a rallying cry for some Catholics who have heard it preached from the pulpit for the last three weeks, for evangelical Christians on the religious right, for Republican candidates on the campaign trail and for members of Congress who are supporting a legislative fix on Capitol Hill.

There are two things to note about this. First and most obvious is that there is no reason to ever attempt to accommodate people like this. They will never be happy, and the person doing the accommodating will always be seen as more weak than reasonable.

Second, it's fairly clear that the Bishops don't really care all that much about this issue. They haven't raised this much of a stink about the subject at a state level, even though they're required by many state laws to provide contraception.

This is a political move by the Bishops to damage the President, and to rally support among the most extremist elements of an organization that lost its way and true calling some time ago. They're acting purely as an attack arm of the theocratic Republican Party, and they should be treated accordingly.

Digby saw it coming:

Yes, this is a war on contraception. And perhaps the good guys won this skirmish, which is very good for women. But the other side took some ground they didn't have before and they're holding on to it, as you can see by that statement by the Bishops. "Conscience" exemptions to Birth Control in the name of "religious liberty" are now a standard part of the political playbook. Perhaps that was inevitable, but I continue to believe that the President should have either quietly allowed the exemption in the beginning if he was going to do it or gone ahead and fought these people back on the principle once he'd made the decision. Putting up a short fight and then ostentatiously coming up with an "accommodation" may make him the only grown-up in the room, and I'm sure that's a truly terrific thing, but in the end, it empowered a group of morally suspect religious elites to continue their war on women.That's why I'm not high-fiving this the way everyone else is.

We've seen how this works in my lifetime. Here's a chart that shows public opinion on abortion rights since 1975.

You can see that public opinion has held pretty steady for 37 years. And yet, inexplicably, abortion has gotten harder and harder to obtain and the social conservatives have turned it into a political industry. No longer do both political parties contain pro-choice and anti-choice representatives. Only one does --- the Democratic party. (We saw how that works out in practice the health care negotiations.) And I think everyone agrees that when John Roberts believes the Supreme Court has the right case, it's highly likely they will overturn Roe vs Wade. I only point this out to illustrate the public opinion is no guarantee that the reactionary right will not be successful. This is fundamental to their belief system.

I've quoted this numerous times, but it's very apropos for this discussion. From Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind

The most profound and prophetic stance on the right has been John Adams's. He believed: cede the field of the public, if you must, stand fast in the private. Allow men and women to become democratic citizens of the state but make sure they remain feudal subjects in the family, the factory, and the field. The priority of conservative political argument has been the maintenance of private regimes of power-even at the cost of the strength and integrity of the state.

This is the fundamental nature of the battle between enlightened liberalism and reactionary conservatism, always has been. In this case it's a very explicit battle for women. But it's not confined to women. Everyone should be concerned that this understanding of "liberty" is going to expand to allow any elite property owner whether religious or simply wealthy to opt out of community responsibility whenever it threatens their hegemony in their "private" sphere.

This isn't just about the lady parts.