Lakoff and Wehling write: "Do you believe in freedom of religion? President Obama does, and he is defending Americans' freedom of religion against Mitt Romney and Fox News in the administration of his health care bill."
President Obama and Mitt Romney differ in their views on contraception. (photo: AP)
Obama vs. Romney on Contraception
12 August 12
o you believe in freedom of religion? President Obama does, and he is defending Americans' freedom of religion against Mitt Romney and Fox News in the administration of his health care bill.
The president allows each woman to decide for herself whether or not to ask her insurance company to cover contraception. If this violates a woman's religious principles, she would never ask. A woman would make such a request only if contraception fit her principles. In short, the president has guaranteed that each woman can act according to her religious principles. He has made a strong defense of freedom of religion.
In difficult cases, he has extended freedom of religion even further, beyond people to churches and houses of worship. Insurance companies are required to cover contraception with no co-pays for the women whose health care they are covering. This guarantees freedom of religion for the women covered, and does not affect insurance companies, which are neither people nor religious institutions.
What about hospitals, charities with a religious affiliation, and religious employers who have a moral objection to contraception? Women getting health care paid through these institutions will be able to obtain contraception from the insurance companies, not the religious institutions. Thus the president has found a way to extend freedom of religion not only to all women, but even beyond people to churches and religious employers.
This makes President Obama a remarkable champion of freedom of religion in contemporary American history.
Moreover, President Obama is very much in touch with the values of Americans. A recent Gallup Poll has shown that, in the U.S., 82 percent of Catholics think that birth control is "morally acceptable." Ninety percent of non-Catholics believe the same. Overall, 89 percent of Americans agree on this. In the May 2012 poll, Gallup tested beliefs about the moral acceptability of 18 issues total, including divorce, gambling, stem cell research, the death penalty, gay relationships, and so on. Contraception had by far the greatest approval rating. Divorce, the next on the list, had only 67 percent approval compared to 89 percent for contraception.
Mitt Romney and Fox News, on the other hand, are proposing a huge backward step on freedom of religion. Romney has said he would support a bill that would allow employers and insurers to deny their female employees insurance coverage for birth control and other health services, based on the religious beliefs of the employers and insurers. As far as employers are concerned, this fits with President Obama's policy. But the extension to insurance companies violates the freedom of religion that the President guaranteed to women.
In addition, Romney has said he would "get rid of" Planned Parenthood, an organization that allows women freedom of religion by supplying contraception if they choose to ask for it. This would be another major blow to freedom of religion.
In short, Romney is advocating, and would take, a big backward step to deny freedom of religion to women.
Incidentally, Romney's ad, which falsely accuses the president of what Romney himself is advocating, namely denial of religious freedom, is entitled "Be Not Afraid," using Biblical language, as if he were God or a prophet.
Given that 89 percent of the American people support contraception, we have no reason to be afraid of Romney - unless we let him get away with his attempt to frame the president as being against religion. The president's advance in promoting freedom of religion should be shouted from the rooftops.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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Comments
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I don't think my tax dollars should go to fund wars, to fund for-profit prisons, or executions, to subsidize Big Businesses that pay less for taxes than I do, to pave streets and build bridges I don't drive on, or to fund studies on stupid stuff like whether potato chips that aren't soggy taste better.
Oh, and I also don't like my tax dollars to pay rapists in the military.
I also don't like government OR religion--or you--telling me what I can or can't do with my body (and that includes forced ultrasounds, which is another form of rape. Don't worry, your tax dollars won't pay for that. The woman forced to get it will probably have to pay for it herself.)
Oh--forced vaginal ultrasounds weren't mentioned? You're not the only one who can drag in irrelevancies.
And the rider you suggest wouldn't solve anything, the "pro-lifers" would still object, and still go after doctors and clinics providing such--they were already trying to restrict access to birth control before "ObamaCare". ("The Pill Kills") And let's not forget that nun at a Catholic hospital who was excommunicated for allowing an abortion that saved the mother's life. They're "pro-life"--but only for the fetus. If the walking uterus can't carry to term, she's expendable.
You left out the point made in "Frekonomics" that the violent crime rate has decreased in (a lagging) inverse proportion to the number of abortions performed since Roe v, Wade: the greater the number of abortions in (pick a year), the fewer violent crimes some fifteen years later.
The governmet has NO RIGHT to legislate these matters of choice and behavior that do NOT harm another American citizen..
As for who pays for what, again - decided. And ASAP the RIGHTS this country guarantees will also include health, food, lodging, and other matters of survival- although America actually already guarantees them TO CITIZENS (not zygotes) ("Life..." #1.)
If you object to paying for these majority agreed rights in your taxes, you are invited to renounce your citizenship and leave. You do not want to be an American.
There can BE no discussion.
NO right will ever exist, to tell OTHERS what they may or may not choose. That is, it won't, once we see the absolute criminality of allowing health decisions to be made or denied FOR THE PROFIT of others once they have been paid for the promise of providing them.
Case closed.
To the Pope and catholic Hierarchy in the Vatican and elsewhere
"You no playa da game, you you no maka da rules!"
Let's restate that in terms closer to home:
". . . forcing people who disagree with trumped-up, illegal wars to pay for trumped-up. ilegal wars via the tax system is wrong."
If people like you get your way and restrict contraception, maybe the women of America will go on a sex strike. It's been done before....
As far as planned parenthood goes an old saying comes to mind "A stitch in time says nine."
Mitt Romney (and I supposed his alter ego Ron Paul) believe that "Corporations are People." As an employer, the Catholic Church is a corporation, and by this definition also a person. The laws of this land theoretically indicate that only a doctor can practice medicine (note that a doctor is a person). Since the dispensing of contraceptives requires a prescription from a medical doctor, and by extension their denial to a patient is also a practice of medicine, then the attempt of church leaders, the CEOs of employers, and others, to restrict women's ability to get the medical attention that they may require should be considered a violation of law and they should be prosecuted as criminal abusers of a woman's rights, bodies and psychological well-being. would also suggest that those who put roadblocks into the way of women getting the medical service that THEY ask for such be treated as the criminals that they are.
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