Leftist Legerdemain

The Obama/Catholic “contraception” brouhaha has many dimensions not visible at first glance. It’s more than Obama forcing the Catholic Church to pay for birth control, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs. It’s the nihilistic, 21st century left forcing the oldest institution on earth - the Catholic Church - to approve what they’ve fought against for two millennia. It’s a political subterfuge as well.

The Church believes the primary purpose of sex is procreation. The left believes sex is for recreation - not in the sense of “creating something new,” but in the sense of “a diversion affording relaxation and enjoyment.” The left divorced sex and procreation.

Should pregnancy result, the left sees it as a disease to be “cured” by abortion.
The Catholic Church believes sexuality should be exclusive to marriage and that married couples do nothing artificial to prevent conception. The Church approves only Natural Family Planning, which requires acute familiarity with a woman’s menstrual cycle to pinpoint periods of fertility. It counsels abstinence when she’s fertile if pregnancy is to be avoided, or coitus when pregnancy is desired.The left ridicules Natural Family Planning as “rhythm.” It pushes artificial contraception before and/or during every episode of sexual intercourse, and abortion after. It sees pregnancy is a negative side-effect of sex. The left calls abstinence repressive. It pushes sexual experimentation with a variety of techniques and a variety of partners - the more, the better. All this, they insist, is liberating.

The Church teaches that the left’s sexual agenda is dehumanizing.

The left - and the Obama Administration is its epitome - uses government to legitimize, propagate and finance its agenda. Obama’s latest gambit is a calculated move to disparage the Catholic view of sex and life. Consider that health insurance doesn’t cover plastic surgery because it’s an elective procedure. But so is contraception. So is abortion. Why should they be covered?

“Oh, but insurance covers Viagra for men,” say leftists, “so it should cover birth control pills for women too.” They’re correct to point out that Viagra doesn’t contribute to mens’ health. It’s elective, and men should buy it themselves. Ditto for women and birth control. Viagra costs about $5 per pill. Generic birth control pills cost about $20 per month. Both are cheap and both are optional. Neither belongs in the realm of health insurance.

That conservatives would object to paying for everyone’s contraception is incomprehensible to the liberal/left as exemplified by MSNBC’S Andrea Mitchell in her recent interview with Foster Friess, a Rick Santorum backer:

"This contraceptive thing,” said Friess. My gosh, it's so inexpensive. Back in my day, they used Bayer Aspirin for contraception. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn't that costly.”

Mitchell was speechless. "Excuse me,” she said. “I'm just trying to catch my breath from that.”

The left insists that contraception, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs be required by government because the mandate confers approval, just as homosexual “marriage” confers societal approval of homosexual acts which the Catholic Church teaches are sinful. That’s what this is all about. The left wants government to be arbiter of right and wrong. It wants government to supplant religion when adjudicating morality. They insist that to oppose mandatory contraception coverage is to be “against women’s health.”

Pregnancy as disease.

Columnist Ann Coulter takes it further:


Just as liberals have turned the Constitution into a vehicle for achieving all the left-wing policies they could never get Americans to vote for, now they are going to use "insurance" for the same purpose. Their new method doesn't even require them to get votes from five justices on the Supreme Court. The secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, will do it all on her own.

Anything close to the beating heart of feminism is about to become a mandatory part of insurance coverage: fertility treatments, chemical sensitivities, a year's leave of absence for fathers after the birth of a child, attention deficit disorder, massages, aromatherapy, watching MSNBC, sex change operations, gender reassignment surgery, gender re-reassignment surgery.

What Coulter didn’t say above is that public funding of abortion is next. Few doubt that, should Obama be reelected, mandatory public funding of abortion on demand will be added by fiat from Kathleen Sebelius.

In a column titled “The Libertine Police State,” George Weigel put it this way:

By effectively sundering sexual expression from procreation, modern contraceptives have done something their less-effective predecessors were unable to do for millennia: They have created a contraceptive culture that identifies fertility with disease and willful infertility with “health.” Those who celebrate that culture are not interested in compromise: They are interested in having everyone pay for what they want, and in levying serious penalties on those who won’t truckle to their will.

The Obama campaign realizes that pushing abortion is a losing issue. They have the pro-abortion vote locked up already, so now they’re changing the debate to contraception, which most Americans approve. The campaign has millions of Americans wondering if Republicans would outlaw contraception instead of thinking about how Democrats are bankrupting our country.