Who can tell what’s really going on?
Religious liberty has been a leading topic in recent weeks because of the Obama administration’s mandate that insurance companies provide free birth control even to people employed by church-affiliated organizations, including schools and hospitals. Opponents frame the debate as one of religious liberty while proponents of the mandate say it’s about women’s health and access to contraception.
Figuring out who’s right is WAY TOO HARD, you guys. Especially right after quoting shit like this:
Romney rarely ventures into social issues in his campaign speeches, but people participating in a town hall-style meeting one week before the Michigan primary asked how he would protect religious liberty.
“Unfortunately, possibly because of the people the president hangs around with, and their agenda, their secular agenda — they have fought against religion,” Romney said.
A.
I just made basically the same point, in a garbled kind of way, over at alicublog. Basically, the mass media’s refusal to cover this “debate” as a religious one is obscuring the fact that one man’s religious freedom is another woman’s religious oppression. They refuse to say “Mormon political figure Mitt Romney today pressed his sectarian beliefs about contraception saying “Obama…” They report this stuff as an anodyne “social issues” when its not a social issue at all–I’ve got zero social issues buying or using contraception. Why should I? I don’t belong to the Catholic Church (and, apparently, even if I did I wouldn’t have any problem using contraception). Its not an issue. But you can be damned sure that if Muslim imams were demanding x or y accomodation because of their religious needs that would be prefaced and marked with the word “Muslim.” Romney, and Santorum too, should not be able to have it both ways. You can’t run as the great religious hope of your particular sect and also not have that appended to your name as the principle form of identification. But the far right has turned religious identifiers (like “Catholic” and “Christian” and “Mormon”) into a taboo subject by asserting that acknowledging these religious identities is almost a form of racism or bigotry. They are extremely threatened by the turning of an unmarked/dominant and taken for granted category (white/religious) into a marked category that can be measured and compared with others.
aimai
They should just replace press coverage of this and, well, most issues withthis clip.
Nobody ever expects the Spanish Inquisition when their paycheck depends on it.
My apologies to Upton Sinclair and Monty Python.
You can’t figure how to tie shoe laces, idiot.