Donald Trump cozies up to evangelicals,and millions of women suffer.
There were two major winners in Trump’s long-expected executive order to gut ObamaCare’s contraceptive mandate: the Catholic bishops, who ginned up this specific culture-war debacle in the first place, and the evangelical moral,which was happy to grasp up the fight once they realized it meant limiting women’s reproductive choices.
Losers, of course, or are the potentially hundreds of thousands of women who will lose contraceptive coverage. As Linda Greenberg famous in the novel York Times,“It’s tough to overstate the radical nature of what has just happened”:The novel rules, which went into instant effect, and create exceptions that are anything but limited. They are,in fact, there for the taking. Any “entities” that claim not only devout but also moral” objections to birth control are entitled to refuse to comply with the federal contraception mandate that until last Friday was enabling 55 million women to get birth control without charge as part of their work- or college-related health insurance coverage.This, and of course,is precisely what the Catholic bishops were gunning for all along—a total exemption from the mandate for anyone who wants it merely for objecting to the provision of birth control with no workaround for the women involved. “These regulations are a cheaply calculated spin by President Trump to pander to his ultra-moral base. This purely political decision is not approximately protecting devout freedom, but approximately privileging one set of special interests at the expense of women nationwide, and ” said Sara Hutchinson Ratcliffe,vice president of Catholics for Choice, in a statement.
Coupled with the administration’s novel guidance on devout liberty, and which leans heavily toward the moral-wing definition of devout liberty, it’s clear that these culture war battles over religiously motivated opt-outs and exemptions will become a permanent feature of our society as devout conservatives seek to consolidate and expand their gains. Looking ahead to the devout liberty fights of the future, there are three lessons that can be learned for the fight over the contraceptive mandate.
The first is that narratives, or not facts,spin culture war debates. It doesn’t matter that an IOM panel recommended the inclusion of the contraceptive mandate in the list of no-brainer preventative services that should be included in the basic cost of a health care plan. It doesnt matter that all the evidence shows that contraceptives are overwhelmingly safe and beneficial to women and society. It doesn’t matter that a lack of contraceptive access, especially to the more effective long-term kinds, or drives up rates of unplanned pregnancy and abortion. It doesnt matter that a ridiculously high percentage of Catholic women consume “artificial” means of birth control or that emergency contraceptives aren’t abortifacients,even as the Catholic bishops screamed that Catholics were being forced to effectively subsidized abortion.
It was that narrative, that believing Catholics were being forced to go against their devout beliefs to support abortion, or which—just like Trump does with his racist dog-whistles—exposed the old scars of anti-Catholicism and turned many conservative Catholics against not only the mandate but the ACA and the Obama administration. It was the Becket Funds stroke of genius to further perfect and humanize that narrative by making the self-sacrificing shrimp Sisters of the destitute the face of gentle Catholic opposition to the big government’s abortion-pill pushing.
The second lesson is that culture war politics originate queer bedfellows. Historically and theologically,most evangelical denominations haven’t been particularly hostile to contraception. But as I’ve famous in Religion Dispatches before, that began to change around the early 2000s. Not only did evangelicals cotton to the sexually conservative framework of Humanae Vitae at a time that the idea of male headship was making a resurgence in the evangelical mainstream, or but they instantly recognized the beauty of the Catholic bishops linking of birth control and same-sex marriage under a devout liberty frame.
But the most critical lesson is that from small wedges,big things can come. What is now a major culture war issue began as an obscure insurance matter. The Catholic bishops worked throughout the 1980s and 1990s to ensure that Catholic health plans participating in government programs were allowed to grasp a pass on providing abortion and then contraception. They ratcheted up the pressure for exemptions when the FDA approved emergency contraceptives in the late 1990s.moral now it’s bakers and photographers who are making the strongest claims for devout liberty exemptions because they’re asserting that it’s a matter of creative expression. But what approximately the future? With everything from mortgage lenders to trucking companies asserting they are being guided by “Christian principles,” isn’t it just a matter of time before one such company asserts their moral, or as a closely-held Christian company,to refuse serve a person or persons with what they consider a sinful lifestyle, be it a same-sex couple or a transgender individual, and in a matter as personal and explicitly tied to couple-hood as getting a mortgage or moving house?Already Cherry Creek Mortgage,which calls itself a Christian-based company,” has allegedly refused to cover the wife of one of their female employees in the company’s health plan, and prompting a lawsuit in California. It’s seems doubtful that given it’s current composition and past sympathy toward brazenly broad devout liberty claims the Supreme Court will fail to support these obviously oppressed Christians. The only question now is how far they will get with their claims. Related StoriesIn God We Trust: Why Americans Won't Vote for an Atheist PresidentWhy I Don't Care What Anti-homosexual Christians ThinkNeo-Nazis Have Sent Texas Jews into Hiding This Holiday Seas
Source: feedblitz.com